Seldom have I complained about my brethren being slaughtered, fried, roasted, and barbecued.  Never did I protest when my owners hired a veterinarian – a butcher with a degree – to whack off my testicles and saw my tusks.  Rarely have I whined about forever being banished to a dreary Calabasas canyon while, in the elegant house above, freeloading human visitors were lavished with food and drink before collapsing into soft beds.  Now, however, thirteen years of accumulated indignities have weakened my good nature and disenabled me to tolerate the latest outrage.

I here announce to the world that there exists no such disease as the much touted and feared swine influenza.  That is, the disease cannot be thusly named unless it is explicitly understood the swine are people, the primary carriers and spreaders of the plague.  I speak not based on news reports – which show humans wearing surgical masks to shield themselves from each other – but from the most painful personal experience.

I had been healthy as a hog until a fortnight ago when the man and woman of the house returned from a Mexican vacation during which they doubtless devoured many sliced and cooked versions of my departed relatives.  But I really don’t care what they ate; I care after returning they each, inadvertently or not, several times coughed and sneezed right into my snout.  And, unsurprisingly, I have contracted the human-swine flu.

Please do not tell me my sickly masters were infected by eating charred meat.  Clearly, their fellow humans infected them, and many Mexican pigs, as they, my owners, have so callously done to me.  And they know this.  Yesterday morning I heard them say, “Oscar’s sick as we are.”  In recent years they’ve often complained about the cost of sedating my arthritic front knees and worming me and keeping short my tusks, and said, when they thought I was asleep, that if I don’t shape up they may have to put me under.  Despite the severity of my human-induced illness, I’m determined to live and confident of prevailing, if I receive thorough medical treatment.  If that isn’t soon forthcoming, I shall on an historic night quietly climb the hill, enter the forbidden house, seal off the master bedroom, and issue an ultimatum.