CHAPTER FIVE

The holidays were approaching and by now Esther was well over four hundred pounds. Of course, the holidays are the time of year when everyone starts catching up—some people even still write those family newsletters. Newsflash: Everybody probably already knows everything you’ve done because they follow you on social media. But in Esther’s case, even though people knew we had Esther, they didn’t really know much about her, and they hadn’t seen many pictures, because we were really trying to keep her private.

The reason for all this secrecy was that having a commercial pig was actually illegal where we live, because she’s a hooved animal. There’s a bylaw that says you’re not allowed to have farm animals. A lot of towns have different laws about keeping animals, but the hooves are where you get yourself in trouble. Even potbellied pigs get you in trouble because of this hoof ban, so we kept Esther’s presence really quiet.

When Amanda first asked me if I wanted Esther, I immediately checked all the rules and regulations, so I knew full well that we weren’t allowed to have her. (By now, you’ve undoubtedly picked up on the fact that I’m the living embodiment of “It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.”)

But I figured with Esther being so small—and because I was naïve enough to think she’d stay that way—we could sneak her past those silly rules without difficulty. And if it ever should come up, well, see that previous thing about begging forgiveness afterward. I’d just play innocent: Hooves, you say? Oh, you’re kidding me! Pigs aren’t allowed in our town? I had no idea!

I was planning to put up a wooden fence for privacy anyway and figured because we had two dogs, anyone who did catch a quick glimpse would assume Esther was just a puppy. A pink puppy. With a mushy little snout. Plus, we had a great relationship with most of our neighbors, so we didn’t think they would be a problem either.

So in keeping with the “hush hush” of it all, only our really close friends and immediate family got to see Esther. For them, we thought, we would start a Facebook page exclusively about Esther. It would be a way for friends and family we didn’t see often to keep up with her adventures, to see pictures and understand what it was like for us to be living with Esther. I suppose by we, I actually mean me, because (I hope you’re sitting down) I didn’t tell Derek I was doing it—I just created the Facebook page while he was getting ready to go out one night. It wasn’t until we were in the car a little later that I told him I’d done it.

It seems funny to think about, making a dedicated Facebook page for a pig, but it was important to me to share with the people closest to us what our life had become with Esther. The first post was something totally generic. We hadn’t found Esther’s “voice” yet, so one of the pictures was of Esther indoors with a caption like, What, you’ve never seen a pig in the house? There was no direction; I didn’t know what I was doing or that this was going to become a thing.

Here’s how it actually went down. The night I launched the page, Derek and I were going to dinner at my aunt Erin and uncle Stu’s house in Orangeville. It was December 4, 2013. While Derek was still getting dressed, I was messing around on Facebook, working on the page I’d built for my real estate business. I was familiar with the process of building pages and had the app on my phone, and I got the idea for Esther’s page. So I sat on the couch and built it using the pictures I had on my phone.

Derek was ready to go before I was finished, so he ended up waiting for me, standing over me and tapping his foot as I put the finishing touches on the bio. That first post consisted of two or three pictures, and I wasn’t even thinking too much about what I was doing. I mean, who was going to see it? By the time Derek was standing at the door with his coat on, telling me we had to leave now, I just thought, What the hell! I selected a first post, pressed the Go Live button, and that was it. We flew out the door, now running a bit behind schedule for dinner, and raced to Orangeville.

We were just a few minutes into the drive, me at the wheel, when I told Derek to take out his phone. Usually, this isn’t something I’d do, because if I’m driving and he’s Facebooking, I feel like I’m just a chauffeur. But in this case, I had something exciting to show him. He looked confused, so I explained.

“Esther has her own Facebook page now.”

His look went from confused to… more confused.

“Did she create it herself?” he asked, now understanding full well what I had been so preoccupied with before we left.

Derek pulled up the page. He read through the bio and immediately said he had a few things he wanted to add, so I made him an administrator. Well, I handed him my phone and told him to add himself, and then he just started playing with it. Throughout the ride, we kept seeing Likes and Comments, and Derek would read them aloud and we just laughed. We discussed the page settings and went back and forth between having Esther listed as a “pet” versus a “public figure,” but we settled on “pet.”

Little did we know what was to come.

By the time we got to Orangeville, the page had already gained close to one hundred followers. This was only a 45-minute drive. Where were these Likes and Comments coming from, and how was this happening so fast? By the time we finished dinner, I looked at the page, and it had over 150 Likes. This was all within a couple of hours. I got excited and thought, Huh, that was really quick. I showed the page to my uncle, because he was one of the people we had made the page for, and even he was wondering who those 150 people were.

My aunt and uncle are super fun. They both have the greatest sense of humor. Stu has the greatest stories ever, and my aunt Erin is always there, shaking her head and laughing along with the rest of us. Their sense of humor also meant they found it hilarious that we had been screwed and had a massive pig in our tiny house. To this day I jokingly tell them they are Esther’s godparents.

I added another photo while we were at dinner and kept sneaking off by myself to see how many new Likes we had and what the Comments were. I immediately noticed many names I didn’t recognize popping up, along with old friends I forgot I was even connected with. By the time we were leaving my uncle’s house, the page had almost three hundred Likes. By the next morning, it had a thousand. The following day, it was two thousand. And the page just took off from there.

We didn’t really understand what was happening or why. It turned out that a lot of our followers came within the first two or three days, mostly through a friend of mine who was part of Toronto Pig Save and who had shared our page. So our initial push came from the animal rights people, and we had a really strong vegan following, and then the general public just started finding out about us and falling in love with Esther. And so the page just skyrocketed.

Sounds great, right?

Well…

About ten days in, we started to panic. Esther’s page now had more than six thousand followers. To me, having come from a small town and having run my small business page for three years on Facebook with only about 250 followers, six thousand people might as well be the entire world. And this could be a big problem. It was illegal to have Esther in our home, and with this giant following, we were worried that the wrong people would find out about Esther: specifically, zoning officials who would know that we were not supposed to be living with livestock.

(Okay, this might be the time when you wonder why I made the page public in the first place. Where were you when I needed you? Who am I, Mark Zuckerberg? You know I just forge ahead without thinking about consequences.)

I was also naïve enough to think that every single one of these thousands of people was from Georgetown and could potentially turn us in. I was convinced the whole town would show up and take Esther away in a van. (I’ve always had a vivid imagination.) So I contemplated pulling down the Facebook page. I made an appointment with a lawyer to find out just how deep a hole I had dug for us.

The lawyer confirmed that it was illegal for us to have Esther, but he also broke down the entire situation for us. He said it would take about eight months before anyone from the town could actually make us get rid of Esther. He said the first thing the town would do was fine us. We’d pay the fine, but we wouldn’t get rid of Esther, of course. So then they’d fine us again. And then we’d go to court, and then we’d get tied up in court, and then ultimately it would end up in an order from the town telling us that we had to get rid of her.

So even though the end of that story wasn’t necessarily good news—not that we had any reason to expect good news—it was good in the sense that we knew the town officials couldn’t just show up out of the blue and take Esther away from us on the spot, which was what I’d been fearing since the Facebook page had taken off. If someone from the town did catch on and press us on the issue, it would be a long, drawn-out process. We’d know it was happening as it happened.

We also knew we had eight months to figure things out—and that was eight months starting from whenever we were contacted by the town, which hadn’t happened yet. But we wanted to be prepared. Derek and I knew we most likely had to move anyway. Esther was still growing and we had no idea how big she would get, so we’d already decided to look for a small country property. This just put more of an official timeline on that plan.

Still, we knew this legal problem could cause us a world of hurt—we could face fees we absolutely couldn’t afford, and we would have to fight a case we would ultimately lose. When we lost, we would either need to move anyway or give up Esther to stay where we were. (Obviously, I did not consider the latter an option.)

If we did need to move, that was another issue in itself. Where would we go that would allow us both to work but still be country property that we could afford and that would be suitable for Esther? Georgetown is a very expensive place to live, so a country property close to town in our budget would be in shambles or be a gas station or something else unspeakable like that.

Still, when we left the lawyer’s office, we weighed the pros and cons and just decided to keep the Esther page going. Ultimately, we knew we would never give up Esther, and we knew we would have to find a proper place for us all to live anyway. It would happen sooner or later. Necessity is the mother of invention, and we were headed full-speed down the highway to necessity.

The page was growing at an astronomical rate. Thousands upon thousands of people were Liking the page and falling in love with Esther. We had not expected this at all. By the first week of January 2014, we had news crews coming by and the Toronto Star doing full-page stories on Esther. (So we obviously were leaning in to the whole media attention thing. At that point, we figured, Hey, what the hell. Let’s just do this thing.)

All of a sudden (technically about forty-five days), we had thirty thousand followers, and we still didn’t really understand why all this was happening. We didn’t know why our story was such a big deal.

Even though Esther’s page was immensely popular, when we thought about it, we realized it still didn’t really have a voice or direction. It had amassed a strong following among vegans, so we decided to cater to them by giving the page a far greater pro-vegan angle. We started putting in vegan memes and talking about good plant product foods. But pretty soon after that, we started to see head-butting between the vegans and non-vegans. We’d never seen that coming, and we really didn’t like it.

We’ve always disliked what we refer to as the Nazi-vegan movement, or, as they refer to themselves, Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach. This movement was started by people who I’m sure had good intentions, but they have black-and-white beliefs and harsh views of what constitutes a positive change. People who share those beliefs were constantly putting up posts on our page, criticizing us for what we were doing. They were even criticizing our followers for what they were doing. In essence, they were hijacking our page to push their agenda and alienating people who just wanted to follow our story.

For instance, there was a woman who posted a comment to our page that said, “I just want you to know that thanks to Esther, I’ve given up pork!” This was kind of a big deal to us. We had yet to understand what we would come to call The Esther Effect, and we considered that a win. A great step. And we told her as much. I replied, “Congratulations, that is a great step!” But that wasn’t enough for the hard-core vegans. They tore into her for giving up only pork—and us for supporting her.

Now, let’s be real. By that point, Derek and I were vegans, so of course we didn’t want anyone to stop at just cutting out pork. Ideally, we wanted our followers to stop eating all animal products. But why chastise someone for taking a step in the right direction? I put myself in that person’s position. If I wrote on a page to say, Hey, I’ve changed my life in this way because of you guys, and that person responded to me with, Well, it’s not enough; you should also be doing this and this and this, I’d be like, Well, screw you then! And that would be the end of my connection.

So instead, we congratulated people on those baby steps. And then we’d get attacked for it. The Abolitionist movement would chime in on our congratulations and say things like, How is this pro-vegan? Are you saying pigs are more important than chickens or cows? Of course we weren’t saying that. But they took a hard line and would post Comment after Comment that vegan was the only moral choice. That kind of negativity didn’t foster what we were trying to accomplish.

We found ourselves in a mess as we were figuring out the page’s direction and tone. A few crazy people attacked us for jokes they considered inappropriate. We posted a photo of Esther’s giant rump and said, Eat your heart out, Kim Kardashian! We thought it was obvious that this was just a joke, but certain people jumped all over us—some claimed we were sexualizing Esther. I mean… really? It was ridiculous and honestly says more about the commenter than us, but we didn’t want to do anything that would upset people, so we considered that in creating the tone of our page and decided to keep things mainstream and lighthearted. We tried to maintain that connection people were finding with Esther and to make them look for answers to questions on their own because they wanted to and not because we were ramming propaganda down their throats.

Every group has its own way of doing things. Take People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), for example. That organization has hard-hitting, explicit print ads and very graphic, attention-getting street displays. That makes sense for PETA, and I understand why its leaders do it. We actually met with Ingrid Newkirk, the president and cofounder of PETA, and she told us exactly why they do the crazy campaigns. Here’s the bottom line: Purchasing ads that would garner the same amount of attention would cost them thousands of dollars they don’t have, so they keep the cash for situations where they can actually help animals. Instead of buying ads, they do outlandish campaigns. That’s what they’re known for.

Some people love it; others think the people behind PETA are just a bunch of crazy extremists. But PETA is the largest animal rights organization in the world, and Ingrid’s passion and commitment has inspired countless others to think twice before wearing leather or eating animals. She believes animals deserve the most basic rights—regardless of whether they are useful to humans. She spreads awareness that all animals are capable of suffering and have interests in living their own lives. Therefore, they are not ours to use—for food, clothing, entertainment, experimentation, or any other reason. Though you may disagree with some of PETA’s outlandish methods, it’s hard to disagree with the reasons why they do what they do.

Then you might look at Mercy for Animals (MFA), a completely different type of animal rights organization, with an entirely different approach—perhaps the exact opposite approach. MFA is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing cruelty to farmed animals and promoting compassionate food choices and policies. MFA spends its time and money buying undetectable camera equipment, hiring undercover investigators, and exposing big agriculture for its horrible mistreatment of farm animals. This group’s incredibly important investigations have shed light on the heartbreaking animal abuse that takes place behind closed doors. The investigations have led giant corporations such as Butterball, Tyson, Nestlé, and DiGiorno to drop products from abusive farms. That’s huge. And MFA is totally different from the next organization. And the next one.

We’ve always felt like there was room for everyone, and it’s not that we don’t appreciate or respect all of the other groups and their very different methods—we don’t begrudge anyone their place in the movement—we just felt that those types of organizations were very crowd-specific and put a lot of people off. With Esther, we had an opportunity to reach a huge spectrum of people with kindness and smiles and positivity.

This was a crucial moment for us. When we saw that we were alienating the people whose lives we could impact most—people like us who loved animals and wanted to do better but just hadn’t made that connection—we knew we had to do it our way, simply with kindness and humor. We had no interest in the angry “You’re not doing it right” approach. That sort of thing had played no part in our becoming vegan. We had come to our decision by getting to know Esther and asking questions and slowly understanding why going vegan was the better choice—ultimately the only choice for us. So we focused on kindness and humor and pulling heartstrings as opposed to harsh words and upsetting imagery, which I think is why the Esther movement is as successful as it is.

The Esther movement appeals to non-vegans in that it’s all very approachable, nonconfrontational, and open, but it builds a connection to people. And we’re finding that non-vegans love it because it opens their eyes and makes them think about things. Yet it still appeals to animal activists and existing vegans because we are a bright spot in an otherwise very sad and upsetting movement. We’ve actually had undercover investigators who are constantly reporting on abuse visit us because they want to be around a happy pig in a good environment. Esther was the morale boost they really needed.

As the Facebook page was taking off, we tried to respond to every single Comment, and we didn’t have anybody helping us. Yes, we actually still try to respond to everyone. Can you imagine? (I guess that also falls under our abiding need to be people-pleasers.)

I was also noticing an influx of followers on my private accounts. Prior to Esther’s arrival, my social media presence was mostly limited to my Instagram account, which had photos of me and Derek, along with the pets on occasion. It also had photos from our trips to Amsterdam and some things that might be considered a bit questionable by your average Esther fan. I mean, we were a couple of bachelors who liked to party now and then. We were just two normal, fun-loving guys who happened to have a pig. We hadn’t lived the life of angels. We simply happened to have an awakening after we got Esther, and our lives drastically changed.

I came to realize that some people who wanted to follow Esther’s story wanted to know more specifically about Derek and me. I could tell because when I went on Instagram, I found that strangers had suddenly started Liking photos I’d posted as far back as two years ago. Until then, I’d never thought my personal life would be of such interest. But for some reason, some people’s fascination with Esther expanded into an interest in me and Derek. We weren’t comfortable with it, so we ultimately decided to do a search-and-destroy mission for a lot of our online footprints. We’d become public figures of a fashion, and we realized it would be smart to say sayonara to material some people might consider a bit risqué. Shortly before Christmas, I converted my Instagram account to Esther’s Instagram and removed all the personal stuff. We never would have thought Esther would take over all our social media, but the demand was there, so ultimately that became the best plan of action.

Our heads were spinning because of the unexpected impact our little Facebook page was having. It’s been mind-boggling. In keeping our message non-preachy and mainstream, we’ve managed to spread awareness so far. We’ve been covered in People magazine’s Pets of the Week and also in PETA’s magazine. Being able to have Esther make connections with people across such different platforms showed us that she was really striking a chord and that we could make a difference.

It was around then that we started thinking about recipes and creating Esther’s Kitchen. And with that we lost all references to vegan and started calling everything “Esther Approved.” Of course that means vegan, but so many negative connotations seem to come with that word that we decided to take a softer approach while still sending the same underlying message. And it worked! We didn’t do this just because of the head-butting between vegans and non-vegans. We were getting a bunch of emails from non-vegan people who were telling us how much we’d opened their eyes about pigs. People from all over were sending us messages saying they had no idea how clean pigs were or how smart pigs were and basically retelling us our story. In reading these emails, we realized that Esther’s photos and stories and funny captions had the same impact on other people as she’d had on us—and we were impacting people without having to “preach the message.” I think our softer, nonconfrontational approach, using humor and kindness and Esther’s funny photos, was a big part of why Esther has been such a success in actually changing people’s lives.

That’s what we call The Esther Effect. Esther has had such a vast impact on people in so many different ways, we are constantly astounded. We met a French woman in Montreal who was in her seventies and already vegan. She introduced herself in very broken English. She told us how much she loved Esther and that she found Esther’s page through one of her vegan friends. She said that Esther’s page had actually taught her all the English she knew! She had started by translating the captions, and over time she needed to translate less and less. She was literally teaching herself English because of Esther, just because she wanted to follow Esther’s story and know what we were saying—which was just incredible.

We also had a mother who wrote to us that she was a vegan and that she worked a lot in animal advocacy, but her husband and kids were meat-eaters. She said that she never wanted to force her opinion on her kids and had been very careful not to do so. But her son fell in love with Esther; he wanted to see what our pet pig was up to every day.

One day, the woman was looking at something on her computer about factory farms. Her son wandered over and saw the pictures of pigs in such awful situations and he started to cry. He asked, “Is that Esther?” She told him no, that was another pig, but it could have been Esther. She told us, “That was my opportunity to explain what was going on, because he was so fond of Esther and was confused by what he was seeing.” That’s when she explained to her son why she’s vegan. She told us that the boy bawled his eyes out as he made the connection. He told his mom that as far as he was concerned, all pigs were Esther. On his own, he stopped eating meat. Even as months passed by, he was still vegan because of Esther. That blew my mind.

Life was busy, and we were trying to maintain our lives as we knew them before Esther. Derek was consistently booked for magic shows. I was doing my real estate work. When I had time, I was taking as many pictures of Esther as I could, to keep her Facebook page active. When we had downtime, we’d sit together in the living room, TV on, both of us facedown in our phones.

One night we were sitting in the living room, just doing our typical routine. Derek was reading messages and responding to Comments, and then all of a sudden, he burst into tears. I didn’t notice at first. I was lost in my own stuff, not paying attention to him. But when I finally looked over, he was sobbing. I laughed at him because I knew he’d been overwhelmed and tense, so I thought he was just letting it all out. (I’m kind of a jackass like that.) But he didn’t laugh with me as he normally would have. He was serious. He handed me the phone and told me to read it.

Derek had been reading a message to the page from a woman who was vegan but her husband wasn’t. They’d lived happily, each allowing the other to live and eat as they preferred for many years. But one day when they were in the grocery store together, her husband was ahead of where she was in the aisle. She watched as he picked up bacon and then put it back. She said nothing to him at the time, but when they got back in the car, she asked about it. He looked at her and just said one word: “Esther.” And it was understood. He couldn’t eat bacon anymore.

I felt a pit in my stomach when I read the message. It’s hard to explain how it feels to read that kind of message. I had never been told by anyone that I had that kind of an impact on them. Clearly, neither had Derek. This was an older couple, dare I say, probably in the third act of their lives, and that someone of that age would even consider changing his life led to the realization of how powerful Esther was and what potential she had. And this was all without our saying things like, You should be vegan or You shouldn’t be eating this or You shouldn’t be doing that. A picture and a caption. That’s all it was. They had such an incredible influence on people we’d never met or spoken with. How was this possible?

Photos of Esther making people laugh and smile were helping them make the connection on their own, without our pressing a negative message or showing horrific photos that most people ignored—ourselves included. Esther was a very real being who was having a very real impact. This was working out better than we ever could have dreamed.