Piggy-wiggies

While I was away visiting my brother in the warm southern US, Louise picked up 3 of our 6 pigs for this year's batch. We got some lovely Tamworth pigs, a very rare breed. Ours are all castrated boys which means we don't feel too guilty about raising them for meat. They are a beautiful ginger colour and Louise named them fREDerick, ethelRED and jaRED. Seems, though, that young pigs are skittish things and we like our pigs to be friendly and easy to handl; therefor, we spend a lot of time taming them. Last year, quite by accident, we discovered that pigs love marshmallows, so we sit in their pen with a bag of mini-marshmallows coaxing the little fellows closer and closer. Soon they begin to associate us, and the plastic bag, with these sweet treats and they look forward to our visits.

We keep them in a large box stall in the barn when we first get them and give them access to the outdoors to a large area fenced in by electric fencing. When the weather gets warmer and the pigs a bit bigger, it is time to move them outside to their summer quarters. Yesterday, we decided we should move them to make room for 3 more that Louise hopes to pick up this week. (Piglets of heritage breeds are not so easy to find, but that is another story. )

Anyway, we prepared their new living quarters, in the vegetable patch, where their job will be to dig up all the weeds in the garden so we can move the pigs out and plant directly. My idea was to string up temporary fencing all along the way to the garden and just herd the boys along. Great idea, if only pigs would herd. They were quite scared and really didn't want to leave the comfort and safety of the barn. After several abortive attempts at pushing them along and having them scoot back to the barn honking and squealing, we decided on Plan B- that is cramming them into dog crates and carrying them to the new home. I have been reading up on pig handling so figured that all we had to do was to make a narrowing path toward a dog crate and get behind them and chase them in.

Well, pigs don't really like the idea of cramming their fat little bodies into dog crates, believe it or not. They also have a remarkable ability to jump and can leap over hay bales with a single bound. We finally managed, purely by luck, to get ethelRED into a crate. Sadly, he is the largest pig and he went into the smallest crate. Not a happy fellow! But there was no way we were going to let him out to try again, so he just had to sit there, complaining while we chased his brothers around.

We noticed last year that the smallest pig is invariably the wiliest and indeed, jaRED is true to form. Shooting through any available space and jumping over bales and barriers. And pigs are much faster that one thinks they could be with those short little legs. A few times we sort of had a hold on one or the other but their sausage shaped bodies make it hard to hold on. Eventually I suggested we try to get them into sacks rather than the crates, so we tried that. All the while, the poor little guys are getting more and more panicky and stressed- which- surprisingly, worked in our favour because after an hour or so they finally became exhausted and generally fed up with us chasing them, and went one after the other into dog crates.

You would think that all this chasing and squealing that all our hard work with marshmallows would be undone, but it turns out that pigs don't hold a grudge. Minutes after being released in their new quarters, they were happily rooting around and even coming up to us to see if we had anything for them. Some people could learn a lot from pigs.