When I was a child, a bizarre incident happened in the neighboring village, where a child from a family was eaten by a pig. That day, the family went out to the market, leaving the child in a cradle at home.

They only had one big fat pig, which was free-range in the yard. When the house was empty, this big fat pig pushed open the door and started looking for food, and in an instant, it devoured the child in the cradle. When the family returned from the market and found the door pushed open, the child was missing, while the big fat pig was leisurely wagging its tail, looking at the bloodstains on the ground. The family immediately understood that the big fat pig had eaten their child.

At that moment, it felt like the sky was falling; in a frenzy, they stabbed the big fat pig with a knife until it was dead. However, their child could never come back to life.

This incident illustrates that all possible hidden dangers can become reality. No one expected a pig would eat a child, yet such a thing actually happened.

There was also an incident involving dogs. At that time, a family in the mountain village went out, leaving their child playing at home. However, at that moment, a wild wolf appeared in the mountains, rushing into the house to eat the child. Fortunately, their dog rushed out and began to fight the wolf. Although the child was accidentally harmed in the process, the wolf was ultimately driven away by the family dog. However, the dog was severely injured and covered in blood.

When the owner returned home and found bloodstains, he thought the dog had bitten his child, and he became very angry, cursing as he raised a hammer and struck the unsuspecting dog on the head, killing it instantly. When the owner later learned that the dog had been injured while protecting his child, he was filled with regret, but at that point, there was no way to make up for his mistake.

In rural areas, pigs are usually kept in pigpens and not allowed to roam freely. However, that family was so careless that it could be said that the child died not because of the pig, but because the adults were too negligent.

At the same time, in rural areas, dogs are generally not tied up because Chinese rural dogs are the close guardians of their owners and would never do something like a pig. However, this also caused trouble for the dogs.

When I was young, for some reason, dog-killing teams emerged. They indiscriminately killed any dog they saw, even taking advantage of the absence of rural people to climb over walls and kill dogs that were chained up, then opened the gates and dragged the dead dogs away. I have witnessed such things firsthand.

It was when I was in elementary school; one day after school, I happened to pass by a house in the village. Their door was locked, and the dog-killing team climbed the wall, shooting two dogs that were chained up with an air gun. They then opened the door from the inside and took the lifeless dogs to the village team.

This incident quickly came to the attention of the family. The parents had two sons, named Da Hu and Er Hu, and their mother had left them when they were very young. At that time, Xiao Hu ran to the team, crying over the corpse of their dog. The leader of the dog-killing team, fearing a bad outcome, allowed Er Hu to take home the larger dog. Then Er Hu returned and continued to cry. At this point, the leader of the dog-killing team became a bit impatient and said, "You don't need to cry; you've already taken back the big dog. You have to leave us one small one, right? We also need to drink dog soup and eat dog meat."

Thus, the situation remained deadlocked, and it seemed they ultimately did not return the other dog. Under the pretext of the big dog, they either ate the dead dog themselves or sold it to dog meat restaurants for profit. This was already an open secret in the countryside, but no one dared to intervene, as they supposedly had the approval of the higher authorities to kill dogs.

They killed dogs indiscriminately, whether they were good or bad; any dog they found was killed and taken away. At that time, while I was eating at home, my father came back and told me a bizarre story.

There was a woman in the village who raised a big dog, which was very gentle. One day, she took her dog out to work, and while passing an intersection, a member of the dog-killing team shot it dead with an air gun and took it away. The woman immediately burst into tears, but she had no way to stop them and could only watch helplessly as her dead dog was taken away.

They wouldn't spare small dogs either. At that time, everyone was on edge, and no one dared to raise dogs; the small dogs were scared and ran everywhere. They directly killed them with stones and threw them into ditches. This was because the meat of small dogs was not enough to fill a gap, so they discarded them casually.

At that time, my family's dog was scared away in such an atmosphere, and it was likely killed later. The family couldn't bear to witness such bloody scenes, so they turned a blind eye and let it fend for itself.

Of course, there were some hard-hearted families who thought that rather than having their dogs killed and taken away by the dog-killing team, it would be better to kill and eat the dogs themselves. So they slaughtered their dogs before the dog-killing team arrived and cooked the dog meat for themselves. You might think this is too cruel, but if it weren't for the circumstances, who would have the heart to kill their own dog? After all, dogs are their loyal guardians.

During that chaotic time of dog-killing, some people impersonated dog-killers, recklessly killing people's dogs and taking the corpses for improper gains. I can't say whether the people who killed the two dogs from Da Hu's family were the real dog-killing team, but they dared to contact the village committee, and the committee backed them up, so they were likely the so-called dog-killing team.

When dogs were almost extinct, they turned their attention to the chickens in every household. However, if they were called a chicken-killing team, it would seem trivial. The dog-killing team could still be said to be preventing rabies, but what about killing chickens? Could they say it was for avian influenza? That seemed implausible, and at that time, there didn't seem to be a professional term for avian influenza.

But this didn't stop them; they spread poison bait everywhere, and as long as the chickens ate it, they would be poisoned and unable to move, allowing them to take the chickens away. The flock of chickens my family raised was taken away by them in this way.

In addition to targeting chickens, they also wanted to steal pigs, as almost every household raised pigs at that time, and selling the pigs could earn some money. However, since pigs were mostly kept in pens and couldn't be stolen as openly as dogs, they resorted to stealing at night.

I remember that my family's big pig was stolen on a stormy night. I only discovered this the next morning when I went to school. This incident was a huge blow to our family, as we had raised the pig for more than half a year, hoping to sell it to pay for my school fees. It was such a shocking event.

When it rains, it pours; at that time, I was short of more than ten yuan for my school fees and had been ordered to drop out of school several times by my homeroom teacher. Every time I was found still in the classroom, he would get very angry and send me home, saying I could come back to school when I had the money. The people who stole my family's pig were truly heartless.