Burning Piggies

A recent Star Tribune business story told of how a local company had been acquiring other companies that specialize in animal-related products, and illustrated it with this photo:


I looked at that photo for way too much time, and admit I had to read the caption to really understand what it showed. That is a litter of gray piglets, and a person is holding some type of high tech scanner (maybe infrared?) that reveals something about the animals.

But what it looks like is a burning fire inside the device, right? And the gray color of the device blends into the gray hair of the animals, making it all the more confusing.

The caption reads:

Animal Health International was purchased by Patterson Companies last week for $1.1 billion in cash. Animal Health supplies animal health, food and software products and services to farmers and ranchers.

Topping off the oddity of the image, the photo is credited to istockphoto. What?! There are stock photos of piglet scanners?

I suspect that the credit is an error, and that the photo was actually supplied by the company. Searching istockphoto for the words "piglet" and "lying" didn't turn up this photo. (There are 52 pages of results for just the word "piglet," which I didn't feel up to perusing, so it's possible I missed it by adding "lying" to the search parameters, though that did result in 181 images.)

So, all in all, pretty weird, Star Tribune.