They were trying to save barn and other property.
I’ve heard it as “Mister, a pig that special, you don’t eat all at once.”
I can’t tell from the article how much life-risking occurred, but firemen are sent out to protect property and pigs are property. They’re worth about as much riskiness as the barn is and I’m going to assume that that’s about as much riskiness as they got.
Too slow - waves at Channing Idaho Banks
And really, being burned alive is a horrible way to go. Better to get them out, if you can without too much danger, than let them suffer.
StG
They made the pigs into sausages? That’s disgusting and wrong!
Should’ve gotten some bacon out of the deal.
Nicotine…? Like a heart attack?
Whenever an animal is shot, know-it-alls always say “couldn’t they have tranquilized it!?” That’s no easy task, and has big chances of either pissing off a large animal or killing it outright. There’s a reason that anesthesiologists get paid well.
I think the problem is the news report described the piglets as being rescued. That made them sound like pets.
What the firemen did was save some property from being burned. When you think of it that way, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the farmer giving the firemen a share of what they saved from the fire.
If the firemen had saved a corn field from being burnt down, would anyone think it was wrong for the farmer to give them a bushel of corn later on? Nobody would suggest that the corn had been rescued and therefore had some protected status.
That’s how I heard it, too, but I was afraid I’d mess up the punchline so I looked it up and that’s how it was in the first link, so I went with that random authority.
Anyway, “Right, Lisa, some wonderful, magical animal.”
The important this is that the pigs were ‘saved’ and are therefore in heaven.
But did they get their 42 virgins?
I heard it Telemark’s way, but I like Rittersport’s way better, and that’s how I’ll tell it in the future. “After all it did for us…”- man, that hits home.
I have to admit I’m a little disappointed there was no “Clyde” pun. I was looking forward to seeing how you’d make it work.
When my children were small, we made a conscious effort to make them understand where food came from. They would stand on a field gate and shout “Mint Sauce” at the spring lambs. 
I’ve told this story before, but when my kids were old enough I brought them to a live poultry pace by us and let them pick out dinner, making sure they understood what was going to happen. I never forced them if they didn’t want to, and I never made them go back if they didn’t want to, but it started a long talk about respect for food and where it comes from.
I vote delicious nonsense bullshit.
Pigs? 
My brother had two pet chickens he named “Original Recipe” and “Extra Crispy.” But he never ate them. 
They weren’t “food” at that point – they were living beings which would have suffered horribly if they burned to death, just as you would.
Kudos to the courageous and compassionate firemen who realized that the hogs didn’t deserve to die in agony, and acted on that knowledge.
This is the same situation that happened in my [new] neighborhood before I moved here. Somehow, some way a cougar got into the north side of Chicago (google ‘Roscoe Village Cougar’) and the same people who called 911 were saying “couldn’t they have tranquilized it, they didn’t have to kill it” when the cops unloaded on it. Did they really want to wait for someone to attempt to tranquilize a huge predatory cat with a amazing ability to jump, run and attack? I asked someone around here about the details when it happened years ago and they said “we didn’t want our children to be hurt, but they didn’t have to kill it”.
You can’t have both!
They were there to salvage property, and also to rescue any animals in the building.
There’s a reason why fire crews have oxygen masks that fit cats and dogs.
I’m sure many of us remember this story from a few years ago. No police department has enough animal tranquilizer on hand to deal with something like this.
What about ducks that are rescued from oil spills and released into the wild, to be shot by hunters?