Pig Poops Pedometer, Ignites Fire

Pigs are often viewed through food-colored glasses, but they're more than just the other white meat. Sweet, loyal, and with remarkably human-like intelligence, they make great pets. And when danger strikes, pigs go ham, protecting people they care about from becoming the other dead meat. For instance, in 1984, UPI reported that a pig named Priscilla, who had learned to swim in a kiddie pool, saved her owner's son from drowning in a lake. In 2006, ABC spoke with Becky Moyer, whose 300-pound pig, Arnold, "saved his owner's bacon" from two would-be robbers that entered her home. Moyer screamed after feeling something "like a gun" pressed against her back, so Arnold seized one of the crooks by the calf, and the intruders fled.

While pigs can be absolute badasses, they do have a dark side, which also happens to be their backside: In 2019, Finnish P&C Insurance told the Helsinki Times that oven-baked hams account for the the majority of insurance claims filed during the Christmas season. Many Finns suffer burns and others get into sledding or skiing accidents after pigging out on ham. Even live swine behinds can wreak havoc. In 2020, a pig's rump roasted a farmyard in the UK.

Via Live Science, in March 2020, four pigpens went up in flames at a farm in northern England. How did this happen? First of all, the swines on the farm wore pedometers to prove they were free range animals. One of those free little pigs wolfed down a pedometer, and pooped it out. The device's copper battery ignited a fire in the poop and dried hay bedding that spread to 807 square feet (75 square meters) of the farm, according to the Independent. Fortunately, no animals were harmed in the making of that blaze.

It might be tempting to heap all the blame on the battery, since cellphone and vape pen batteries have also been known to spontaneously combust. But as the Smithsonian notes, swine turds have a history of causing explosions, one of of which "raised a barn roof several feet in the air and blew the hog farmer 30 or 40 feet from the door." Scientists attribute this a to gelatinous foam which traps the flammable methane emitted by fermented manure, but maybe it's just pigs being badasses with bad butts.