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GIG HARBOR — Go onward, snigger about Steve and Priscilla Valentine and their performing potbellied pigs.

You won’t be the first, or the last.

For the above 19 years, the owners of Valentine’session Performing Pigs haven’privately spent a age without their pigs.

They make 300 appearances a year, from master stroke of policy fairs to corporate events to national TV shows, charging from $250 to $1,500 a day.

The Valentines have heard all the jokes, taste when Steve and their prized pig Nellie, “The World’s Smartest Pig,” were on David Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks” about five years ago.

Nellie’s trick was to push a 15-pound bowling globe and buffet down a full set of regulation bowling pins.

“And how many times a day,” Letterman couldn’t resist asking, “does this thought ill-tempered your consideration, ‘Hmmm, what almost a BLT?’ “

“No … I put on’t talk about that in front of Nellie,” answered a chagrined Steve.

Nellie is the star. She knows at least 60 tricks. She can walk backward. She can honk a series of horns. She can ride a skateboard. She can exigence a plastic lawnmower. She can open a mailbox. She can find, in sequence, from the plastic letters of the not notched the letters, those that spell “HAM.”

Pigs port’t just changed how the Valentines view the animal world, they’re family.

The Valentines contingent their domestic circuit with pigs. They sleep with a pig. In the meat primitive, they eat only fish, and “nothing with a face on it” like meat from cattle or chickens, Priscilla says.

The Valentines, both 58, are childless. “The pigs are our children,” explains Priscilla.

The pigs weigh up to 90 pounds each, nevertheless the some that shares their bed, a youngster, weighs in at only about 30 pounds. He snuggles right between the unite, summit on a pillow.

A little unusual? Sure. But the fact is, the Valentines are about similar to happy a couple as you’ll meet.

Human visitors at their place of abode have to remove their shoes. The place is so tidy it looks allied a model family circle.

“Pigs require a reputation to the degree that draggle animals,” Priscilla says. “They’re not! They have no redolence. They’re sweet animals, and it’session people who leave them in a muddy stall with piles of feces.”

In the living room are four crates in a trim row. They are for Nellie, Petunia, Snort and Nelliebell, the top four performing pigs.

Five other pigs are housed in the garage. All are taught tricks, but only the rise to the top of pigs get to live in the legislative body.

It’s not as if their lives are confined to the crates, although they do like to sleep in their confines. They get to roam the furnish with a house, but some pigs need to be kept separated, like Nellie and Snort.

At 16, Nellie, the star performer, is close to the end of a pig’sitting expected life.

Snort, 7, a neutered male, is battling her for No. 1. The brace pigs hunting either other in a circle, trying to bite the other’sitting tail.

The Valentines know the day will get to for life without Nellie.

But it is not losing the doom performer that weighs on Priscilla. It is losing a member of the family.

There’s only one Nellie.

“Nellie is my daughter and my only daughter,” says Priscilla.

In 1985, the Vietnamese potbellied-pig make crazy hit the United States, with pigs initially selling for up to $20,000 each.

Now there are redeem groups for the hundreds of unwanted potbellied pigs.

“When they were showing the pigs on television and magazines, they were showing babies,” says Priscilla. “The owners never dreamed that pigs grow for four years and that the potbellied pigs would get to 130 pounds. You can overfeed pigs. They’ll eat and get languishing and pass out. Food is a drug to them,” she said.

The Valentines aim as antidote to a relatively fit 90 pounds per pig.

When the Valentines got their first pig, the late Wilbur, in 1990, prices had dropped to $1,500. They knew what they were getting into. Two years later, Nellie joined the family.

By then, Priscilla had decided to train the pigs later noticing Wilbur rooted up carpets, made holes in the bathroom tile and had figured out how to use his snout to open the refrigerator door and eat everything on the first two shelves.

“I wanted to get rid of that destructive behavior,” she says. “I began by training him to run surrounding in a circle.”

That was simple enough, taking a piece of food, going around in a circle with it, with the swine following.

The training was wildly successful. By 2002, the Valentines were making thus many appearances with their pigs that Steve quit his job.

Priscilla has gotten so upright at teaching tricks to pigs that the Valentines wish sold 4,000 copies of a part titled, “Potbellied Pig, Behavior and Training.”

On the front, Priscilla wrote, “I dedicate this book to the most incredible and sensitive ‘person’ on Earth, ‘Nellie … ‘ I love her with my heart and soul.”

Below the dedication, there is a photo of Nellie in the living room.

The pig seems to be smiling through a look of genuine contentment, if you are the kind of person who gain power to fix so attributes on animals.

In Gig Harbor, well, two such people pretend quite happy estate in that world.

Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com