How to evacuate a 300-pound pig

As wildfires blazed through Los Angeles on Wednesday, Ellen Marie Bennett shared a plea with her Instagram followers: could someone, ideally someone with a spare trailer, help evacuate her roughly 300-pound potbellied pig?

- CALLIE HOLTERMANN

“He is very heavy and very big so it’s not an easy task,” she wrote.

The problem – named Oliver – was a rotund nineyear-old boar covered in coarse bristles. Bennett, founder of kitchenware brand Hedley&Bennett, got him as a 15-pound piglet in 2016; he has enjoyed snoozing and nibbling on peaches and strawberries since.

When the flames approached her home in Pasadena, California, on Tuesday night, Bennett and her husband, Casey Caplowe, loaded their two young children into the car and drove them to Glendale, away from the blaze. It was going to be much more difficult to relocate their unwieldy pet, whose weight Caplowe estimated to be closer to 200 pounds.

“That was among the top priorities,” Caplowe said: “How do we get Oliver out of there?”