As many as 400 piglets died when a tractor-trailer crashed in Ohio, leaving a busy highway closed as some 1,500 surviving piglets were rounded up.
Authorities told the the
Dayton Daily News that the driver of the tractor-trailer carrying about 2,200 piglets traveling from South Carolina to Shirley, Indiana, lost control and crashed Monday evening near Xenia.
WDTN-TV said the driver hit a guardrail, lost control and turned over. Many of the surviving piglets scattered into a wooded area off U.S. 35.
"There's quite a few dead pigs," Xenia Township Fire Chief Dean Fox told the Daily News.
"We'll try as hard as we can, but we probably won't retrieve them all. I can't say what will happen to the pigs," said Fox. "If somebody finds a pig and wants to turn it in, call the local law enforcement and we'll try to take care of it."
While roughly 1,500 piglets were rescued, authorities said they don't have a fixed number of how many are still in the woods,
according to WXIX-TV.
"We are just not sure" how many piglets are still loose, Deputy Jason Tavner told WXIX-TV. "Once we got them all corralled it was almost impossible to count them all at that point. They all went into big clumps."
Fox told the Daily News that local farmers played a critical role in rounding up the loose piglets by bringing their own livestock trailers to the scene, allowing law enforcement to secure the animals safely.
The rescue of the piglets was captured on social media.