BANGOR, Maine — The arrival of Miss Snuffles, the therapy pig, on Tuesday morning at a local assisted living facility was met with much anticipation. About 20 senior women, residents of the Phillips-Strickland House, watched with rapt attention as the 185-pound porker — a household pet with the manners of a well-trained dog — made her leisurely way across the hardwood parquet of the dining room floor and into the circle of chairs in the adjacent activities room.
“Isn’t she beautiful!” “She’s gotten bigger since last time.” “Well, hello, darling!” the ladies crooned as the 4-year-old American potbelly pig wandered into their midst, accompanied by her handlers, Kim and Debbie Chatfield of Rockport. The reminiscing commenced almost immediately.
“Oh, we had all kinds of animals on the farm, but I always liked the pigs best,” said 94-year-old Fran Dembicki, who said she grew up in Benedicta. She sported pig-themed socks for the occasion of Snuffles’ visit.
Once, Dembicki recalled with a huge smile, she persuaded her father to let her bottle-feed a runt piglet in the house until it grew strong and was able to join its littermates back in the barn.
“I didn’t want it to die,” she said.
Snuffles, more surefooted with her trotters on the small square of carpet in the center of the ring of chairs than on the slippery wood floor, took a while to summon her social skills, but before long she was obligingly making the rounds. She delicately accepted small bits of raw carrot to munch, swished her wispy tail and allowed the admiring residents to stroke her bristled jowls and scratch her hairy back.
“This is her excavator muscle,” Kim Chatfield said, gently slapping the pig’s massive neck. He explained Snuffles uses her neck muscles to power her nose when she roots and digs in the dirt. “She can plow up 6 inches of ground in about a second,” he said proudly. “But that nose is also an incredibly sensitive organ.”
Chatfield said pigs have a phenomenal sense of smell that enables them, for example, to detect the subtle, musky aroma of a valuable truffle fungus under the ground.
The residents listened carefully and peppered Chatfield with questions, all the while laughing and smiling and exchanging small anecdotes as they watched the pig.
Ruth Carter, 95, grew up on a farm in Etna and raised her own children there, too.
“We had pigs and cows and horses,” she said. “And goats and sheep. I miss the farm.”
Carter watched Snuffles with a wistful smile. “I wish I could go back there sometime.”
Visits from therapy animals — more typically dogs and cats than pigs — have become a mainstay of long-term care facilities in recent years and are widely touted for their beneficial effect on residents and staff alike.
However, despite anecdotal benefits, there is little scientific evidence that the presence of therapy dogs or other critters actually enhances the well-being of hospital patients or residents of long-term care facilities. But the practice is growing in popularity, fueled by the warm, nonscientific enthusiasms of people such as the residents at the Phillips-Strickland House.
Although many pets and their handlers go through extensive training, Chatfield clarified, Snuffles is not an officially certified therapy animal. But she is so clean, well-behaved and generates such delight wherever she goes that she has been a welcome and repeated guest at many area residential facilities, including the Maine Veterans Home in Bangor and some elementary schools.
Linda Nickerson, activities director at Phillips-Strickland, said well-behaved animal visitors are always welcome at the facility.
“Many seniors who move in here have had to leave beloved pets behind, giving them to a family member or a friend to care for,” Nickerson said. “So inviting animals in here to visit gives our residents some special bonding time with animals again.”
