Loose dogs kill 5 pigs at Abilene ISD AG farm; community rallies support

ABILENE, Texas (KTAB/KRBC)- Five pigs belonging to Abilene ISD students were found dead by an apparent dog attack on Tuesday morning. AISD Ag-science teacher and Future Farmers of America (FFA) advisor, Cindy Easley told KTAB/KRBC she has been in contact with district officials, students, family and community members to figure out how to address this needless loss, and how to prevent predators from entering the AISD Ag farm in the future.

“You know it’s never good when you get a call before 6:30 from one of your kids that has animals at the farm. It’s usually ‘my pig is sick’ or something like that. You never really think that you’re gonna hear ‘My pigs are dead’,” Easley said.

According to Easley, four of the five pigs killed belonged to siblings in a single family. Those kids range from 6th grade to high school. The other pig, Easley said, belonged to a separate girl, and had been living at the barn for some time.

“So that’s you know hours and days worth of work…[the pigs] were not eaten it’s not like the dogs were hungry. they just… just killed them,” said Easley.

By Easley’s explanation, the dogs were seemingly able to leap over through the gap at the top of the pig pens and gain easy access to the rest of the pens once inside. The district is already considering changes that could be implemented to prevent this from happening again. However, she as an educator, would appreciate some community cooperation as well.

“I just feel like we need to be more responsible pet owners, number one. There are some things that we can do in our program to mitigate that and I’ve already been in talks with our district officials and we are all on the same page about, what are some things we can do to prevent this in the future? And so those things will get taken care of,” Easley explained.

Not only did this take the student’s pig from them, some of which had been raised by those students for a good while. Students also out any of their own money they spent on their pig over the years and now the cost to replace, should they decide to try again. Easley shared her overwhelming pride in her students response to this sudden loss.

“It would be very, very easy for the dad or the whole family or the kids to just say, this is too hard. Like, I can’t I can’t do this again. But I think that the lessons that those parents know that their kids are learning by doing these things is more important than just giving up…But, like I said, my kids are extremely resilient and they’re just going to be ready to get back to work,” said Easley.

An update to the social media post Easley made Tuesday morning about the incident, states around half a dozen pig breeders, including those that provided the pigs that were lost, had reached out that same day offering to replace or furnish pigs for the families.