As children, many of us heard the fairy tale of “The Three Little Pigs.” The first little pig built his house of straw. When the wolf came, he huffed, and he puffed, and he easily blew the house down.

In a year dominated by doom and gloom headlines, two women have quietly engineered a cross-border success story with 13 tiny trotters, a mountain of paperwork, and a shared belief that animals deserve ...