A woman on a mission to save Italy's pigs

At a small farm in northern Italy one woman is on an impossible mission - to save

the nation's pigs from becoming salami.

As Federica Trivelli enters one of her four pig sties, the animals rush about her, honking
with pleasure. She says that even if someone were to blindfold her she would know
which pigs in La Piccola Fattoria degli Animali or the Little Animal Farm - were talking to
her.

"Each has its own voice. Some make a deep noise, some make a sort of hissing," she
says. "One of the pigs makes a noise that sounds like a sort of trumpet."

One little piglet has the nickname "little boiler" for his incessant huffing and puffing.
There are scars all around his neck from injuries that he suffered at his previous home.
In fact, Trivelli's Little Animal Farm, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy overlooked
by snowy Alpine peaks, is not a farm at all, but a sanctuary for abused pigs.

Trivelli empties cereal flakes mixed with water into their bowls and the noisy sty
becomes quieter as the pigs contentedly gobble down their food.

"You can receive a call at any moment of the day or night," she says. "I'm ready 24/7.
I'm constantly talking with the police, with the forest guard, with environmental
organisations. They call me and say: 'I've got some pigs for you. How many can you
take?'"

At the moment she has 20 pigs, gathered into four herds according to size. The first
one, a Vietnamese she called Bombi, arrived on her 36th birthday in 2009. Already an
animal activist, Trivelli had been visiting farms and slaughterhouses for almost 20 years,
but this was the first time she had felt driven to take an animal into her care.

"He was living with some very unpleasant people," Trivelli recalls, adding that she and
her activist friends initially struggled to see how they could help the animal. "We didn't
want to buy him, we didn't want to give money to those disgusting farmers, so we
bartered with them and swapped the pig for some gym equipment - and agreed to
repaint some of their sheds."
She takes in pigs from across the country. One piglet was found discarded in a plastic
bag in Palermo, in Sicily. Trivelli put out a call for help on an animal rights mailing list,
and volunteers transported him by relay up the entire length of the country.

Trivelli named him Spartacus, after the slave that led an uprising against the Roman
republic, to signify the food revolution she is hoping to start - her dream would be a
world in which no-one eats meat, and certainly not pork.

On her Facebook site, Trivelli retells his journey as a heroic campaign through Italy.
"The crowd cheers the arrival of Spartacus and, once again, the gladiator wins!" she
writes of the pig's passage through the capital. "Rome is free from slavery and the city
celebrates the triumph of freedom, honouring all fallen brothers in battle and those
forced to live in chains."

Another pig, now an enormous hog called Yoda, was just 10kg (22lb) when she came
into Trivelli's care, after being left on the back of a truck at a motorway service station.

Other pigs that she has cared for had been kept in chains, unable to move around.
Some had been fed rotten food - one was even given the remains of the farm dog. "It's
like a David Lynch movie, a horror movie," Trivelli says. "Sometimes I would like to beat
up the farmers and butchers but it wouldn't help. I have learned to use diplomacy and to
smile at them."

All too often, in her experience, Italy's pig welfare standards fail to live up to the
illustrious reputation of its hams and salamis. In 2013, the campaigning group
Compassion in World Farming visited 11 pig farms,and found that none of them met
the EU's directives on pig welfare.

They documented pigs standing in excrement in gloomy overcrowded sheds. Nearly all
had had their tails docked - a practice banned by European law since 2003 - because
pigs in cramped conditions, without any straw or other distractions, start to chew them
off.

The speciality hams for which Italy is famous are made from pigs that have already
reached sexual maturity and must therefore be castrated to prevent the meat taking on
an unwanted flavour - a procedure generally performed without anaesthetic.

The Italian Ministry of Health - which oversees farming standards - has pointed out that
Compassion in World Farming's investigation was limited to just 11 farms.
In 2013, the Ministry itself inspected almost 2,000 pig farms and found that a majority
complied with EU guidelines, though 38% did not.

Trivelli - a vegetarian for almost 30 years - says she would like to see every pig in the
country moved from farms into a sanctuaries like hers.

"If I were a billionaire I would take them all," she says.

In a country where the rural calendar still begins with the annual pig killing - a winter
festival of blood-letting and sausage-making - this is not a mainstream point of view.

Trivelli's animals die natural deaths, and unlike most farmed pigs they grow to their full
size. One of the largest is a boar with bluish inkblot markings on his hide. At nearly five
years old, Billo weighs between 350 and 400kg, and is Chief Pig on Little Animal Farm.

"Despite being leader, he is very balanced, he's not violent," says Trivelli. "If somebody
does something that he doesn't like, if somebody tries to eat from his bowl for example,
he simply stares at them and it's enough."

Billo and three of his aunties

A piglet called Sophie

She has no hesitation in hugging and kissing the animals, and treats them in every way
like pets. They are far more intelligent, she says, than her seven cats and six dogs. The
pigs quickly learn their names and phrases like "go inside", and smack their lips to ask
for water. One piglet was toilet trained in just a week, banging its snout on the metal
gate to its enclosure when it needed to go.

As for emotional intelligence, Trivelli says the pigs know when she's feeling unwell, and
tone down their oinks.

Each herd on the farm has its own large sty, and every morning the herds take turns to
be released into a central patch of mud known as the "toddling area" to run around,
foraging and digging big holes in the mud, while Trivelli and volunteer helpers refresh
their hay and water. Trivelli spends five or six hours every morning doing this, before
going to her part-time job as an architects' secretary. Every weekend, and every penny
of her income, is given over to the pigs.
"I never go to restaurants, I never buy designer clothes or bags," she says. "I don't go
on holidays and I'm not bothered about having a fancy haircut. If I need to buy anything
I just go to the market and get the least expensive thing I can find. All my savings are for
the pigs.

"It's almost like a vocation. There are people who are keen on helping children or elderly
people or people in developing countries. I have a true passion for animals. My ambition
in life is to save pigs."
The woman who lost a dog and gained 200 sloths

Monique Pool first fell in love with sloths when she took in an orphan from a
rescue centre. Since then many sloths have spent time in her home on their way
back to the forest - but even she found it hard to cope when she had to rescue
200 at once.

It all began in 2005 when Pool lost her dog, a mongrel called Sciolo, and called the
Suriname Animal Protection Society to see if they'd found it. They hadn't, but they told
her about Loesje (or Lucia), a baby three-toed sloth they didn't know how to look after.
Pool offered to take it - and was instantly smitten. "They're very special animals to look
at," she says. "They always have a smile on their face and seem so tranquil and
peaceful."

Sloths are gentle creatures, but are far from easy to keep. Their diet presents enormous
problems, and the local zoo had shied away from the task.

Pool sought advice from Judy Arroyo at the famous sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica,
who told her she must feed Loesje goat's milk - cow's milk would be fatal. But goat's
milk is rarely available in Suriname and had to be sent over from the US. The leaves
that sloths eat are also hard to source - and must be fresh.

Loesje had a surprise in store - she turned out to be a "he". Male three-toed sloths
display a characteristic spot on their backs when they're a year old. "But we carried on
calling him Loesje because he was used to the name," says Pool. He was her very first
charge but died after two years. "I didn't know what was wrong with him," she says. She
wished she could just ask him. The experience taught her how little expertise there was
in the rehabilitation and care of three-toed sloths, but she built up a network of
contacts and hasn't had a youngster die on her since.

Sloths hung all over Pool's house - from the bars on the window and anything else they could grab onto

Soon Pool became the go-to woman for sloths in Suriname. If the police, the zoo or the
Animal Protection Society hear about a sloth, they call her. On average, one or two
sloths a week pass through her home before being released a few days later, unless
they are hurt and need time to recover.

However in October 2012 Pool was faced with a crisis - "Sloth Armageddon", as she
puts it. A piece of forest near the capital, Paramaribo, was being cleared and she was
asked to remove 14 sloths.
"I'd never seen more than six together, so we knew we'd have a lot to cope with," says
Pool. As a machine operator carefully pushed over the 15m (50ft) trees, the sloths in the
canopy would fall to the ground, where they were picked up by Pool and her volunteers.
Sloths move very slowly on the ground - even when they'd like to get away fast.

The baby sloths are weighed regularly to check their progress

A friend built enclosures in Pool's back garden for the adults. "There were so many of
them it was hard to open the cage and keep them all in," she says. "As soon as they
saw the doors open they'd try and get out." At night, males would sometimes fight and
have to be separated. "Normally sloths are solitary animals," Pool says. "So to be so
packed together was not a normal situation for them." And they keep to different
timetables - two-toed sloths are awake at night and three-toed sloths by day - so they
had to be housed separately.

Four days into the rescue they realised they were dealing with more than 14 sloths - a
lot more. "After a month we were close to 100, and at the end we got to 200," says Pool.
"On some days I had 50 animals at my house. We had 17 babies at one point, being fed
with droppers by volunteers." Pool had managed to source a steady supply of powdered
goat's milk by then.
Sloths were hanging everywhere - from the trees in her back garden, from the bars on
the living room window, and anything else they could hold on to. "Two female adults sat
on the TV stand and the babies would climb on the matriarchs." One very young sloth,
known as Lola, would pop up in the strangest places, like the stove top - though not
when the gas was alight, luckily. "She was an amazing little thing," Pool says. "She
didn't like to sit with the others, she preferred to hang behind the fridge where it's nice
and warm."

This was when Pool invented the term "slothified" as a description for her home and life
- she plans to write a book about the experience. This is how she defines it:

Slothified (adj.)

1. Overwhelmed by sloths

2. Overwhelmed by sloth - so tired after catching sloths all day that you don't want to get
out of bed

3. Overwhelmed by the cuteness of sloths (baby sloths in particular)

4. Overwhelmed by sloth lovers

The one thing Pool could not do was slow down. She was at full stretch for two months,
spending whole days at the forest clearance site, and organising teams to feed and
care for all the sloths at home.

Luckily for the neighbours, sloths tend to be quiet - most of the time. "We had one,
Bolletje (Little Ball), who was on heat and made a lot of noise to attract males," Pool
says. "We'd rush into the room because we thought they were fighting. She must have
cottoned on to this because later, when she was no longer on heat, she would call just
to get our attention. She was very intelligent."

The hardest thing was feeding them all. Although three-toed sloths are known to eat up
to 50 types of leaves, they have very different preferences depending on the area they
come from - young sloths learn which leaves to eat by licking leaf fragments from their
mother's lips. But luckily for Pool there is one tree all sloths eat, the cecropia. She was
saved by a friend who worked in a forest resort in the interior. Every day, she sent Pool
a load of fresh leaves via a bus that went back and forth with tourists. Two-toed sloths
are easier to please - they will eat dagublad leaves (a relative of the sweet potato)
which are sold by most greengrocers in Suriname. And they like apples.

The sloth's diet explains its peculiar behaviour. Most leaves are hard to digest, so
some leaf-eating animals (folivores) cope by eating huge quantities, others by
regurgitating their food and repeating the digestion process. Sloths simply allow lots of
time - the BBC's David Attenborough calls them "mobile compost heaps". As a
result, they have a very slow metabolism. They save energy by hanging from their
formidable claws, rather than using muscles unnecessarily. In fact, they move so slowly
that they're an attractive place to live - three-toed sloths host a number of other
organisms in their fur, including algae and the "sloth moth".

But sloths actually sleep less than was once thought - they are not lazy, despite their
name. Scientists still have plenty to learn about them, as their life high in the tree
canopy, combined with their slow and silent movements and effective camouflage,
make them extremely hard to observe. So Pool's access to sloths presents a great
opportunity - she collects blood samples and other data for Nadia De Moraes-Barros, a
researcher with the Anteater, Sloth and Armadillo Specialist Group.

"I realised there is a lot of bad information out there," says Pool. "For example that they
are slow and dim-witted, when actually they are very smart and deliberate." She finds
them far from stupid - a group of sloths learned how to open the bathroom door, and
one, probably a former pet, even used the toilet. "The first time we thought it was a
mistake," says Pool. "But after the fourth time we realised they had taught her how to go
to the toilet."
Sloths only defecate about once a week - which makes them "wonderful houseguests,"
says Pool. Recent studies have shone a light on their curious toilet habits. Rather than
allowing their poo to fall from the tree, as the two-toed sloth does, three-toed sloths
make a weekly pilgrimage down to the forest floor to poo on the ground, where they are
vulnerable to attack by predators - half of all sloth deaths occur on the ground. So why
do they do it? It is known that this behaviour benefits the sloths' resident moths, who lay
eggs in sloth dung. Scientists from the University of Madison now have a theory that
the moths may in turn encourage the growth of luxuriant green algae on the sloth's fur.
This doesn't just create excellent camouflage, the scientists think it may also be an
additional food source. In other words, sloths might be farming algae in their fur, with
moths providing the fertiliser.

Sloths and anteaters

Many people are scared of sloths because of their claws, which look quite fearsome, but
Pool has never been attacked by one, despite the traumatic circumstances in which
they tend to meet. One rescued sloth, who she called Smokey, was wounded but "very
kind", she says. "You wouldn't believe she was wild, she'd touch you very carefully with
her toes when she wanted something. All the babies loved her too." Pool also thinks
they have a degree of feeling in their claws. "Once when I was taking a three-toed sloth
to the vet - she was miscarrying - she held my hand with her claw, as if she knew she
wouldn't survive." She didn't.

Last year, Pool took in a badly-injured two-toed sloth she named Stephane - one head
wound contained 130 maggots. Stephane's arrival coincided with an international sloth
conference in Suriname, and Pool jokes that he must have planned it so that the best
specialists in South America were on hand to treat him. Two months later, when the
wound had healed, she took him back to the area where he was found. He disappeared
up a tree so fast that she was unable to capture it on film. Those are the best moments
for her. "It's such a pleasure when you go with them to the forest," says Pool. "If you
hold a sloth, it starts reaching out for the trees, like it's swimming with its arms - for them
it can't be fast enough." The sloths are generally released an hour's drive from the
capital - one site, along a river, is completely uninhabited and probably will be for many
years.

All the sloths rescued during "Slothageddon" were released back into the wild, apart
from three babies - now teenagers - who aren't quite ready to fend for themselves. Pool
calls them "lounge sloths" because they roam freely around the house. It's a tribute to
her expertise that they have survived for so long - three-toed sloths usually die after
months in captivity, and it's a race against the clock to get them back to their natural
environment. If new arrivals refuse to eat, Pool also lets them go - often their depression
lifts when they see trees.
From June this year, most of the rescue work will be done at a new centre 67 km (42
miles) outside Paramaribo, where land has been made available by a tourism company.
Meanwhile, another crisis looms. Pool has found out about a new patch of forest which
is going to be cleared. The owner thinks there are 15 sloths, so Pool has calculated
there could be as many as 300.

It's likely to be Slothageddon II. "I don't sleep much, it is difficult," says Pool, who fits in
rescuing alongside a full-time job as a translator. It doesn't leave much room for
anything else, she says. "I'm single, I haven't found the right person who is as crazy as I
am."

The Tao of Sloth

What would it be like to be a sloth? Human life would be a blur. Sloths seem to embody
a central tenet of Taoism "action through non-action" so let's consider a "Tao of Sloth":

● Eat slowly - The sloth's diet of leaves is hard to digest, their approach is to allow plenty
of time
● Hang out - Sloths save energy by hanging from their claws rather than using their
muscles
● Smile all the time - Sloths are cute and appear to smile though they're not primates,
they're related to anteaters and armadillos
● Be kind and others will be kind to you - Three-toed sloths climb down from the safety of
the tree canopy to poo on the ground, for the benefit of moths that live in their fur (the
moths in turn encourage the growth of beneficial algae)
●