Kim and I have had many wonderful animal experiences during our travels over the years.

We loved seeing a wide variety of wildlife during our visits to Africa, were educated and got up close with elephants at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, swam with turtles in Barbados and got to see turtles lay eggs in Oman. (Check out a post from 2012 which has My Top 5 Animal Encounters.)

Besides trekking to see mountain gorillas in Africa again or swimming with whale sharks, a top animal experience I’ve been hoping to do would be to revisit the Bahamas to see their swimming pigs.

The swimming pigs in Exuma have been written about quite a bit and are a very popular activity.

While I was away in Ireland I came across some sad news. An unknown number of the swimming “pigs were found dead on the beach of Big Major Cay,” according to T+L.

Nobody knows just yet what happened but investigators are looking into it.

The article mentions that around 7 or 8 swimming pigs are still alive. The amount that died is somewhere above 7 pigs but less than 15.

T+L mentions one possibility, that the pigs accidentally ate something poisonous. It could’ve been done on purpose but the Bahamas Humane Society President, Kim Aranha can’t imagine why someone would try to hurt the beloved pigs.

Find out more from T+L here.