Equipped with feed sacks half their size, five children lined up in the swine ring on the first day of the Deerfield Fair to take their starting stance.
The rules were simple: Catch a pig, take it home.
Then, they were off. Cheers erupted from the crowd as the chasers surged toward their targets, each undertaking their own technique: Some sprinted, others attempted a classic fake-out. Some lunged, skidding in the mud, as the pigs squealed and scattered.
Steady rain on the first day of the Deerfield Fair dampened the crowds, but not the action of the competition. More than a hundred people — some shielded by raincoats and umbrellas, others braving the pouring rain unprotected — gathered around the ring. Parents stood by as kids mounted the fence on their tiptoes to snag a better view.
Several minutes in, Ella Baker was the first to grip a pig’s hind leg, with the animal wriggling to escape and its snorts and oinks piercing through the onlookers’ cheers as she maneuvered it into her sack.
Devoted attendees see the annual event as a beloved, time-honored tradition of family fun. But at her local fair last month, state Rep. Cathryn Harvey, a Spofford Democrat, saw things that concerned her.
She said she saw people sit on the pigs, gang up on them and keep them in the sack longer than necessary on a hot day — all of which are against the rules, she said.
“It’s a scramble,” she said. “There’s a lot of stuff going on at the same time, it’s impossible for the referees to watch everything and, you know, things happen quickly.”
Harvey seeks to outlaw the competitions known as pig scrambles. She recently filed a bill request that may be presented in next year’s legislative session.
Wendy Baker, from Pittsfield, perched on the bleachers in Deerfield on Thursday with her grandson in hopes of watching her older grandkids chase the pigs. The event is a highlight for her family each year.
“I feel like the pigs are going to homes afterwards … Most of these guys are farmers that take the pigs home and they raise them for pets or bacon,” she said. “I feel like it’s not a bad thing. It’s a fun family thing to do.”
Harvey said she doesn’t consider herself an animal rights activist.
“I’m not a vegan, and I’m not a vegetarian,” she said, but thinks the way pigs are treated in the scramble is inhumane. The game, clearly, “is traumatic to them.”
A loyal fan of her local agricultural fair, Harvey said she reveres them as a showcase of high-quality farming practices and the best of rural America. The pig scramble — especially the way she witnessed it, with rules flouted — represents none of that, she said.
“It’s not a good farm practice, but it’s a really bad thing to be teaching kids that it’s OK to manhandle animals for human entertainment,” Harvey said.
Harvey didn’t set out to poke a hot-button issue, but the proposal has already garnered vehement, albeit wry, disapproval from top Republicans in the State House, who have been posting jokes about it online.
“I understand, you know, I am attacking mom and apple pie. This is tradition. It’s been tradition for a number of years, and so people are upset about it,” Harvey said. “They think of this as good family, wholesome fun, and it is, unless you’re the pig, and then it is not.”
The debate has mired the Deerfield Fair before, when anti-pig scramble protestors descended on the fairgrounds in 2017, branding the game as animal cruelty.
“As long as they play it fairly and follow the rules, it’s really no different than keeping them in their own pen at home,” said Brittany Musso, a mom who watched the games on Thursday and has personal experience chasing and collecting her own pigs at home. “We raise animals anyways, so we treat them as well as we can.”
Musso, who lives in Deerfield, has brought her kids to the pig scramble since her oldest became eligible to play at age 8, five years ago. They’ve never been picked to compete.
Musso’s children said they like the scramble. Why? “The pigs,” they said, and, of course, “the bacon.”