Headscratchers / The Three Little Pigs

• Wouldn't a house of bricks take a long time to build? Much longer than houses of straw or twigs? As such, wouldn't the third pig's house be unfinished when the wolf arrived? And thus, wouldn't the third pig also have been devoured?
  • As the cartoon suggests, the three pigs took an equal amount of time. The first two just took shortcuts by using straw and wood, so they had lots of free time to sing and dance, while the pig who built his house out of stone had no free time at all, because it took him so much work.
  • Willing Suspension of Disbelief/Anthropic Principle. You have to assume that the wolf took a sufficient length of time to find the third pig that would enable said pig to be able to build his house, because a story that ended with "... and the wolf caught up to the third pig before his house was finished and ate him, the end" would be monumentally pointless. It's a necessary and very minor leap of faith to make for the story to function and it hardly stretches the boundaries of plausibility, so essentially you just have to accept it and move on.

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