I have this vague recollection of seeing my first pig-wrestling contest in a movie long, long ago. Kids were challenged to catch a greased pig.

That tells you how long pig wrestling has been around – decades, more than half a century.

It’s a little different today. The pigs aren’t greased. The contests, held mostly at county fairs in more rural counties, take place in mud pits. The object is to catch the pig and control it, which doesn’t happen all the time.

I would never wrestle a pig. I’m averse to dirt.

Others, though, just don’t think people should wrestle with pigs. It’s bad for the pigs, they say.

Now there are dueling petitions at www.change.org, one calling for Whitley County to cancel its pig-wrestling competition, which is scheduled for the county fair in July, and the other urging the 4-H board to keep the pig wrestling.

The negative petition drones on for some length about how pigs can be hurt, about how it is emotionally damaging for them and amounts to cruelty and so on.

The pro petition just says keep the contest.

There will always be differences of opinion, so I’m not going to condemn the opponents or the pro-pig-wrestling crowd.

But we should be realistic. I was unable to reach a 4-H official in Whitley County, but I did speak to Jerry Hammon, a member of the Allen County Fairgrounds board, which plans pig wrestling for the county fair here.

Pig wrestling started out as something for kids to do, to try to catch a pig, something that was entertaining for the farm community, Hammon said.

"The fun part is seeing the kids get dirty, and the pig doesn’t even get caught," Hammon said. "That’s what you’re going to watch."

The pigs, by the way, are actually trained. They live on farms where they’re worked out, taught how to avoid getting cornered, and they only have to run once a night, Hammon said. Then they go back into their trailer and eat.

If you don’t like pig wrestling, though, that’s OK, you don’t have to like it.

What bothers me is the makeup of the petitions. The petition to ban pig wrestling had about 5,000 signatures the last time I looked, signatures of the indignant, appalled righteous.

The signatures were from all over – Florida, Oklahoma, California, Texas, Germany, England, Nova Scotia – all over the world.

The signatures on the pro-pig-wrestling petition, though, which numbered about 1,000, were almost entirely from Whitley County, judging from the ones I looked at.

Whether or not the people who run the Whitley County Fair will even pay attention to the petitions is an unknown. But it would be worthwhile to note where the signatures come from.

Personally, I’m not a pig-wrestling fan. I won’t go watch, and I won’t particularly care who wins.

But I do have a problem with people from Germany, England, Nova Scotia and other places sometimes thousands of miles away trying to dictate how a local county fair is run and protesting an event they may have never witnessed.

Frank Gray reflects on his and others’ experiences in columns published Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. He can be reached by phone at 461-8376, fax at 461-8893, or email at fgray@jg.net. You can also follow him on Twitter @FrankGrayJG.