TABUK CITY, Kalinga – Leaders of Lacnog, this city, were able to crack the problems of highway robbery and cattle-rustling which used to give their barangay a bad name but they are no match to the native pigs which freely roam the village including the national road passing through it.
During the Ubuhung Festival held to mark the 24th founding anniversary of the barangay on April 18-20, 2011, two former barangay captains admitted that making Lacnog folks confine their pigs to their respective compounds is a very tough job.
During his term in 1997, Fidel Pan-oy initiated the enactment of an ordinance penalizing owners of stray animals but gave up trying to implement it because the pig owners refused to obey.
“Initially, some of the pig owners constructed pens. The pens were close to their houses because we have small residential lots here. With the waste of the pigs now concentrated in one place, the owners said that they will get sick due to the smell. We, Butbuts, could not stand foul odor,” Pan-oy said.
Roberto Dawagan who was barangay captain from 2007 to 2010 admits that motorists complain about the pigs due to the possibility their presence on the road will cause accidents adding that there was already an instance where a motorcycle-riding man passing Lacnog took a spill due to a pig on his path.
He tried to reason with the pig owners that aside from preventing possible road accidents, restraining their pigs would help in the maintenance of cleanliness in the barangay and would give other residents the opportunity to do backyard gardening but his pleas fell on deaf ears.
Dawagan said that most residents of Lacnog raise native pigs because it comes next to their farms as a source of income.
“Lacnog is the main source of the native pigs being sold in the market in Bulanao,” Dawagan said.
There is a steady demand for native pigs in the locality not only because of their palatability but also because of their cultural usage as fortune-telling animals. The appearances of the liver and the bile or gall bladder are read by an elder as omens.
Well aware of the failure of his predecessors to find a solution to the problem, newly-elected barangay captain Wallis Ngayaan has come up with his own solution: the construction of a fence that will separate the residential area and the road so that the pigs cannot stray into the road.
The trouble is it cannot still be known immediately if the solution will work because it was not funded this year but is included in the project list for next year.
City officials have been nagging Lacnog officials to do something about the pigs with Councilor Lester Lee Tarnate, chairman of the committee on tourism of the Sangguniang Panlungsod, requesting the barangay officials just this week to get the owners to tether their pigs because the sight of pigs freely roaming around does not create a good impression to visitors especially so that the barangay is at the entrance to the city and the province.**
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