Escambia Animal Control officers remove a whopping 608 pigs from a Cantonment property

Escambia County animal control officers spent three-and-a-half days in Cantonment over the last week collecting pigs belonging to the In Loving Swineness Sanctuary run by Christal and Francis Ellard, eventually nabbing 608 animals and shipping them off to farms or other locations in the region.

"I about fell out," Mary Tharp said when she heard the total numbers of animals retrieved.

Tharp lives next door to the property at 1846 Highway 95A where the pigs were kept and at one time hosted the Ellards and their swine on her family's own 8 acres of land.

"It's terrifying is what it is," Animal Control Director John Robinson said in verifying the total number of pigs captured.

Robinson could not pinpoint exactly where all of the pigs had been taken. The county's livestock officer was given the task of hauling them off once animal control documented their confiscation.

"They're out of the county, on different farms. Obviously they all couldn't go to one place, so they're all spread out," Robinson said. "I think some are in Alabama."

Previously: 80 pigs seized by Escambia County Animal Control. The question now is where to put them.

More: Cantonment pigs are good eaters, but bad neighbors. Why landowner wants them gone:

Robinson said animal control moved on short notice last Wednesday when the agency was contacted by the pig owner who, he said, told them, "I can't do this any more."

The round up continued through the day Thursday and Friday and was picked up again on Tuesday, Robinson said. The whole thing became a logistical nightmare.

"It's so difficult when you're dealing with that many animals," he said. "It shouldn't be the county's responsibility to clean up somebody's mess like that. At this point we've basically zapped our resources."

Robinson said his team and other county offices are still going through the administrative aspects of the pig debacle, such as determining how sanctions should be divided among the property owner and the sanctuary operators.

"There will be some civil violations, for sure, that need to be addressed," he said. He also didn't rule out the possibility that criminal charges could also be filed.

In 2022, Christal Ellard and her organization were featured in the Pensacola News Journal as she was utilizing the approximately 150 miniature pigs she owned at the time to remove invasive cogongrass from areas in Cantonment where it had proliferated.

But by July of that year, with the prolific piggies having made a mess of the Tharp's land and their constant escapes from confinement leading to the Ellards being cited for code enforcement violations, the relationship between the homeowner and sanctuary owner soured. In November of 2022, with the Tharps having failed on a technicality in their effort to evict the Ellards, In Loving Swineness Sanctuary moved just across the property line to the 95A property owned by Patrick Larrabee.

Larrabee, Tharp said, constructed a pig pen right on the line where his property met hers.

The change of location did nothing to halt the rowdy or randy dispositions of the sanctuary pigs, who continued to escape, roam and breed.

On Tuesday Larrabee appeared before a code enforcement special magistrate and was ordered to pay a $250 fine for keeping the pigs on property zoned medium density residential which, according to Lt. Terrance Davis with Escambia County Environmental Code Enforcement, does not allow for any kind of farm animal.

Tharp said she'd calculated that fine to amount to about 41 cents per pig.

Larrabee has also been ordered to clean up his property and catch another 15 or so hogs Tharp said are still roaming her community. Some of those remaining, she said, are believed to be pregnant.

"They started with 20 pigs four years ago. The Larrabees and Ellards couldn't contain them," Tharp said. "If somebody doesn't stay on top of this, where will we be a year from now? I think we'll have feral swine in the Cantonment area for years to come because of this."

The original story: Are pigs the answer to fighting an invasive species? Some Pensacola-area experts think so.

County Natural Resource Division head Tim Day said if the Larrabees do fail within a 60 day allotted time frame to catch the remaining pigs and bring their property into compliance with code enforcement orders, automatic fines of $50 a day will be assessed until all issues have been resolved.

Robinson couldn't confirm that 15 pigs still remain on the loose, but he said he knows of at least three healthy-sized hogs that weary animal code enforcement officers did not attempt to capture for fear of making a misstep and getting hurt.

"Those pigs had zero interest in going with us," he said.

Day said that the pigs remained at the Larrabee property for as long as they did without county intervention because code enforcement officers typically provide homeowners time to correct violations before issuing citations or taking legal action.

The Florida Department of Agriculture has also investigated the Larrabee property and In Loving Swineness Sanctuary. Efforts to obtain documentation of the state agency findings and/or actions have been unsuccessful.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia animal control pulls pigs from Cantonment Swineness Sanctuary