Getting 2 piglets - essential advice??

[Cornish Heritage]

LOL! People do train their pigs. We were talking to a guy the other day that has a Large Black boar (we raise Large Blacks.) His boar is 6 mths old & he has it trained on a leash & to give him his paw!

HOWEVER that is highly unusual. Remember when you pick up these piglets they will be scared to death of you. You have to allow them to warm up to you gradually & if you are going to eat them for goodness sake give them meat names & constantly tell yourself that in a few months they will be sausage & bacon. What we do when we wean piglets here (we raise around 30 litters a year) is put them in a small area that they cannot get out of with one strand of polywire around the front to teach them what it is. We leave them in this enclosure (moving it everyday to fresh pasture) for 2-3 days. After that we graduate them to electric netting putting 2 in at once. If you put only one in, it will panic & run right through! (Been there, done that!) They stay behind electric netting until they are 4-6 mths of age, depending on size & then from there they graduate to 3 rows of polywire. This system works well for us.

Liz

 

[mstricer]

i didnt know my pigs read this forum! after i was talking about how theyve never even tried to get out i came home to fine them dug almost completely under the fence. this fence was burried 6+inches and had never been bothered. well when i dumped out some gone bad yellow wax beans for them the other day i dumped them near the fence and some got to the other side. i didnt think anything of it! well the piggys figured out that was where the food was, so mabey theres more that way and started digging. no one got out, but i had to use a pallet and some wire staples for a quick fix.

so lesson number (insert extremely large number here) about pigs is; expect the unexpected.

OMGOSH I had that dream last night, after I dropped a piece of dog food to close to the fence and both pigs were going crazy to get it. Won't do that again

 

[Stubbornhillfarm]

Great stories folks - thank for the smiles.

If you can train your piglets to electric fence they will be some of the best animals on the farm. Without it they will be a constant headache! We have some 9 week old (weaned at 8 weeks) piglets out there right now - the first couple days were a total pain but now they are trained to the fence they are quite happy in their little pasture & have started "talking" to me at feed time when they see the bucket.

Pigs love the grain from the breweries Enjoy your pigs,

Liz

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