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This article was published 3/6/2015 (1936 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the end, there was no mercy for Mercy the pig.

The sow was found loose in a field near the Perimeter Highway last Friday and named Mercy by local animal activists who hoped to save her from slaughter and instead buy her and move her to a nearby animal sanctuary in Ontario. But it appears Mercy was slaughtered before she could be saved.

Between Friday and Tuesday, Charlotte Sigurdson and other local animal activists had raised about $2,400 in pledges in a GoFundMe online fundraising campaign to buy the pig. Jenna Vandal and others had started a petition, up to nearly 5,000 signatures Wednesday afternoon, calling for the Manitoba Pork Council "to allow the pig to be purchased by animal advocates."

"I have a contact that told me Mercy was sent out first thing Monday morning for processing in the U.S. So she was slaughtered and we didn’t even get a chance to buy her," Sigurdson said in a telephone interview, her voice breaking from emotion. "They never intended to negotiate with us. They told us she wouldn’t be harmed until we at least had a chance to work on it and that wasn’t true at all. There was never any possibility."

Manitoba Pork Council general manager Andrew Dickson said that’s because the council was not involved with what happened to the pig and that it was the pig’s owner who decided her fate. The Council’s role is regulatory, he said.

"I understand these people (advocates) are very frustrated and now they’re angry at us (Manitoba Pork Council) because we didn’t sell them the pig but we don’t own animals," Dickson said. "The farmers, it’s their animals and they market them according to the rules."

He said the pig had been examined by a veterinarian with the province’s Chief Veterinary Office at the site where the pig had been found. After the pig’s owner was identified through her ear tag, the CVO received instructions from her owner and transported the pig directly from the site to an assembly yard. He said when the CVO became involved, the Council was out of the picture.

Sigurdson said Pork Council employees lied to advocates, saying the pig was "being looked after on a local farm" to recover from her ordeal, but she was actually already in the queue for slaughter.

Dickson said privacy laws prohibit the Council from giving out information about pig ownership, locations or destinations, except to the CVO. He said a Pork Council employee interviewed Friday on television said the pig was going to a farm because that’s what would have been done if the owner could not be found.

"After the (TV) crew left, we were able to track down who owned the animal, contact the owner and he indicated he wanted the animal taken to a livestock assembly yard where it was to be marketed from that place," he said. "As far as we were concerned, that was the end of the story. We didn’t take it to the farm because we didn’t take it anywhere."

There is a nefarious angle to the story. Several animal advocates told the Free Press they had been contacted at their workplaces by a Pork Council employee who made "false accusations against them" and "tried to get them in trouble."

Dickson said the employee had called back some of the advocates who had left messages or emailed but "it wasn’t intentional to cause embarrassment" but "to tell them what happened" to the pig.

One woman told Free Press she had spoken to two council employees "in the nicest, most respectful way" but was later called into her supervisor’s office. Her supervisor told her a Council employee said she was "harassing" him.

"I don’t know why he wasted all that time phoning around when he could have just phoned the farmer and let us buy the pig at market value," she said.

Dickson said many advocates calling the Council office used "abusive" language. He said the Council received "over 600 emails from across North America," more than 150 phone calls and has shut down its Facebook page and Twitter feed because of the number of inflammatory postings.

Dickson said, while it is unusual for a pig to escape or fall out while being transported, advocates could place an ad on the Manitoba Pork Council website in the classifieds section stating that they would be interested in purchasing a pig.

Sigurdson said she plans to donate the funds collected for Mercy to the Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary, named after Esther the Wonder Pig who lives there with her caregivers and sanctuary owners Steve Jenkins and Derek Walters. Those who want their money back are asked to contact Sigurdson through her business Facebook account Hogwash Bath and Body. She said no one yet has asked for a refund.

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca