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<\/a><\/p>\nThe following year we got two pigs, Penny and Pushy.\u00a0 It quickly became clear that two pigs were too many to run around loose in the barnyard.\u00a0 They outgrew the kidding barn where we kept Papa as a piglet within just a couple weeks and needed to go to the garden to turn over the grass and root out the wild blackberry while we set up some other fencing.\u00a0 I used to scoop Papa up under one arm and carry him from place to place as a piglet.\u00a0 Which I couldn’t do with two pigs.\u00a0 I also used the feed bucket to tempt Papa in the direction I wanted him to go so I figured I’d do that to move Penny and Pushy.\u00a0 Which was when I discovered that two pigs were more than twice the work of one.\u00a0 Just because one pig is following the feed bucket doesn’t mean the other one isn’t dashing around the woods, rooting under fallen logs and scarfing up acorns.\u00a0 In addition, it’s impossible to keep one pig corralled while simultaneously chasing down the other one.\u00a0 Moving two pigs out of the barn yard, down the driveway, and into the garden wasn’t a smooth operation.\u00a0 That’s all I care to remember about that.<\/p>\n
Eventually Penny and Pushy made it to a fenced-in area around the pond (with me leading the way with the feed bucket and all four kids blocking any egress), where they were expected to compact the soil and, hopefully, seal whatever area was causing the pond water to leak slowly out.\u00a0 The fence that went through the woods and around the pond required about thirty T-posts, two rolls of field fencing, and many hours of hard labor.\u00a0 You’d have to ask The Other Half (he was in charge of that job), but I bet he’d tell you that putting up that fence was more than twice the work of just tossing Papa in with all the other critters.\u00a0 That was fine because we had already seen evidence that Penny and Pushy were capable of more than twice the amount of pond-packing wallowing.<\/p>\n Penny and Pushy were fed occasional grain from the feed store, leftover goat milk, all the scraps from the house and garden, and outdated bread from the bakery which we kept in the freezer, greenhouse, and pantry.\u00a0 It was a cheap way to feed pigs but it felt like we were feeding an entire passel of pigs, not just two.\u00a0 In Farm City<\/a> by Novella Carpenter<\/a> she talks about dumpster diving to feed her two urban pigs and states: \u201cIf we had had time to think about it, we would have realized that we had become these pigs\u2019 bi*ches.\u201d\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0 That’s about right.<\/p>\n The upside of the whole adventure was that two pigs filled more than two freezers.\u00a0 So we took a year off from raising pigs and settled in to eating them.\u00a0 But having pork in the freezer didn’t resolve the problem of the leaking pond.\u00a0 Penny and Pushy had made a nice trail around the waterline, tamping down the soil as they went, but it wasn’t enough.\u00a0 All the local farmers insisted we were thinking way too small and six to ten pigs would seal the pond in a summer.\u00a0 Six to ten pigs.\u00a0 That seemed less like the amount of pigs needed to seal a pond and more like the amount of pigs needed to dispose of dead bodies.\u00a0 Luckily, the outbreak of porcine enterovirus last year limited the supply of piglets that were available this spring.\u00a0 As hard I searched, there were only a few reasonably-priced piglets in my area.\u00a0 I settled on the last remaining four piglets from a farmer about 10 miles away.\u00a0 The owner claimed the piglets were Duroc but they certainly look like a Hampshire mix.<\/p>\n I didn’t even bother with putting four pigs in the kidding barn.\u00a0 I knew better.\u00a0 They went directly into the old chicken pasture with its long, low pallet house for cover.\u00a0 I planned to keep them there for a few weeks until they were friendly enough to handle.\u00a0 A few weeks turned into only a few days because they made way more than four times the amount of mud as the other pigs.\u00a0 And they were living over the septic field.\u00a0 I think we’ve recently discussed the rules about the septic field.\u00a0 According to The Other Half, pigs are not allowed.\u00a0 Especially pigs that make this amount of mud.\u00a0 Good for the pond, not good for the septic field.<\/p>\n Before we moved the pigs a friend came over to help me castrate the males.\u00a0 He castrated one and I castrated the other one.\u00a0 Turns out that castrating<\/em> a male pig is not as hard as catching<\/em> a male pig in a muddy pasture.\u00a0 Even if the chase efforts aren’t slowed down by the boot-sucking mud, opposable thumbs are no match for a muddy pig leg.\u00a0 In addition, the same pig that will calmly eat a cookie out of your hand also strategically places his feet out of leg-grabbing distance while he’s munching away.\u00a0 Apparently this is because pigs have excellent lateral monocular vision<\/a>.<\/p>\n The good news is that after the strenuous exertion of catching a pig, you have enough adrenaline flowing to castrate the pig even though some small part of your mind is going, “Oh mah gawd!\u00a0 How did I get to this horrific point in my life??\u00a0 Abort!\u00a0 Abort!\u00a0 Abort!”\u00a0 For the record, we don’t have the facilities to separate males and female.\u00a0 The males at our farm have to be castrated or we risk pregnancy of the gilts and aggression between the males for breeding privileges.\u00a0\u00a0 Also for the record, slicing the scrotum was the worst part—-removing the testicle and the spermatic cord was rather straightforward.\u00a0 The Other Half was not even as nervous as he should have been<\/span> I expected although I’m not sure he slept very well that night.<\/p>\n At this point I wanted those pigs down at the pond where, hopefully, they could live unmolested until it was time to butcher them.\u00a0 While my dad was over fixing a waterer he suggested we go ahead and move them down to the pond.\u00a0\u00a0 After all, there was two of us, the pond fencing was still intact, and all we had to do was coax them out of the chicken pasture, down through the woods, and past the gate into the pond area.\u00a0 I naively agreed.\u00a0 Because math was never my strong point.\u00a0 An hour and a half later we gave up coaxing, chasing, and trying to corner the pigs into the area by the pond.\u00a0 Feed buckets, treats, and cattle panels as pig boards were no match for four pigs set loose in the barn yard with an acre or two of woods between them and the pond.\u00a0 Don’t assume we were terrorizing a bunch of frightened, frantic piglets.\u00a0 They were having a great time exploring new territory, checking out the chickens, sampling the automatic waterers, and gobbling up the trails of grain and cookies we distributed to lead them toward the pond.\u00a0 My dad and I were the ones that were traumatized.<\/p>\n That’s when it really dawned on me that owning four pigs was way more than double the work of two pigs.\u00a0 Owning four pigs felt like owning this many pigs:<\/p>\n \n So we switched modes.\u00a0 If four pigs made more than a podunk pig operation then it required more than podunk pig tactics.\u00a0 That’s right.\u00a0 We went commercial on ’em.\u00a0 We herded the pigs right back to the long house and chicken pasture where we started the whole operation and closed the door to the house.\u00a0 Then we used cattle panels to set up a catch pen and a pig chute right outside the door of the house.\u00a0 As soon as we walked away from all that alarming apparatus, the pigs came out of house to check things out.\u00a0 It doesn’t seem possible to me that curiosity killed the cat faster than it could kill a pig.\u00a0 Bam!\u00a0 We shut the house door to prevent a retreat and…..that’s where we went right back to podunk pig chasing.<\/p>\n My dad scooped up the first pig and started carrying him down to the pond—-mud and squealing and all.\u00a0 I offered to help.\u00a0 Because that pig looked heavy.\u00a0 And muddy.\u00a0 And squealy.\u00a0 But my dad said I should stand back because he was afraid the pig might bite me.\u00a0 So I stood back.\u00a0 Because who I am to argue with my elders?\u00a0 That’s rude, people, just rude.\u00a0 After seeing how heavy and muddy and squealy (and potentially bitey) the first pig was, I figured I should take a turn catching and carrying the next pig down to the pond.\u00a0 Thinking about carrying a heavy, muddy, squealy (and potentially bitey) pig down to the pond by myself made me remember how we transported the pigs when they first arrived:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n