Eleven

Well, our little injured piglet didn't make it.  We did our best to help her recover from a laceration on her leg, but she was so young and had to be such a fighter to begin with just to get her fair share, that with the injury she was unable to keep up.

Last night, we wrapped her leg but when I came out this morning, I couldn't find her.  I knelt in the straw to count again, and heard a squeal.  I quickly dug through the straw and found the little girl, buried six inches down.  She was still alive, but not doing well.  M decided that she should be named Charlotte because in Charlotte's Web, she dies and he knew that this piglet might die.  I brough her into the house and wrapped her in a heating pad.  This seemed to help a bit.  She had been very cold.  Piglets are unable to regulated their body temperatures when they are little and she was nowhere close to the 85-90 degrees that she should have been.

Once warm, I tried to give her a little milk with a bottle, but she didn't take it.  She began to gasp and twitch.  We could see that she was passing.  Rather than allow her to suffer, we dispatched her tiny body with a single gunshot.  We are now holding steady at eleven piglets...and all are doing well.

I have begun to bottle feed the three runts.  I go out every few hours and give each of them as much milk as I can get into them...usually only a couple of teaspoons.  They aren't as interested in being bottle fed as the baby goats were.  You have to almost pry their mouths open and they never really latch and start suckling on their own.  But I'm getting a little something in them and I hope it gives them the boost they need.

We set up two heat lamps in the shelter last night.  They are both fairly low to the ground and I am finding that it works best to turn the heat lamps off in the daytime so that Ruby will go in the shelter and lie down.  Otherwise, I think it must be too hot for her, as she tends to lie outside in the dirt.

One mistake (of many, I'm sure) is allowing Ruby to still have a mud puddle in the pen.  She has wallowed her way into the muddy water and then settles down to let the babies feed.  But the babies aren't much taller than the mud.  And her teats are covered in a thick brown laquer that doesn't seem to be too appealing to the kids.  We will be letting her mud puddle dry up for the time being.  At least until the babies are big enough to wade into it safely.