“Miss Piggy” was a cow who saved the lives of hundreds of (perhaps more than a thousand) other animals. How exactly does a cow save a life? Let me start at the beginning…

In 1994, I was a college undergraduate student hoping to become a veterinarian. Admission to veterinary school is difficult, since there are less than thirty in the United States. Being a suburban girl, I was looking to enhance my application with some hands-on large animal experience. I procured a grunt position at The Ohio State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital in “the barn,” which was the original food animal and equine wing of the hospital. My job was to clean out stalls, scrub hallways, distribute feed, move animals to new stalls, and to help spruce up the hospital before the ground-breaking ceremony for the new, high-tech and beautiful equine center.

Traditional stalls were set up so that the front facing the hospital hallway had metal bars with a built-in stanchion and a wide gate for accessing the animal. The rear side faced the feed aisle and was made of concrete with a high sliding panel for dropping in the hay and grain along with a thin wooden “escape door” from the stall into the feed aisle.  As I walked through an empty, dusty, narrow feed aisle early one Saturday morning, I sensed someone’s eyes on me. To my surprise, I turned and saw a huge bovine head with eyes staring inquisitively at me through the escape door from her stall. I had met Miss Piggy.

Miss Piggy was young in those days, probably 3 years old. She was a large Holstein cow, or technically a heifer, since she was never bred. Her purpose was loftier. You see, Miss Piggy was a transfaunation cow.

Cattle are ruminants, meaning that most of the abdomen is filled by a large multi-chambered stomach. The rumen is the largest chamber and functions as a fermentation vat. It can hold nearly 20 gallons of matted hay and fluid. The micro-organisms in the rumen are essential to the life of the animal, as they perform much of the digestion process that breaks down the cellulose in hay and other feedstuffs.  When the microflora are killed off or severely altered by antibiotic treatment or sudden intake of high-carbohydrate feed (called “grain overload” or “rumen acidosis”), ruminants become dangerously ill and often die from an influx of fluid into the rumen, severe ulceration of the lining, absorption of acids into the bloodstream and shock. In order to save the animal, rumen contents can be harvested from a donor animal and gavaged through a tube into the ill animal, restoring the normal microflora.

Miss Piggy was the donor cow. She had a permanent rumen fistula in place, which is a soft rubber gasket through the skin of the flank into the rumen and covered by a plug when not in use. While it looks disturbing to some observers, it is actually painless to the animal aside from the initial surgical placement, which is done under spinal anesthesia. When harvest of rumen contents is necessary, the plug is removed and a gloved hand/arm (or tube) is passed through the fistula to draw out a small volume of greenish partially digested material.  Thus, whenever a cow, sheep or goat (or rarely a camelid, although their forestomach anatomy is different) needed transfaunation, Miss Piggy provided the donation.  

Don’t get the impression that Miss Piggy’s life was spent confined to a stanchion with someone reaching into her fistula, though. That was her very part-time job, but it wasn’t the way she spent most of her time.  Miss Piggy was the hospital mascot, or pet, if you wish.  She was the star of the whole place. Before the new equine wing of the hospital was built, and while she was still young, Miss Piggy used to go outside into the grassy area behind the hospital. A hospital staff member or student would put a rope lead around her neck and literally run through the grass with her. I have never seen anything like it, watching a cumbersome 1000 lb. cow frolicking and bucking around with joy. When she was inside, she would take leisurely walks through the hallways of the barn. Whatever stall she was in would have the stanchion left open so that she could pass her head through it and crane her neck to see what was going on in the hall. No one passed her stall without giving her head a scratch. Everyone who toured the hospital met her. Children loved her.

Being a crafty bovine, she even figured out how to grab the escape door knob and turn it, opening the door to look out into the feed aisle as she did on the morning I met her. That caused her trouble on one occasion when someone left a full bag of sweet grain in the feed aisle very close to her door. She quickly gobbled up almost the entire bag, ironically sending herself toward rumen acidosis. Not to fear! Her rumen fistula was opened and the grain was removed by hand before it could do severe damage to her.

Two years ago as I was finishing my veterinary pathology residency, a biopsy from Miss Piggy’s rumen fistula site came through the surgical pathology service. Squamous cell carcinoma, a slow-growing and invasive tumor that can be associated with chronic irritation. The presence of the rubber gasket for more than a decade eventually led to tumor formation in Miss Piggy’s skin.  Still, she remained comfortable and happy for more than a year, with occasional debulking of the tumor, but it eventually became invasive enough to justify her euthanasia. She passed away peacefully at the age of at least 15 years old (and some say 17). It was a somber day in the OSU Veterinary Hospital as word of her death spread.

A food animal veterinarian who had worked with Miss Piggy since her youth raised money for a tree to be planted in her honor outside the hospital, and word has it that a lock of her hair was buried underneath. There is a new transfaunation cow residing at the hospital, but it still feels a little empty not seeing Miss Piggy’s head poking out curiously into the hallway next to her stall-side medical record clipboard, which was always empty except for the worn-out identification card reading simply “Miss Piggy.” I have moved on from the university, but I think of her whenever I reflect on the time I spent there. 

So here’s to you, Miss Piggy. If there is a Heaven for cows (and if there is a Heaven, I strongly support the presence of cows there), I hope you are there stomping through the grass with sunlight streaming across your back again.