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Real-Life ‘Spider Pig’ With Eight Legs Born In Argentina [Photos]

By JohnThomas Didymus
Published on: 05:21 PST, Apr 2, 2016

Images have emerged online showing a weird “arachnid” piglet born with eight legs. The strange animal, nicknamed “spider pig” because of its eight legs, was born to a sow on a farm in Argentina. Many on social media have remarked that the piglet is the real-life version of Homer Simpson’s pet in The Simpsons Movie.

Argentinian farmer Santiago Valdez from El Galpon in the northwest province of Salta, told reporters that he was shocked when his sow give birth to the strange creature with eight trotters, believed to be a mutant. Another piglet belonging to “spider” pig’s litter reportedly had two mouths.

“Spider pig” died shortly after birth. But Valdez snapped pictures of the creepy-looking animal and uploaded them to social media. The farmer said he had expected that experts would want to study the piglet, but he was surprised they showed no interest in studying the monstrous birth defect.

“I have no idea why it happened,” he said. “I was surprised that nobody had asked for it, to carry out investigations. But nobody asked for it, so I just threw it away.”

But some sources claim that the apparently high rate of monstrous birth defects among farm animals in Argentina could be due to use of toxic industrial chemicals. Experts say that the condition, known as preaxial polydactyly, is caused by rare genetic mutations.

But despite the apparent lack of interest by experts, images of “spider pig” uploaded online went viral as social media users speculated about what may have caused the deformity.

But this is not the first time that images of weirdly mutated animals uploaded to social media have gone viral.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=714-Ioa4XQw&gl=NG&hl=en-GB

Images of a puppy born in Venezuela with three legs and “horns” in place of a head went viral on social media recently, according to Express.

The scary-looking puppy had a short neck at the end of which was a pair of structures comparable to horns. But some viewers thought they were malformed ears.

The owner Jesus Chirinos Palenzuela said he was so spooked when he saw the puppy that his dog Princesa gave birth to that he rushed to call his neighbors who did not believe him until they saw the puppy.

The puppy, one of a litter of six, had one front leg instead of two and a total of three legs. The single front leg appeared to have been formed from two front legs that failed to split normally during fetal development. One of the hind feet had seven toes and the other had eight.

“I was absolutely stunned and ran to my neighbors to let them know what had happened,” Jesus told reporters. “They also didn’t believe me until they saw it for themselves.”

The puppy was born alive and moving but died soon after birth, Jesus said.

The Inquisitr reported early last month the birth of an “elephant-like” piglet on a farm in Pramoy, western Cambodia. The piglet had a snout that looked like an elephant’s trunk and big fan-shaped ears.

Social media users said the elephant-like trunk and ears made the piglet look like a pig-elephant hybrid. Others said the creature looked like a pig about to evolve into an elephant.

A piglet with a similar deformity was also born on a farm in Longtan District in the Jilin province of southeastern China in 2014. But the animal died of starvation soon after birth because it had no mouth.

A piglet that had a humanoid face was born on a farm in southwest China in 2008. The piglet had an eerily human-looking face. The face was flat, without a snout. It had a prominent forehead and eyes placed close together in front of the face like in humans and apes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVQGCj89fkY

But despite wild speculation about the possibility of a relationship between the farmer and his sow, scientists explained that the weird appearance of the “humanoid pig” was due to a form of congenital malformation called holoprosencephaly (HPE) or arhinencephaly omnibus.

HPE covers several forms of congenital malformations linked to defects in brain development that disrupt normal development of facial features. In most cases malformation of the forebrain leads to failure of development of the face, including eyes, nose and lips.

[Image via Shutterstock]

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