From her small Maple Ridge home, Janice Gillett looks through her kitchen window, and stares off into the distance of her large, green acreage. The cramped kitchen is cozy, and as a Rottweiler paces the kitchen floor and a small cat rests nearby, you can’t help but to notice a large collection of pig ornaments scattered about the home.
In fact, Janice Gillette lives with pigs.
A metal pig stands by the fireplace, surrounded by scattered blankets and pillows, and as your eyes begin to adjust, more pigs become noticeable.
A pig cookie jar sits on the kitchen counter, and a series of pig-themed ornaments have been hung proudly on the walls.
And while you take the time to observe Janice’s collection, what you may have missed is the full-sized farm pig standing on the picnic table outside of her window.
This is not an unusual sight for Janice.
If it’s not a pig on the picnic table, it’s a pig laying on the couch, standing at the door waiting to be let in, or squealing for food by the refrigerator door.
After all, she has 39 of them.
If you ask Janice what she likes about pigs, she’ll tell you. In fact, she’ll tell you everything you need to know about them.
She’ll tell you about Sparkle and Casanova and Pebbles and all about the stories of Comet and Tortilla and Roscoe.
There’s something special about Janice.
The small, tired-looking woman is the founder of Heart on Noses Mini Pig Sanctuary, the only pig rescue centre in British Columbia.
“Everything is for them,” says Janice “The house, the acreage, me. Everything I do now is for these pigs.”
Janice steps outside her house and walks over to the carport, where she empties a cardboard box of vegetables onto the cement, and then over to a pen where a large pig waits for her.
“This is my wild child, a farm pig,” says Janice as she unlocks the pen and the pig goes running to the pile of food left in the carport.
The pink animal is massive, coming above Janice’s waist, and proving difficult to control.
“He has to respect my direction at this size,” she explains “What do you do with a 700-pound pig that is challenging you?”
What’s most surprising about Janice is that she wasn’t always a fan of pigs.It was something that come to her with time.
Janice rented her acreage in 1993 and was surprised to find a small pig abandoned on her property several months later.
As an animal lover, she took the pig into her home and it soon became part of the family.
As Janice moves around the corner of the carport and behind her house, a village of pig stalls become visible.
Wooden fences surround each pig’s area, with large pig houses and a straw umbrella to keep them cool in the summer and protect them against rain in the winter.
The area resembles a small Jamaican resort with the exception of its occupants.
Each stall has fresh water and food, and several wrinkled black pigs.
The chubby critters are anything but cute, with tough skin and large black bristle rising on their backs.
“When pigs are happy and when they are listening to you, they raise their bristle on their Mohawks,” said Janice, as she greeted each pig by name in a squeaky baby voice and with a treat in hand.
She talks directly to the pigs.
“Hello, Winnie! You need to be brushed? Just shake it off!” she says.
Casanova, a smaller dark pig starts shaking straw off her back, and Janice responds:
“Good shaking, Casanova!”
“Casanova goes to schools, he kissed the principals, he kissed them a few times, didn’t you Cassanova?”
The pig grunts and circles Janice as she knees down to pet his nose.
When Janice began to talk about the start of Hearts on Noses, she often talked of a pig close to her heart.
Willy was her first pig, the one found on her property long ago and her “first love” as she would often call it.
The mention of Willy left Janice in tears, as she looked up to the sky and paused to think about her beloved pet.
“Willy is my heart, and he is in heaven. I can’t talk about him without missing him. He taught me about loving his kind, about pigs and what people don’t see. To look past the exterior and into the heart,” says Janice.
Walking further into the village of pigs, Janice lets each one out, one by one, and watches as they ran in all directions in search of food around the acreage.
She stops in front of Wyatt’s cage and smiles as the pig comes waddling out to greet her.
“Hi, Wyatt.Is the plumbing still working good? Is everything working for you?”
Wyatt had severe medical problems in the last couple of months. He was left with a blocked urinary tract, rushed to the vet three times and left Janice with $2, 500 in medical bills.
The money doesn’t matter to her.
“I make sacrifices. I don’t go out for dinners, I don’t go to movies. I shop for them. I don’t have a $100 pair of shoes or the fancy brands. I go to second-hand stores. We all make our sacrifices.”
“People don’t see pigs the way they see other animals. They see it as just a pig, and I don’t understand it”, said Janice as she fed and cuddled Wyatt while brushing straw of his stiff black bristles.
She walks down between two narrow posts and opens the wooden gates to several more stalls, stopping to talk to every one of her pigs.
“They can understand everything you say”, said Janice.
Once again, Willie is to thank.
“After loving him, and getting to know him, and getting on the net, I thought it was the only one to ever love a pig, but I wasn’t, and I found other people who felt the same way.”
That was all she needed.
Soon after discovering other pig-lovers, she got in contact a woman who needed a home for a pig, and gladly accepted to take the animal into her home.
That’s how it all start, just one pig after the other.
“I told myself I was not going to do this by myself, and I ended up doing it by myself. Did I think it would get this big? Yes, I guess I did”, said Janice as she thought about what she had said and laughed.
Janice is getting to the end of the pig stalls and starts walking back toward the house as the animals follow her in search of attention.
Their strait, pencil-thin tails wagged like a dog’ as they trotted after her and pressed their wet noses against her leg.
At one point she had the pigs sitting in a row, and another time circling her on command, and a couple even played a small toy piano for a treat.
“I love these pigs, and they need me”, said Janice as she crouched down to pet one of the smaller pot-bellied pigs.
After asking the pigs to make baby noises and laughing as they squealed on her knee, the pig-hero made her way towards a tree in the centre of the backyard and stopped.
“We lost some pigs a couple of weeks ago, and we hung these bird feeders in their honour, and we’ll plant some flowers after the snow, we always want to do something special for them.”
It was this passion that made Janice unique: she could make anyone care for pigs.
It was then that we met Sparkle.
The highly-vocal pig came squealing up to Janice at full-pace and rubbed up against her jeans for attention.
Janice began talking on the pig’s behalf
““This is Sparkle, she says, ‘When I moved here, my name was Hotdog. But my mom said you’re not a hotdog you’re a sparkle!’”
Her voice was loving and enthused.
Sparkle went through three homes before coming to Hearts on Noses Mini Pig Sanctuary.
Janice explained that Sparkle was kept in a small rabbit cage in the basement of one home, because his owners were frustrated with him.
They called him “the evil white one” Janice says in fury.
She explained that Sparkle was not behaving because she was locked in a cage, and that pigs need love and attention.
“Why would she want to behave if she was locked in a cage all day?”
The owner later told Janice that the breeder she got the pig from was starving all of their animals, and that she would take the pig back in order to get a refund.
“These are the kind of people that buy pigs,” says Janice, “Dumb as a bag of nails”
That was the day that Janice bought her first pig.
“When they come here, there are not wanted by somebody. That kills me, it rips my hearts, because the pig knows they don’t want him.”
This is where Willy comes in again.
The inspirational pig gave something special to Janice, not only through love, but through a simple observation one day.
When Janice’s noticed that the pig’s noses were in the shape of an upside-down heart, she was thrilled. A friend of her’s once observed this, and called Willie a “hearts on noses pig.”
That’s where she got the name of her rescue effort.
“They have hearts on their noses and my heart is on that nose”, says Janice with a grin.
One thing unusual about Hearts on Noses is that all the pigs stay with Janice, and are rarely adopted out to a family, something that the middle-aged woman is proud of.
“Once the pigs come through the gates, my promise to them is that is that I will love them forever,” said Janice, who explains that many people disagree with her.
She told of a fundraiser where she has set up a booth, to teach people about her cause.
A young woman came, and was shocked to learned that she owned so many animals.
“How can you possibly take care of them all?” she asked Janice, who simply responded with, “You have no idea”.
“What I really should of said was, ‘Come over and see for yourself’, and I regret that”, Janice said.
Walking back around the house and into the carport, Janice says hello to some pigs finishing a meal and begins to tidy around the area, picking up leftover food and straw, and talking to her pigs as she works.
It hasn’t always been easy supporting these pigs on personal income and fundraising.
It wasn’t until this year that the rescue centre was able to receive grants from the government.
Janice was working full-time up until a couple of months ago, and spent long nights looking after pigs when she arrived home.
“Anytime after work is all about the pigs. Cleaning, feeding, fixing gates, posts, sweeping-everything is about them”, she says, after finishing her cleaning and walking out of the carport.
Her family didn’t always understand her need for pigs.
“My mother thought I was nuts. My family didn’t understand them, they didn’t see what I saw”, she said, “but over the years, now they see what I see.”
That’s what Janice wants everyone to see. She loves the way pigs interact with each other, the way they rub their little noses against her leg and squeak, and the way they show their love to her.
“There more than a food source. They have needs and wants”, she explains. “They will come up to me looking for loving and put there feet on my legs. That’s what people don’t know about them.”
Janice has even bigger dream for her shelter.
She currently is trying to sell her home in search of a larger property, in order to give her pigs more room to roam.
“I do the best I can with the land I have here”, she says, “but it just isn’t enough. My dream would be to live in a big barn-style house, with a living quarters upstairs and room for the pigs downstairs, so they could run and play and live inside with me.”
Janice walks up the steps of her home and in through the side door where another cat was sitting in of pile of blankets.
Walking over to her kitchen, she stood by the sliding door and opened it just enough for Wyatt to come waddling in.
The pig went straight for a large blanket and stretched his legs out as Janice cleared her kitchen table and looked out on her property.
She looked tired and stressed as she looked into the distance as pigs ran around her yard, but there was a twinkle in her eye.
She looks over at Wyatt sleeping in her living room, her face begin to relax and glow.
You can ask her anything about her pig, and she’ll tell you, but there’s something more important she’ll tell you.
“I look out there and I smile. I’m proud of what I’ve done. I just wish I could do more.”
