While the holiday season is meant to be spent relaxing at home with family spending quality time together, it’s actually one of the most stressful times of the years for most people.
On top of picking out the perfect gifts for every member of the family, about 98.6 million Americans need to travel about 50 miles or more in order to actually get home. In order to help relieve some of that stress and anxiety, many airports bring in comfort animals during the holiday season.
Usually, airports bring in comfort dogs to help calm scared flyers or cheer up angry customers dealing with flight delays and cancellations, but New York’s Albany International Airport is gaining attention for their most recent addition to their troop of comfort animals: Bacon Bits the pig.
Pigs might not be known as comfort animals, but after he helped his owner Terry Hutchinson with her heart problem, she realized he was meant to be a comfort animal and has since brought him around to visit about 65 nursing homes in New York.
This is the first time Bacon Bits has worked in an airport to calm frazzled flyers, but he’s proven to be an instant success. “Just amazement,” Hutchinson said about people’s reaction to Bacon Bits. “We get both ends of the spectrum from people who have never seen or touched a pig to people saying, ‘I used to raise pigs when I was a kid.'”
“We just walk around and don’t get to walk far because by the time we take 10 steps, there’s already a group of 25 people looking at him because he’s a pig on a leash,” Hutchinson said.
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[Featured image: Facebook/Bacon Bits]
Airport Hired A Pig To Calm Stressed Holiday Travelers is an article from: LifeDaily