Animal Lovers Web Blog

So pigs are clean animals are they?  No-one bothered to share this fact with our two Kune Kunes, Betty and Lottie! Delightful they certainly are but, after 2 months of living in our dog run and thrice weekly mucking out, the time had definitely come for a change of accommodation.  The poor girls had finally worked out that it would be far more pleasant to get off their lazy backsides and do their number twos outside in the run but still didn’t seem to see the point of urinating there too!!

We spent a very hot day last Saturday “pig proofing” our sheep field with spare planks of wood nailed at obscure angles with pig wiring tacked on top.  Our five sheep looked on bemused by the whole affair - little did they know what was to come.

Once we felt assured that the pigs weren’t going to be able to make a run for it through some narrow gap in the fence, the question of how to actually get the pigs from the dog run into the field became a matter for debate.  At four months old, Betty and Lottie are still just about light enough to pick up but our recent attempts when we had to vaccinate them didn’t fill us with much confidence with this plan.  Trying to catch a pig, pick it up and transport it safely from A to B seemed a little risky and was bound to be EXTREEMLY noisy!

Plan B was to lure the little darlings with food…hmm, this could be even more risky.  We would be reliant on Betty and Lottie following a food bucket for about 30 yards without being distracted by a) the chickens/rabbits/dogs, b) the lush green garden, c) our strawberry patch…Plan B didn’t seem such a good idea after all.

And so onto Plan C.  Our large dog crate was carefully placed at the entrance to the dog run with a bowl of their pig pellets inside.  As sure as night follows day the pigs couldn’t resist trotting inside to feed their piggy faces, unsuspecting that they were the victims of a cunning plan!!  With the crate doors firmly bolted we were finally able to carry our girls into their new home.

Well, Betty and Lottie thought they’d died and gone to heaven!  With grass as far as their cute little eyes could see, they couldn’t eat fast enough.  Our sheep however were less than impressed and charged over for a closer inspection of these little black creatures that appeared to be taking complete liberties over the whole food situation. If you thought pigs could eat fast, they can also eat AND run at some speed too!  What ensued was a game of cat and mouse, sheep panting and out of puff, a few head butts thrown in for good measure and squealing pigs tearing around the field (obviously with grass in their mouths!). You can see the fun for yourself on our video “Kune Kune Pigs Meet the Sheep”.

Anyway, after the initial rush of blood to the head, everyone (including ourselves) calmed down.  Betty and Lottie are loving all the extra room to play and, more importantly, the continuous sea of food that they now inhabit.  The sheep seem to think that they are really above it all and quite indifferent to the whole situation and so harmony is restored, for now. 

Diane
Animal Lovers Web.com

Spring is in the air here on the farm, with the crocuses and daffodils blooming, newly laid frog spawn covering the wildlife pond and our sheep enjoying the fresh green grass once again.  

Easter time last year was celebrated with the arrival of our lambs - it doesn’t seem five minutes ago that they were clambering over each other to be the first to get their bottle of milk each morning!  What a difference a year makes. 

And, as for this year…well no new lambs - yet.  However, the latest additions to our farm, two 10 week old Kune Kune piglets (Betty and Lottie), seem to have settled in really well.  It’s been almost three weeks since their long journey south from the SSPCA in Scotland.  Currently living in our dog run, which seems to have housed most of our animals over the years (rarely our dogs!), our pigs have had access to grass for the first time and are living up to their reputations as ploughing machines on four legs.  We were under the impression that Kune Kune pigs were grass eaters rather than rooters.  I don’t think anyone bothered to tell them this fact!

Betty and Lottie are slowly getting used to us and will happily enjoy a good scratch on the back whilst troughing into their dinner. However,  they have been a little more wary this week after we had to pin them down, quite literally, to get their worming injections.  They’ve only themselves to blame.  After turning their noses up at their dinner laced with worming medicine, we really had no choice but to resort to the needle.  I think a pig refusing to eat their medicine was a first for our vet - whoever heard of a pig refusing to eat anything!!

Well, we’ve injected sheep before but a pig is a whole new ball game.  Despite weighing a mere 13kgs, our attempts to restrain the little swines turned into a wrestling match which we just about won.  I think that the demonic screeching emanating from their ever-so-sweet mouths, just ratcheted up the stress levels for everyone and our neighbours must have wondered who was being murdered!!

Rather like the tantruming child that gets the candy, as soon as Betty and Lottie were released from our clutches, normality suddenly returned - for them at least.  My heart was still palpating an hour later!  AND we’ve got to repeat the whole process again in the next few weeks with further vaccinations.  Can’t wait!!

With mixed feelings, we have had to say a fond farewell to our cockerel, Primrose.  Despite our best intentions, he was struggling to fit in with our other chickens and our older cockerel, Tiger was making his life a misery. 

Determined that he would continue to live a happy, free-ranging lifestyle and avoid the dinner table, we weren’t too optimistic that advertising locally would find Primrose a new home to fit the bill.  So it was with great relief that we received a call from a like-minded animal loving family, who were just looking for a cockerel to keep their hens in check. 

Primrose is now happily strutting around in an acre of woodland with eight hens for company as you can see in the picture above. He is also soon to have a new and more appropriate name, more  in keeping with his new manly role in life! But he will always remain Primrose to us.  For us, peace is restored back in to the hen house at last and we can enjoy the more tranquil spring birdsong once again.

Diane

Animal Lovers Web.com

After a long wait we have finally managed to collect our two rescue piglets from the Scottish SPCA rescue shelter in Balerno, Scotland after coming across them in a Google alert. The poor young piglets, part of a litter of seven, had been waiting for several weeks for us to be able to collect them, as the RSPCA had delayed doing an assessment of our facilities to approve us to have the pigs.

It was a long drive to collect them as the shelter is almost two hundred miles off so we went up the night before and stayed at a friend’s. The next morning, armed with a large wire meshed dog crate and a bag of straw for bedding, we set off with excitement but also a little trepidation, as we didn’t know exactly what size piglets to expect or how they would cope with a 200 hundred mile car journey!

The wait for the piglets turned out even longer than expected as we had some difficulty finding the rescue centre and we went round in circles, albeit in some lovely Scottish countryside, before asking a local farmer who pointed us in the right direction. At long last we got there and one of the staff welcomed us and said “would you like to see the piglets the then?” -  would we? Too right we would!  Although, before actually meeting our piglets we were taken to meet the parents. The parents had been part of a circus petting zoo before their rescue and the piglet’s mother is a pretty pink-with-black-spots Kune Kune sow named Fiona. Their father is a black pot bellied boar called Shrek, a real handsome chap. The litter of piglets were all either all black like their father or pink with back spots like the mother.

Then the wait was finally over and we went to see our piglets. They were in a brick outhouse with a walled off concreted yard and the first we saw of them was their little black snouts poking up out from some straw. They look gorgeous but a little apprehensive as they had just had their ears tagged that morning, which were probably still a little tender and I’m sure they were thinking “Oh no, what are they going to do to us now?”  Our first impression was that they were much smaller than we had expected but they looked really cute and gorgeous.  Now we were sure that the dog crate that we had bought specially was more than big enough for them. In fact, they were going to look a little lost in it. After meeting them and taking some pics and videos we had to go off to the office and complete all of the paperwork. This involved giving our DEFRA holding numbers and there is a pig transportation form that has to be completed when pigs are moved, we had brought this with us. With the boring bit out of the way it was off to load up our piglets.

This was when the squealing began, as soon as one of the staff tried to catch the piglets they both squealed like banshees. The first piglet stopped squealing as soon as she was caught but the other piglet squealed at the top of her voice all the way to the car. As soon as they got in the car they settled instantly and just tried to bury themselves under a pile of straw. So off we set on the long journey home. Before very  long before it became clear that one of the piglets had had a bowel evacuation…what a smell!! This is not a smell that you want to experience at too close range, like cooped up in a car! With the windows all lowered and sun roof open we proceeded and then one of the piglets must have become car sick as it started to go the way a dog does just before it vomits and sure enough, proceeded to empty its stomach contents as well as its bowel. You can imagine how the car smelled by now! We had to make a stop and throw in a lot more straw which neutralised the smell to some extent and then called for an emergency care air freshener.

The rest of the journey proceeded without incident, apart when we stopped for a break and a snack which we ate in the car, to keep an eye on the pigs, and with the smell we nearly joined the pigs in throwing up!

Anyway, finally we arrived home with the two gorgeous piglets intact and we introduced them to their new home. While they are so small we are keeping them in our dog run which is ideal having an indoor sheltered area and an outdoor grass run. They seem to like it although are more than a little timid at the moment, it seems they are pigs by name and guinea pigs by nature! But we’re sure our piglets will soon become tame.

You can see a little video of us collecting the piglets below.

John

AnimalLoversWeb.com

We braved freezing temperatures, muddy puddles and our first flurry of snow to visit a local farm that specialises in rare breed pork, poultry and lamb. Pepperfield Farm in North Yorkshire is owned by two teachers, Terry and Joanne Laheney who, for the past four years have been dedicating their free time out of the classroom to the care of Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs, Tamworth pigs, Wiltshire Horn sheep and Buff and Blue Orpington chickens.

The main purpose of our visit was to gain more information about pig breeds following our pig keeping course back in October, particularly in relation to the Gloucestershire Old Spot. We are keen to get a couple of weaners, but were still deliberating as to which breed would be the best for us. Our discussions with Terry and Joanne encouraged us to take a closer look at the Old Spots because of their reputation as a very friendly breed of pig.

We were fortunate to be able to get up close to the pigs, armed with a bucket of carrots and were treated to a mini-stampede of Old Spots and an occasional Tamworth, who were only too happy to relieve us of our load! The Old Spots certainly looked more like a traditional pig, with big floppy ears that conveniently acted as umberellas over their eyes to keep out the driving snowy rain. The weather reinforced the stereotypical view of being as “happy as a pig in muck”, as they squelched and rooted through the rain-soaked ground. The younger pigs were very inquisitive, jostling for their carrots and taking an occasional nip from the older pigs! They were absolutely gorgeous.

We are hoping to get a couple of piglets in the springtime and today’s visit certainly provided food for thought! We really took a shine to the Old Spots and think that they would be a lovely addition to our animals. In the meantime, we will be looking forward to sampling some of their produce and tucking into some sausage and mash for dinner tonight - thanks pigs!

Diane
www.AnimalLoversWeb.com

So are we, which is why we spent today on a pig husbandry course in Northumberland. It is a fairly new course ran by a pig farmer and breeder Sarah Dodds, who specialises in Tamworth pigs. These are a gingery/golden red colour pig with a lively character and are thought to be the oldest pure English breed of pig. There are said to be only around 200 in existence in the whole of the UK.

I went on the course together with Diane and Laura, my 10 year old daughter, as we wanted to learn more about pig keeping to see if it might be for us and also to have some fun. The course kicked off with some of the rule and regulations about keeping pigs required by DEFRA and Trading Standards here in the UK, before a look at some of the equipment required in keeping pigs.

It wasn’t long though, before we got to the really interesting part – off to meet the pigs. The pigs were fantastic. They were much larger than I had imagined, although, I have been up close with pigs before I had forgotten just how large they really are. One of the many interesting facts we learned to day was that a fully grown pig will weigh up to about 25 stones! They were indeed very lively and noisy, making incredible squealing noises and they were intriguing to watch (see an example in the video below). We were then told all about the fencing, housing and feeding requirements of the pigs.

Then it was off to see the piglets and weaners and to learn about the farrowing (delivery of the pig by the pregnant mother) and to view the facilities required for the process. The young piglets were wonderful, lively and cute and must rival lambs as one of the loveliest young animal. We also had a demonstration of tattooing the weaners (marking their ears for pedigree purposes) and an offer to have a go, which we all declined, we were happy to watch the experts. Following this we fed the pigs and learned about the feed requirements at various ages.

Finally we had a demonstration of the products of a butchered pig, together with some interesting revelations about the financial difficulties in commercial pig production and why it can be fairly difficult to make an adequate living from it.

In addition to all of the interesting information and advice that we obtained on this course we were well catered for from a culinary perspective too, with a lovely lunch and afternoon tea and cakes included.

We certainly learned a lot about pig keeping and are going to go off now and do some further research before probably getting a couple of pigs of our own, possibly in the spring time. We will keep you posted on any developments, both here and on our animal website.

John
www.AnimalLoversWeb.com