The Babies Have Landed

I had pretty much given up checking on Ruby every hour this week as she just didn't seem to be getting any closer to delivering and I knew that I wasn't going to make it happen any faster by staying up every night.  So last night, I succumbed to a cold, took some Nyquil and went to sleep.  I didn't even check on her before I crawled into bed.

This morning, I looked out the bedroom window and could see our dog sniffing the air next to the pig pen.  I immediately threw on my clothes, slipped into my shoes and ran out to the shelter.  Sure enough, I didn't even have to enter the pen to see a mass of squirming black and white bodies next to one tired momma.  I turned around, ran back to the house and yelled for the boys to come out with the camera.  I then went in to see how everyone was doing.

I braced myself in case I found any dead babies - something you never want to find, but always must expect.  Happily, the babies were all up and doing fine.  There were twelve in all, three boys and nine girls!  As I checked them each over, Ruby gave a few final pushes and delivered the last of the placenta.  I had missed all of the births, but only by minutes.  Oh well, my animals seem to like their privacy when giving birth (I don't blame them) and as a farmer friend of mine once noted, I'm luckier to have animals that can give birth without aid or intervention than to have ones that end up in complications.  It's some consolation, but I REALLY wanted to see the birth.

The babies ranged in size from under a pound to about two pounds.  They looked like little chihuahua puppies.  Some of the smaller ones fit almost entirely in my hand.  Imagine, in just six months these babies will weigh close to three hundred pounds.  Guess I'd better get my snuggling in while I can.

After I got the kids off to school, I went out to do some basic clean up.  I used a pitchfork to remove the placentas out of the pen.  As horrible as it sounds, the chickens thought that I had sent them mana from heaven when I shovelled it out of the fence and they were able to access it.  Gross chickens.  I then took a pair of scissors and clipped any of the umbilical cords that were longer than about two inches.  A couple of the babies had cords over ten inches long still attached and were catching their tethers under other babies and getting very upset.  Momma was tolerant of my presence, although she didn't like it much if I held a baby long enough to make it squeal.  She would bark and growl at me, letting me know that she was the one in charge, not me.  I respected that and it was all good.

Later in the day, I checked on the babies again.  One of the girls must've been stepped on as she had about a two inch laceration on her hind leg.  It was on the inside of the knee and was pretty deep.  I sprayed it with Blu-Kote but figured we'd need to do more later.  All the other babies were doing fine.  There were three babies that were obviously smaller than the rest.  These three runts looked like they might need a little extra, so I plan to try to supplement their meals with a bottle of rice cereal and milk.  I did help them all to latch when momma rolled over, but it's pretty hard to manage twelve hungry snouts all searching for food at the same time.  And BOY do they have sharp teeth.  We will be clipping their needle teeth soon so avoid problems with nursing.  If we don't, they babies may bite momma so much that she gives up feeding them altogether.  I don't blame her.

This evening, J and I went out to give the babies their booster of iron supplement.  Pigs are born with an iron deficiency and while pig milk is supposed to be almost the perfect food, it is low in iron.  I wanted to find the injectable kind, but settled for the oral iron.  2 ml per baby and nobody liked it.  By the end, all the babies had rust-colored slobber and J and I were covered in the stuff.  It suggests repeating this at 7 days, but I think we'll skip it on most of the babies.  Maybe just the tiny ones.