View from the North 40: So ... pigs are man's best friend now?

James “Mac” McIntyre of Florida went to the South Pacific to find a pig, but got a dog, too — well, kind of.

Huffington Post reports that McIntyre, a trained zoologist, has been many things in his life, a vet tech on a cattle ranch, a zookeeper, a high school biology teacher, a logger and a carpenter. But he hasn’t let any of that hold him back from pursuing his love of scientific researcher.

McIntyre told Huff-Po that it was his relentless passion to know things that drove him in 1993 to fly to Vanuatu, an archipelago west of Fiji, to find a study the elusive intersexual pigs. The pigs have both male and female characteristics and are known by locals as “pig half-man half-woman.”

I know, who wouldn’t want to pull all their savings out of investments to do just that and maybe give them a better name in the process.

“I took a chance,” McIntyre said in a 1997 article about his search for the Vanuatu pigs about which little was known at the time. “People told me I was crazy, but I knew I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”

The pigs didn’t want to be studied.

They eluded him for six weeks of island hopping and interrogating strangers about their whereabouts before he found one. One pig. But one pig was enough to spawn wide-ranging research.

McIntyre returned to Vanuatu for a brief trip in 1996 to re-up his pig data. He also took a side trip to Papua New Guinea to look for that island’s infamous wild dog, which was thought at the time to be extinct. Let’s just say he had better luck with the pig, since he couldn’t even confirm authenticity of the dog-ish feces which was found in all the right hangouts, but without sightings of the actual canines.

For 20 long years McIntyre slaved over his intersexual pig research and dreamed of going back to search for the highland wild dogs.

Then late last year, his dream came true when he returned to Papua New Guinea, for the dog search he hoped would yield more than a few sketchy poop samples. Though the weather conspired against him, fate did get him hooked up with students from the University of Papua who were also setting out to collect data on the same animal.

Because of the dog’s extreme isolation in a remote area of a remote island in the South Pacific, it is considered to be a pure link between ancient canines and modern domestic dogs. Plus, they are also called singing dogs because of their singsong-y howl, so who wouldn’t want to study that.

Working in collaboration, McIntyre and the university crew covered a lot of ground in foul weather, allowing them to come up with even more of nothing than McIntyre found before — nothing, that is, until the end of his monthlong stay.

With time running out and signs of dog tracks all around them, McIntyre played a recording of coyote howls in hopes of calling out the dogs for a good old-fashioned sing-off. But the wild dogs weren’t ready to rumble.

McIntyre placed his available wild-doggy cameras out on likely trails, and the day before leaving he collected them to find more than a hundred photos of a thriving New Guinea highland wild dog family that, the article says, suggests “a healthy and robust population.”

The photos, along with fecal samples that are still awaiting DNA study, are an important find, McIntyre said. So as soon as he can put the money together, he will be headed back to the islands to study the intersexual pig half-man and half-woman.

Wait, what?

Yeah, I’m with you. I’d go back for the dogs instead, but he just can’t quit those pigs.

Because those pigs have enough femaleness in with the maleness, the males don’t have that hormonally inspired rank boar smell and flavor that uncastrated male pigs of the regular-sexual variety have. McIntyre said he’s been using his research to work on a vaccine which will eliminate that smell, called “boar taint.”

So, basically, McIntyre chose a stinkless pig over a singing dog.

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You can’t fault that effort at [email protected].