The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life, sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that binds us all together.

- Erma Bombeck

Monday, July 23, 2012

Loading the Pigs, Part One


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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