The owner of the year-and-a-third-old Purple Elephant Gallery tells Cypress Creek Mirror reporter Rebecca Bennett of her plans to turn her stretch of McSwain St. off Kluge Rd. into an artsy “Old Town Cypress.” Already up: her backyard Iron Butterfly Studio and the thatched-roof Street of Dreams Palapa at 12802 McSwain, where hoopdancers attend Houston Spin Stars classes (above). Next, Debra Reese wants to turn a home she owns down the street into a restaurant.
“This has always been my dream, and that’s why I named it the Street of Dreams. You can make your dreams come true. You can even have a pig,†she said.
“That’s weird. [pot-bellied pig] poop doesn’t really smell much (not like a hog farm, where the hogs are fed to bursting). It’s kinda similar to rabbit or deer (remember these are prey animals). Wilbur may be overfed? Or not eating proper PBP food, which is like rabbit food pellets – alfalfa + protein mix. We rake the poo up & put on the compost pile or mix it directly into the garden soil. It does not burn the grass. Or attract flies, really. Maybe the neighbor is smelling something else? An 8-month-old PBP will produce about 20 little balls of poop a day on the proper diet. Sorry if this is TMI, but I feel I owe it to Wilbur to produce some facts from a long-time responsible pig owner. I can smell our neighbor’s dog’s poop next door – and the wandering cat’s – but the pigs’ is not nasty at all. I was kind of worried when we got our first one that it would be a problem, but it is not. And our neighbors will tell you that too.” [
After 4 hours of classroom training near Hobby Airport in “the first Professional Helicopter Hog Hunting Safety Course in the nation that is specific to hunters who would be hiring a helicopter service to hunt feral hogs,” reporter Sonia Smith goes out on her first aerial wild hog shoot, AR-15 in hand — near Knox City, with the same helicopter pilot who took Ted Nugent on a 30-plus pig run back in March. A new law effective September 1 allows sport hunters to rent helicopter gunner seats for hog or coyote kills, but the rush has already begun. 
