Mr. Wiggles (seen here cowering inside a rock in Nefarian’s Lair), the noncombat pet pig reward from World of Warcraft’s recent Children’s Week event, has become my guild’s constant companion. All the cool kids have a pig.

Here’s a little secret you may not know about Mr. Wiggles: he can find grass to eat anywhere, even on a stone tile floor. One day, that’s going to be some Grade A finely-marbled organic pork.

If you have all the time in the world and want to collect the Warcraft non-combat pets (some of which are no longer available), there are several player-created guides available:

Warcraft Forums: Guide to Vanity Pets (Furl archive of thread)
Dianius’ Pets Guide, including screenshots (Furl archive)
TKA Something Zalla’s Collector’s Guide to Non-Com/Small Pets (Furl archive)

And lastly, Dark Legacy Comics’ Children’s Week and Pet Rewards comics

The latest in World of Warcraft’s special events/holiday quests is available now: Children’s Week. We are to give back to the innocents, the children, although I don’t think they’ve ever given anything to me — not even a boot shine or a glass of beer, NOTHING.

There’s this guy in Ironforge, John Turner, who wanders around asking for donations to the orphans of war. Several times, I’ve tried to chat with him, give him a few gold for the cause. I don’t know what his deal is, but he won’t speak to me or take any gold. That’s why I think this is all a scam.

I play on a PVE server and as far as I’ve ever seen, the orcs and dragonkin stay in their instances and never venture out to ravage the cities. Sure, every once in a great while, a few horde will show up around Ironforge or Stormwind or Darkshire (wow, that’s brave) and pick on a few hapless players or NPCs. I do the math, that’s only a few orphans created each year, certainly well within Stormwind and Ironforge’s city budgets.

I’m not one to turn down free quest rewards and free reputation, so I griffed over to Stormwind last night and did the questline for Children’s week — even though, I disagree on principle. The evil orphanage matron handed over an orphan to me, rather eagerly, and it was my job to take him on a whirlwind tour of the sights around World of Warcraft.

My dullard wanted to see three initial sights, then he had two more requests (sigh) and finally, I returned him, rather eagerly, back into involuntary servitude at the orphange and got some tidy Alliance-wide reputation and a choice of four rewards: three non-combat pets or a bag of coins. There’s a few screenshots available in a Flickr photoset.

An organized upper-level guild could complete this questline for all of its online members in a few minutes with the wonders of mage portals and warlock summons. An improvement over other special events, there’s no items to collect that will take up valuable bag space.

My dullard got a little extra adventure. I dragged him through the savage countryside of Searing Gorge and into Blackrock Mountain — me on horseback, him racing along on the ground. I wanted him to experience the thrill of adventuring in the Warcraft world, as he claimed he wanted to do some day. Also, I wanted to return childless to the evil matron and request another, “Excuse me, madam. I seem to have misplaced my orphan, may I have another?”

That’s the real scam of the war orphans: little bastards have no aggro.