It’s not easy to part with market hogs at fair

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer Updated 10:32 PM Thursday, July 30, 2009

SPRINGFIELD — In her first year showing an animal at the Clark County Fair, Kaitlin Toth made a colossal mistake — she named the animal. “I kinda wished I hadn’t named him,” she confessed. “He’s cute. I couldn’t help it.”

Grady the pig came into her life as an 80-pound cutie. He left it Thursday, July 30, as a 275-pound market hog. “I don’t like to think about where he’s going,” Toth said. “But I came into this knowing what’s going to happen.”

Hundreds of hogs were auctioned Thursday in the annual junior livestock sale. Regan Entler’s 260-pound grand champion hog — “a whale of a good pig,” in the words of the auctioneer — sold for $2,175.

For Entler, a 14-year-old freshman at Southeastern High School, six years of showing hogs doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier. Her hog went straight into the trailer of a waiting truck.

“It goes to the slaughterhouse, I guess,” she explained softly. “You just get used to it after a while. ”

Toth hoped to make at least $400 off ol’ Grady. In her fifth year in 4-H, the Kenton Ridge grad and Wittenberg University freshman finally got to raise and show an animal — a far cry from the sewing projects of years past.

She bought Grady herself and raised him in a neighbor’s barn after years of listening to kids at 4-H camp talk about the joy of raising animals. “He’s taught me to take care of something other than myself,” she said. Grady, in turn, learned that he liked vanilla wafers, marshmallows and, when he’s stressed, strawberry yogurt. “He’s got one more yogurt coming.”

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