Jamaal Harrison was riding his e-bike to a West Hollywood Goodwill when he spotted a small animal running through the street. When he realized what it was, he was “astounded.”
Hours later, he and the little pig he tried in vain to catch went viral.
“Everyone cared,” Harrison, 37, said in an interview. “Everyone cares about this pig.”
After seeing the tiny swine around noon Saturday, he pulled out his phone and started recording while giving chase. To his surprise, catching up to the pig to return it to its owner wasn’t as easy as he assumed, as he went on to document over three videos he posted online.
“Hey, come here, piggy piggy, come here, baby,” he said in one TikTok video, his bike brakes squealing as he reverses direction to catch up with the pink, fuzzy fugitive. “Why you running like the police coming?”
The chase eventually led him to an alleyway, where a man on foot also tried to catch the pig. Harrison thought he had the animal cornered between two cars at one point, but no such luck — it slipped away.
“I’m like, ‘That pig’s fast, man,’” Harrison recalled saying to his fellow would-be pig-wrangler.
Harrison dropped the pursuit and headed to Goodwill, texting a couple friends videos of the encounter. One of them replied three minutes later.
“Post that bro,” the friend wrote in a text message. “That’s crazy. Catch that pig. Be a hero.”
Harrison posted one of the three videos he shot to TikTok. He browsed for clothes and furniture at the Goodwill, looking for items he could resell, and found nothing. By the time he got home, the video was gathering an unusual amount of likes and comments, and it only grew from there, getting about 5,000 likes by the end of the day. Then, news outlets starting messaging him, including CBS LA, which interviewed him for a TV broadcast.
“I made it yall,” Harrison wrote in the caption of a TikTok video showing the CBS LA piece about the pig.
The original video now has more than 459,000 views.
The pig was subsequently captured and taken to the West Los Angeles Animal Shelter, CBS reported, where it will be kept until Thursday to give the owner time to pick the animal up.
The city’s animal services department did not immediately answer questions about the pig’s status.
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