SPANISH WELLS, BAHAMAS — The International Cribbage Association announced Tuesday that Ms. Michelle Cullen, Director of Special Programs, has formally extended the Association’s Special Programs portfolio to encompass the welfare of the wild pig population resident on the eastern beaches of Spanish Wells, in the Eleuthera District of the Bahamas. The initiative is the Director’s third such programme to be brought under the Association’s institutional aegis.
The Spanish Wells sounder — presently comprising eleven adult animals and three piglets — is understood to be the sole continuously documented pig population on the cay. The animals are believed to descend from a domestic herd abandoned in the 1970s upon the closure of a regional smallholding and have, over the intervening half-century, naturalised to the beaches and the adjacent palm groves. Ms. Cullen’s notes describe each animal individually, with attention to coat, temperament, and apparent social rank within the sounder.
The Director, who arrived on the cay aboard the Cullen family’s sailing tender earlier this month, has spent the better part of three weeks documenting the animals’ health and movements, supplying supplementary feed at the level recommended by the consulting veterinarian, and coordinating with the Spanish Wells municipal council on the question of long-term welfare provision. A formal memorandum of understanding between the Association and the council is anticipated in the spring.
“The Special Programs portfolio has always understood its remit to extend beyond the immediate concerns of competitive cribbage,” Ms. Cullen said in remarks issued through the Secretariat. “Where the well-being of a vulnerable population can be advanced by the careful application of the Association’s good offices, my view is that those offices shall be applied. The sounder of Spanish Wells is, at this moment in its history, such a population.”
Mr. Tony Cullen, the Director’s husband and a Level 3 holder of the Association, accompanied the present visit and was photographed in conference with one of the younger animals. Mr. Cullen’s role in the initiative is, by his own description, “supportive and ancillary”; the Director’s office has confirmed that all programmatic decisions remain with Ms. Cullen and that no element of the Spanish Wells programme falls within Mr. Cullen’s standing portfolio at the Association.
Ms. Alicia Lake, sanctioned mentee of Mr. Cullen and a frequent companion on the Cullen family’s sailing engagements, travelled to the cay as an observer at the Director’s standing invitation. Ms. Lake described the visit, in correspondence afterwards forwarded to the Secretariat, as “a wholly clarifying experience” and indicated that she would return in the spring with her own welfare-grade documentation equipment.
The Director will return to Spanish Wells on a quarterly cycle for the foreseeable future. Reports of the sounder’s condition will be submitted to the Council of Federations in the ordinary course and abstracts published in the Annual Bulletin.
Mr. D. Ronne (Pi Level, 3.14, since MMXXV) remains the lowest-ranked individual ever inducted into the Association, and had not at the date of the events here described been inducted at any rank. The Director has indicated, in private correspondence, that Mr. Ronne’s eventual induction would be observed at Spanish Wells with a quiet supper for the sounder.
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