“All that work you put into it, it makes it all worth it when your pig does something great, like Kipper did,” he said. “I couldn’t have asked for a bigger blessing than Kip. He was incredible.”

Because of the money involved, the auctions are serious business. Mr. Leach has not yet received his $40,000 check, because a urine test must be completed on Kipper, a standard practice by livestock show officials to ensure the pigs are drug free and have not been given anything to bolster their performance or appearance.

For the business executives, restaurateurs and other wealthy Texans who attend the auctions in their cowboy hats and boots, bidding six-figure sums on barnyard animals to help send young people to college has become a charitable tradition, albeit a playfully competitive one. Each year, groups of buyers try to win bragging rights and break records (“Praise the lard: Top barrow hogs a record,” read a Houston Chronicle headline from March 2001). The $178,000 winning bid on Kipper beat the $177,000 paid for last year’s grand champion barrow.

In the last 10 years, Jon Hodges and his wife, Jackie, have spent about $407,000 at the Houston swine auctions, including the $75,000 they contributed to be part of the groups that bought Kipper and Blueberry Dan, the 269-pound reserve grand champion.

Mr. Hodges, the president and chief executive of an industrial cleaning company called Evergreen Environmental Services, keeps the letters he gets from the students he has helped in frames at his firm’s headquarters. “A lot of times they don’t forget you,” Mr. Hodges said. “You may purchase a swine at the auction and you’ll get a letter three years later. The dollars are well spent.”

Though Mr. Hodges will be financing a large portion of Mr. Leach’s college education, the two were strangers until they met after the auction, which was held March 16 at Reliant Arena. The Hodgeses and the three other couples who bought Kipper posed for a picture with Mr. Leach and the pig, who showed off more of his body than his face for the camera, because his snout was buried in a box of feed.

Inevitably, the auctions turn out better for the animals’ owners than for the animals themselves. Three days after the auction, Kipper was put in a trailer and driven to a meat science laboratory at Texas A & M University, where he was slaughtered and placed in a cooler. Once his drug test results come in, Kipper will be butchered, boxed and, along with 66 other top-ranking barrows, donated to charity. The four couples who bought Kipper will each receive a 54-pound gourmet pork package.

The last time Mr. Leach saw Kipper was at the arena, in his pen on champions’ row the day of the auction. Some of the livestock show’s committees call the arena’s back loading dock, where exhibitors aged 8 to 18 say goodbye to their animals, the trail of tears. “It was one of the hardest things to do, to leave him in his pen,” Mr. Leach said, standing by the dirt and hay in Kipper’s empty stall back in Haskell. “I miss him. I really do. I miss just kind of knowing that he knows you’re there, and you know he’s there.”