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"Babe" Death Rumor Gets Canned
Contrary to wild tabloid rumors, including a New York Post story Thursday, the porker who played the title star in the Oscar-nominated farm-yard fantasy Babe was not tagged for slaughter.
In a case of porcine mistaken identity destined to become a Hollywood urban legend, the worldwide media had mobilized Thursday to report that Grunty, a 6-year-old pig resident of England, was threatened with extermination because of the country's foot-and-mouth plague. Grunty, the Post and others reported, was the animal actor in the 1995 hit movie and had been sent to the slaughterhouse after coming in contact with infected critters.
But the media got the wrong swine.
First off, Grunty, is apparently black. Babe (and all the numerous piglets, pigs and animatronic porkers that played the gabby trotter) were white, or as we humans refer to them, pink.
Grunty is, the Associated Press reports, a rare Kune Kune pig, a New Zealand breed. But she's never set hoof in Australia, where both the sleeper hit Babe and its dud 1998 sequel, Babe: Pig In the City, were filmed.
Universal Studios, which produced the film, did not know the fate of the numerous live pigs that combined their talents to be Babe. However, Aileen Miller, wife of Los Angeles-based animal trainer Karl Miller, says, as far as she knows, they are alive and kicking Down Under.
"This story is just ridiculous. We couldn't bring all the pigs home from Australia, but before we left we gave them all to schools and little zoos and petting parks," says Miller, speaking from her husband's Animal Action company. (He's in Vancouver working with three German Shepherds on the third K-9 dog-cop action comedy.)
Mrs. Miller didn't know the natural life span of a pig, but she believes that most of the Babe crew are still delighting their new owners with all those little tricks they were taught growing up, even though they would now be hefty 1,500-pound adults.
That brings us back to jolly ol' England and our porker pal Grunty. Thanks in part to the pleas of her owner, Grunty was let off the hook at the last minute by a kindly British High Court judge, who deemed the sow's home farm uncontaminated by nearby outbreaks of the livestock epidemic that has sent over 4 million pigs, sheep and cows to an early grave.
Grunty is, to give her her due, a minor celebrity--and not just because of the save-our-cloven-hoofed-pets hysteria rampant in England this summer. She hammed it up in the British TV program Pig of the Ritz, in which she showed off her training in good manners, eating dainty meals at posh London restaurants--displaying far better etiquette than her boorish thespian brethren in Hannibal.
And, last we heard, Porky, Petunia and the three little pigs were playing it safe and steering clear of the U.K.
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