Buy a luxury holiday home and property developer Jeremy Paxton is offering to provide a pig for your porch at the exclusive Cotswold Water Park near Cirencester.
Anyone who buys one of the luxury houses before the end of the month will be given the chance to become the proud owner of a live Gloucester Old Spot porker.
The ruse is designed to snout out buyers for the £250,000 to £10million houses - though last night the RSPCA sounded a note of caution.
Mr Paxton, a former magazine publisher, is understood to be away on holiday. However, a spokesman for the developer said: “The idea for the pig giveaway came from Jeremy himself. He’s always coming up with schemes like this but can actually come through with the product on this one.
“He really wanted to show the buyers that he is big on the eco-plans for the estate.” He added: “The pigs, I gather, will be coming from a farm in Gloucestershire, but the Lower Mill people haven’t selected it yet, as most of the houses on the estate haven’t been built.
“It’s a surreal bonus for an expensive second home, but if the record amount of house sales in August are anything to go by, there will be a group of buyers with a new family friend when they arrive on the estate.”
Porker owners would be in celebrity company - Hollywood heart-throb George Clooney is reputed to have his own pot-bellied pig.
But Mr Paxton still might fall foul of animal welfare campaigners. Part of the glossy promotion material also states: “Your specially house-trained pig can either live with you and your family at home, be kept on a special farm, where it can graze in the beautiful Lower Mill surroundings, or it can be turned into the finest pork loins and rashers of bacon found in the UK. The choice will be yours.”
RSPCA spokeswoman Helen Briggs said: “If people are thinking of taking on an animal they should think very carefully about it and whether they have an appropriate place to keep it.”
However, she said the organisation would have no problem with the animals being used for meat so long as they were killed and prepared in the proper way.
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