The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Pigs => Topic started by: Clive on October 21, 2013, 01:39:44 pm
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So yesterday afternoon, in the wettest conditions we have had so far, we discovered that the pigs from adjoining pens had gone over the electric fence and started fighting, all from the same litter but they had been separated for some time.
We spent an hour, wallowing in mud trying to work out who belonged where! The first lesson we learned - make sure you have made a record of who is in which pen! In fact we are going to tag them differently in future as we split them into batches. Reading notched ears is not easy in the semi dark when both you and the pigs are muddy!
Well there was one main victim, who is now sporting badly torn ears (now sprayed purple) but other than that, no real harm.
All part of pig keeping I suppose
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Ah Clive one of the joys, we have a pig pen map pinned on the feed house wall, marked with names of pigs or " Clo's piglets x 3" or whatever, and a sheet of feed instructions so that if ever i'm called away sudden or something happened to me and somebody had to come and feed they could do it from these two sheets of info.
HTH
mandy :pig:
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Its bad enough having to pig wrangle at anytime but in the mud that we must all have now :innocent: :innocent: :innocent:
I'm putting off tattooing the piglets for as long as I can but I need to do it sooner rather than later.
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The plan is a great idea Mandy. As soon as we get a shed up on the smallholding we intend to do just that.
Postscrpt to my first post. Last night the pigs did it all over again! I'm sorry to say that I am working away this week so it was the rest of the family that had to chase the pigs down! I definitely need to get some additional stock fencing sorted out, although this is the first time we have had mass breakouts from the electric fencing!