This morning we planned to load the pigs to move them over
to the new house. I have a small pen
ready to go with two lines of hot wire, one about 1 foot off the ground and
another about two feet off the ground. I
figure if the pigs get out, we’ll change the way we have the pen set up. I’m skeptical, but for now, I’m going with
the idea that I read about in the Storey Guide that says you can contain pigs
with a single strand of hot wire.
Knowing that Jaws does not like to load, I didn’t have high
hopes for the morning attempt. We needed
to be in town by nine so we were just going to try for about half an hour and
then have to come back later to try again.
J backed the trailer up to the gate and we created a ramp
using a couple of posts for support, then a pallet as the ramp, and lastly a
plywood board for walking on. It wasn’t
completely stable and I knew that Jaws wasn’t going to trust it the minute he
stepped on it and it wobbled. We used
the trailer door as a wall for one side of the chute and then propped a piece
of metal sheeting up on the other side of the ramp. There’s no way that you can keep a pig from
pushing through a wall if they want to so this was really meant to act as a
visual barrier, not a physical one.
We prepared the pigs for transport by withholding food for
the past day. We made sure that they had
water, but wanted them to be good and hungry.
When we had everything set up, we opened the gate to the pen and shook a
bucket of grain in front of the ramp.
Everyone was immediately interested.
As they walked closer, we walked up the ramp and into the trailer. Once in the trailer, we filled the feeding
tubs with grain and snuck out the side.
Ruby and the piglets walked up into the trailer without hesitation and
began to happily eat. Jaws stepped up
onto the ramp and immediately turned around and walked away. This isn’t his first rodeo…he paused, looked
over his shoulder at the trio eating their grain in the trailer, walked over to
his nest, and flopped down.
Round one was over.
We shut the trailer and the gate.
Ruby and the babies would head to the other house without Jaws. We’d have to come back for him later.
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