Five More Gone

We sold five more piglets today.  That leaves us with three - Frieghtliner, Oreo, and Mouse.  It's pretty funny to look at these two towering giants next to the scrawny little runt.  We expected to end up with Mouse.  Even though I priced her at $50 instead of $75, she just doesn't look that appealing.  Especially next to her siblings.

I went to the house to meet the buyer this morning.  I had a plan...and generally speaking, it worked the way I planned it.  I knew that I could catch one piglet in Ruby's pen, but after that it would be game on and I really didn't feel like playing a game of chase with a 500 pound angry mother.  So I poured a bunch of feed into the adjacent pen where Jaws and Hammy are.

The piglets run under the fence between the two pens all the time.  We joke about how Ruby uses Jaws and Hammy as babysitters, but it's actually quite miraculous.  Not all adult pigs will tolerate piglets that aren't theirs, especially when they are eating out of the adult pig's bowl.  But Jaws and Hammy couldn't care less.

Once the piglets were all in the second pen eating, I went in and grabbed each one by the hind leg (one piglet at a time) and handed them over the fence to the buyer.  He then put them into a large dog crate that we were letting him use to transport them home.  The first two went off without a hitch.  But when he opened the door to put the third piglet in, the other two bulldozed their way out.  These piglets may only be two months old, but they are seriously strong creatures.  It took all of my strength to hold the bigger ones by the hind legs and there is no way I could have held them around their middles.

So, once again, I caught the piglets and handed them over the fence.  Ruby was upset, but it seemed to me that she was more upset about not having food than about what we were doing to the babies.  When we had three in the first crate, we locked it.  We put the other two in the second crate.  There were a couple of narrow misses, but we managed to keep everyone in the cages once they were in.

We carried the crates to the back of the truck, he strapped them down, and away they went.  Goodbye Angelina, Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dumb, Two, and 3-D.