What To Do With Day Old Piglets

The first item on our agenda after the babies were born today was to trim up the umbilical cords and check the babies over for any obvious problems.  Once that was done, I spent a lot of time just helping the babies to find a teat and get some milk in them.  This was tricky for us as Ruby only has twelve working teats and sixteen working babies.  It means that there will always be a couple of piglets without something to eat.  Today that isn't much of a problem because the babies are so tired from the birth that half of them are asleep at a time.  They might be walking and then they are asleep.  It's like a war zone with little sleeping piglets strewn all over the place.  The piglet in the picture was walking over her brother when a snooze caught her.

After giving the babies some time to eat and sleep, we made sure that Ruby had food and water.  She was pretty warm in the sun so I gently wet her down with water from a bucket.  It wasn't enough and she had to go lie down in a mud puddle - not the best idea with a bunch of babies following you, but she did it and everyone survived.

It is SO much easier to handle the babies on the first day.  The momma is tired so she doesn't react very much to a squealing baby.  The babies are tired so they often fall asleep in your hands when you pick them up.  These two things mean that it's best to address needle teeth and iron supplements on day one.

Last year I described how to clip needle teeth.  But it's pretty easy.  There are eight teeth altogether and the only reason you clip them is to avoid piglets injuring each other or their momma.  We used nail clippers and just cut the tips off each tooth to make them flat.  The teeth have an odd brownish tint to them that makes me think they may be dying the minute the baby is born.  They do bleed, however, so they must still be partially alive.

When the needle teeth are clipped, J and I give the babies 2ml of iron supplement orally.  I bought the injectable kind this year, but was afraid that there wasn't enough "M" (muscle) to give the shot "IM" (intramuscular).  These babies are a bit on the small size...probably due to how many Ruby was carrying and the fact that we didn't have her on a free-choice diet because she was sharing her pen with other pigs.

The babies don't like the taste of the iron...at least they don't look like they like it.  You have to be careful not to push it in too quickly and allow the baby to aspirate the liquid.  I found that if I divided the dose into four small pushes, we could get most of it to stay in the baby and not end up on our hands.

An added benefit to doing the oral iron supplement at the same time as needle teeth is that you have a visual marker of who still needs to be done.  The babies do not like to stay in one place for very long and no matter how effecient we were, we never really knew if we had a new piglet in our hands until we saw the orange foam around their mouth.