South Carolina Farm Needs Volunteers to Cuddle With Pigs and Feed Them Cookies

A little over a year ago, 550 pigs were rescued from a hoarding situation in Kentucky and relocated to the Cotton Branch Farm Sanctuary in Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina. Only about 150 rescue pigs are still waiting to find their forever homes, but first they’re going to need plenty of cuddles and cookies.

Delish reports the sanctuary is looking for “piggy cuddlers” to help socialize the pigs and prepare them for adoption. According to a Facebook post, this entails scratching the pigs’ bellies, feeding them cookies, and even just talking to them.

“We have people come out and spend about an hour at a time with them, three times a week,” sanctuary president Josh Carpenter-Costner told WLTX. “Within a month they are generally totally ready to be adopted.”

If you’re new to the notion of owning a pet pig, there are a few things you should know. For one, you can definitely house-train them—even more quickly than you can house-train dogs, according to Carpenter-Costner—and that means they can be indoor pets. While you don’t need an entire farm’s worth of space to keep your pig happy, you should have at least one-fourth of an acre of land around which your pig can roam and root at its leisure.

And, if full-time pig parenting isn’t a responsibility you’re quite ready for, spending a few hours with Cotton Branch’s snuggly swine might be the perfect happy medium. The farm also houses ducks, turkeys, and other abandoned, elderly, or disabled animals, so pig cuddling isn’t the only volunteer activity you could participate in.

Find out more about how to get involved here.