Pig racing event: ‘You never sausage a show’ delights fair goers

When you think of county fairs, you might think of agricultural competitions, pie eating contests, butter sculptures or kids with ice cream cones dripping down their wrists. What you may not think of is pig racing — piglets to be more precise. For 35 years, Bart Noll has been training and racing piglets and presenting these events at county fairs. “You never sausage a show,” is how the All-Alaskan Pig Races are billed. Noll hails from Alaska where he started his business, and although he and his family moved to the Pacific Northwest and now live in Eugene, he kept the Alaskan name. The porcine fun has just wrapped up for the weekend at the Lane County Fair. Noll joins us to chew the fat about how — and why — he trains and races pigs.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to pig racing, or piglet racing to be precise. Bart Noll is originally from Alaska, he lives in Eugene now. For 35 years, he and his family have been training piglets for life in the fast lane, and presenting these races at county fairs. As he says, “you never-” [laughs] “you never sausage a show.” The All Alaskan Racing Pigs were recently at the Jackson, Marion, and Lane County Fairs. They will be at the Wasco County fair in mid August. Bart Noll, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Bart Noll: Good afternoon.

Miller: I did not think that that pun would make it impossible for me to actually read that line, but somehow it got me. Well done.

How do you describe what a piglet race looks like for those of us who have not yet seen one?

Noll: Well, it’s just a really scaled down version of virtually any other kind of race you’ve seen. So horse races, dog races, track and field, adult races on the track, it’s all pretty similar. So that’s what it is, we just scale it to work with baby pigs.

Miller: And my understanding from some pictures I’ve seen is that, in some cases, you have hurdles, and you make the pigs jump over hurdles?

Noll: Yes, yes. Pigs are very athletic. That’s one of the interesting things about pigs. There are stereotypes that are just false, or stereotypes that are kind of misleading. The lazy pig that lays around all day, yeah, sometimes they do that. If they can, they do. It’s kind of like your family dog, they’ll sleep 20 hours a day if you let them. And same thing with pigs. But they are also very athletic. Jumping hurdles is not a difficult thing for them. They do a lot of very athletic things.

Miller: How did you get into this business?

Noll: Okay boy, that’s a tough one. Usually my reply to that question is “I’m not too concerned about that. I’ve been spending 35 years trying to figure out how to get out of it.”

It was just for fun. The first show that we did was in my hometown in Fairbanks. We did it at the local fair. We figured at the time it was probably gonna be a one-off deal. I kind of combined my experience with animals and what I had learned about livestock from people I worked with at the fair there, and said “I think I can make this go.” It’s a great attraction. On the face of it, it just makes sense. So that’s what we did. Turned out not to be a one off, obviously.

My wife and I put it together. She was a big driver originally in actually making it happen. I was working at the fair that we produced the show at. I kind of took advantage of her being on maternity leave for the summer, and she ended up doing most of the training and all of the operation stuff to get the show going.

Miller: You mean, because she was at home, you said let’s do this, and then because she was on maternity leave she trained the pigs herself while taking care of a baby?

Noll: We did have some help, but that was kinda how it went down. Chad came along quite a bit early, so it wasn’t the timing we planned on.

Miller: Chad is a human baby?

Noll: Yes.

Miller: Okay. How much experience have you had working with, essentially, work animals?

Noll: Well, I grew up in a dog mushing family. I’ll just say up front, I am a very fortunate person. The life that I was born into, and the things that I’ve been able to do in my life, I’m just a very lucky man.

My dad was a dog musher. Sled dogs were a part of my life from the day I was born, until I left Alaska more than 30 years later. So I knew a lot about dogs. I was not a great dog musher.

Miller: Why not?

Noll: Well, it mostly was just scale. Being a competitive musher was not a priority for me. Enjoying it was my priority. So my family and my career were the first priorities. And that didn’t leave a whole lot of time for the dogs.

Miller: And to be really good, it would take the time it takes to be really good at anything, and that was not time you wanted to put in.

Noll: Exactly, exactly. Now in my youth, I was a four-time North American champion sled dog racer in junior racing. But that is entirely due to my father. He was the dog man. He was very good. Same thing though, he had other priorities. He had a very small kennel. But the best dogs in his kennel were competitive with the best dogs that anybody else had, mostly they just had a lot more good dogs.

So running in the junior races with really small teams, I could compete with anybody, and beat most of them. That’s part of my good fortune. My job was to hold on, and that part I could do well.

Miller: How do dogs and pigs compare in terms of intelligence and trainability?

Noll: Pigs are substantially more intelligent. They develop faster, at a younger age, which is why we can do this. We get pigs as soon as they’re weaned, typically a 7, 8, 9 week old pig is what we start with. We train them to run, and we have them performing at events, sometimes within a week or two, but certainly within that time frame there, we have managed to socialize them very well so they’re comfortable around people. They are trained to do what we want, to follow our little routine, to go around the racetrack, in and out of their living quarters, starting gates, all of that kind of stuff. And actually, we can do that in an afternoon. They learn the routine. A dog at a similar age, you wouldn’t even come close. Even an adult dog, fully developed mentally, would not learn all of that that quickly. So there is a pretty substantial difference there.

Also, pigs genetically develop a lot faster. That’s what makes it work for what we do. We have to choose a scale. Pigs grow very fast. They’re born at maybe a few pounds, within six months they can be 300lbs. They grow quickly. We have to pick up part of that growth scale that works for us. We choose the bottom end because that’s where they’re growing slowest, they can stay in the show longer, they still have the ability to learn all of the behaviors that we work with them on, and have fun with them.

Miller: Do people bet on these races?

Noll: They do, they do. You can catch them. We don’t do any formalized kind of betting, but there are always greenbacks changing hands, or other kinds of bets going on out in the crowd. You can see people doing it, groups of friends are attending together, and they’re making their best picks.

Miller: Do you think at this point, after three and a half decades, that if you went to some other pig race somewhere and you could just watch the pigs milling around right before the race, would you be able to guess more often than not the pig that’s going to win?

Noll: It would take a little bit of time. Athletically, no. With the pigs, it’s all attitude. The alpha pig is the one. There’s a social order in the pigpen and on the farm, and the alpha pig is more likely, but not a guaranteed winner. If you’re, if you’re playing the odds, that’s how you do it.

Miller: Are there other pig racing companies in the West, in the Northwest, or have you cornered the market?

Noll: Well, there’s at least one that I know of in the western states. I have many competitors, but most of them do not come out to the western states. So the South, Midwest, especially in the East, the population is much more dense, a lot more events to play and so forth. Tend to be more of them back there.

I have one competitor that’s out here still. But there are some of the competitors from other parts of the country that come out here and pick up a few events here and there.

Miller: What happens to the pigs when they age out and have to leave the circuit?

Noll: A variety of things happen. We’re members of the Livestock Conservancy. This is a conservation group that works with threatened and endangered livestock breeds. I think most people would be very surprised at the diversity in the animal world. I think the number of species, wild or domesticated, that exist is just a very very big number. And in livestock, as the world has changed and agriculture has become less of a dominant employer, (it’s still a dominant force because everybody eats,) but as the system has become more efficient, fewer and fewer people are involved, fewer and fewer people produce more and more food. Livestock breeds in particular, their numbers are dwindling for some of them. And that’s the mission of the Livestock Conservancy.

We work with a particular breed called the Gloucestershire Old Spots. They just have characteristics that appeal to me personally, so that’s why we specialize in them. There are farmers around the country that do the same thing. Right now, the Livestock Conservancy list them as threatened. They were on the critically endangered list until about three or four years ago. And part of what we do is we buy from farmers who breed purebred GOS pigs, and then we rehome them with farmers around the West who would like to join in the conservation effort, and increase the numbers of the pigs. That’s the primary thing we do with them. We put quite a lot of effort into finding people who are interested in preserving the breed.

Also, we deal pretty much exclusively with backyard and really small farms, people who have one or two or four pigs in their backyard. And some of the breeders that do it, they might have one or two or three sows that they breed. So that’s the kind of scale with the people that we work with. This is not a broad market type of pig. The food that you find in the grocery store or most typical restaurants, you’re not going to find this breed. If you go to a really fine restaurant, this is one of the breeds you might find there. And in the grocery store, it would be hard to pick that out. In the park production world, I think most of this breed of pig goes into the restaurant business.

So that’s the other thing, they are food. And eventually many of them end up there. But what our focus is on preserving the breed, and in further propagation. So that’s where we put our efforts, to find those breeders who would like to do that.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.