Joanne Clayton had no clue how important a stray animal would become to her neighborhood when she saw it near her home in Illinois.

I observed an animal near my house’s woods one day. It wasn’t a skunk, opossum, or fox, and it didn’t appear to have any fur at all.

I finally got a clear view of the critter a few weeks later: a large pink pig. I’m not sure how a pig ended up in our neighborhood, but she opted to stay.

I left a bucket of water out for her, which she gently drank at first but then dumped into a mud puddle. She was soon seen walking around the neighborhood with her new best friend, Harley, a black Lab.

On Facebook, we created a pig-spotting page, where we uploaded images and videos of Porkchop, as we named her. The sightings eventually became a source of traffic jams.

Porkchop turned out to be a local farm’s regular escape artist. By this time, the farmer had decided she was more trouble than she was worth.

Porkchop found a new home and even a new name at a nearby hobby farm: Ernestine. Ernestine is prospering two years later, with plenty of companions, food, and mud to wallow in.

She even gets a float in Herrin’s spring parade as the town’s most famous inhabitant. Joanne Clayton nominated me for this award.