Just a few weeks from giving birth, Crystal sprawled in southern Wisconsin quack grass, her swollen nipples exposed to the April chill. Cong ambled over and kissed her on the face.
Derrickson and Kessenich, former Madison restaurateurs, have been raising rare-breed cattle, sheep, goats, and chickens for more than 12 years. But these are the first pigs Kessenich has ever bred and the first for Derrickson since her youth. The couple has two other mulefoots aside from Cong and Crystal–another male, named Churchill, and another gilt, or female that has yet to give birth, called Cherry.
The mulefoot became a recognized standard breed in the early 1900s, when there were some 235 breeders in 22 states. But, as George E. Day reported in his 1913 Productive Swine Husbandry, “The National Mule-foot Hog Record Association, which has its office in Indianapolis, has issued the following statement: ‘Up to the present date, the Mule-foot hog is a hog without an authentic history. Rumors and reports offer Denmark, Holland, South Africa, Mexico, South America, and the Sandwich Islands as the country of his birth. . . . Reports are so contradictory that this Association cannot, without further research, endorse any of them.’”
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He says he took some ribbing for raising mulefoots. “Well, I was just foolish enough to keep bothering with them,” he says. “They made all kinds of fun of me. Yeah, some still call me Mr. Mulefoot. That’s the only thing that’s hurt ’em–who wants to eat a mule?”
Dibert and his wife, Jessica, contacted Holliday himself but he wasn’t ready to give any pigs up. “Mr. Holliday didn’t sell to many people,” says Jessica, who’s writing a book on the history of the mulefoot. “He was very, very picky and for many years he sold to nobody.”
“The mulefoots are really friendly and they’re curious and they want to see everything you’re doing,” she says. “They’ll follow you along and talk to you. They’re just really interesting pigs, and when you line them up with some of the other breeds they’re just a lot more fun to have.” Now with some 25 boars and close to 60 females, she owns the largest herd of mulefoots in existence and has become a vocal advocate for the breed.
