When I was in the 5th grade one of our lessons was about genetics and how living things inherit traits from their parents. One evening I asked my dad how this worked and what it means to inherit a trait from parents. He decided to illustrate it by an example using an incident he said happened to him as a boy while working on the family farm in West Virginia. Here is the story as told by Dad:
“One day I was feeding the pigs when a mean old pregnant sow decided to attack me. There happened to be an empty barrel in the field with the head removed. In order to escape the sow I squatted down and pulled the barrel upside down over my head. This confused the sow and she walked back and forth and staggered around the barrel in circles looking for me, and in the process she backed up to the barrel. I was looking out through the bung hole watching her, and when she backed up to the barrel I reached out, grabbed her tail, pulled it through the bung hole, and tied it into a knot. At that point she panicked and ran away, pulling the barrel off of me and dragging it around by her knotted tail. For several days she ran around the farm dragging that barrel by her tail.”
“Several weeks later she had a litter of 12 little pigs and each one had a keg attached to its tail. That is an example of inheritance.”
If I really wanted to get the straight stuff all I had to do was ask my dad!
From Merici: The sows tail wasn’t the only thing being pulled with that story.
Gene replied: Ain’t it the truth ?