Walter Jefferies Horrible, Terrible, Awful mostly bad year

Picture courtesy of WCAX, Vermont.  https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Vermont-farmer-recaptures-almost-all-runaway-pigs-558851501.html

Walter Jefferies has been having a pretty hard time over in Vermont.  You know it's bad when the local television station puts out a story with this headline:

Pigs on the loose plague Vermont town

Apparently Walter has had problems with pigs getting off his property repeatedly, last year and this year, and the local township is getting complaints - and issuing fines.    Full disclosure:  I've been issued fines by the local animal control for pigs off my property, related to my special neighbor Dale Shelton, but my fines are not even in the same planet as the ones that Walter has been assessed so far:  The local township reports that he's been fined 

$90,000

He's going to have to sell a lot of pastured pork to pay that kind of fine.  I think it's excessive, and it'll probably be reduced, but the local township is apparently pretty mad at him.  Here's the quote:  

"We can issue the civil tickets to him but we have no further control, the state and federal government and the state police need to take action to control the situation of loose pigs in orange" - Angela Eastman, Clerk for the town of orange 

Apparently this situation has been going on for weeks and despite the fines hasn't been resolved yet.  The news reports also state that they had pigs loose last year too; my guess is that everyone is getting kinda tired of chasing pigs around. 

Walter makes a claim that his fence was damaged by an ex-employee on his web page.   I've had my own experiences with bad farm help and I empathize with him on that, but apparently the police have been out multiple times and this has gone on for weeks, a couple of days I could understand, but weeks, well, a little harder. 

Walter did crowdfund a portion of his butcher shop project, and promised the backers their rewards in 2012.   So 7 years later some of those very very patient backers are getting a little fed up.  Given that Walter is probably roaming the hills with hotdog buns trying to get his pigs back, I understand it completely when he says it's impossible to answer questions like:  "Hey, how many people have

actually got their promised rewards" and "are you ever going to fufill your promises for this project?"

Full disclosure:  Kickstarter banned me from their site when I asked those questions directly.  I think that kickstarter is a great platform for the folks that get the money - there's basically very little accountability to the people they make promises to, and apparently no consequences if they just don't do what they say they're going to do as part of their project.  

Cheer up Walter.  You could always just shoot them all and make maple syrup!