Pigs is Pigs

    “I am fond of pigs.  Dogs look up to us.  Cats look down on us.  Pigs treat us as equals.”
                                                                                    -----Winston Churchill


    We began raising one or more weaner pigs over the summer in the early '80’s.  The experience turned out to be something entirely different from our relationship with the cows.

    For a number of years after we first settled here we raised a few pigs and we always found the association good.  
    Since we kept only a few pigs each summer, three at the most, we were always fascinated at the development of their personalities.  It may be possible, in a hog barn, to regard all the inmates without regard for differences, but on a small farm pigs have a chance - like everybody else - to be themselves.  There may be ill-tempered pigs, but we never had one.  Demanding yes, but not ill-tempered.  After all, pigs do love to eat.  Nothing makes the staff of a small farm run to phone the vet quicker than a pig who seems to have lost interest in food.
    Our pigs lived outdoors, and we used them to root up ground which we would later incorporate into the garden.  They were thus doing good work for us and having a good time doing it.   But we always brought them food in the morning and evening.  Pig chop was basically ground up grain we bought at the Co-op.  The slop bucket served to moisten the chop.  Slops might consist of a mix of almost anything, usually excess milk up from the day’s milking, some water, with kitchen scraps and any other available goodies mixed in.
    We learned early that a single pig can be selective in his diet.  Add another pig and the two will compete to see who gets the biggest meal fastest.  As we had no building for keeping pigs in the long winter months, our pigs lived an outdoor life while they were with us.  The experience suited them.  The term “rooting around” has its origins in the activities of pigs.  Pigs’ snouts were made for digging and if you want to clear a patch of weeds so you can expand your garden, and you don’t have machinery, a pig is the very one for the job.  They will get the weed, but they will get the root too.
    Some of the old farming books we read called the pig "the mortgage lifter."  And no doubt it was.  In the days of mixed farming, when every small farm had a few chickens and a cow or two and a variety of crops, the pig and the chicken could be relied upon to consume whatever was left over in the way of kitchen scraps, sour milk, garden thinnings, and almost anything else that would be otherwise wasted.  On such a diet and with access to pasture, a bit of shade and a wallow for hot days, a pig could wax and grow fat.
    The chicken is a good composter but the pig brings enthusiasm to the job.  Indeed all our pigs, bought in the late spring after they were weaned and in the freezer by winter, brought both enthusiasm and a kind of infectious exuberance to our midst.  
    The name "pig" is the very definition of excess, and yet, in our experience, the excess was always good-humoured; we never knew quite what would happen (or they would think of) next.  From the time they came as weaners to the time they went at about 200 pounds some months later their exuberance begot an affection - and a relationship - quite different from that accorded the cows.


Summer is a state of mind.

    Right now, to be accurate rather than romantic, we are in the intermediate period between the “Is-it-going-to-be-summer -or-isn't-it?" and "The-days-are-drawing-in" seasons.  The sun hasn't got so far over the yard arm that the evenings are noticeably shorter, and the immediate drop in temperature that accompanies the sunset still leaves a comfortable margin above the dark and frosty regions we will worry about in a couple of months.
    The pigs are growing apace.  They no longer look like little creatures that are easily discouraged, who miss (how could they possibly?) their mother.  Far from it.  Higgledy, the little gilt, was so much smaller than Piggledy, her litter mate, when they arrived, we worried that she might have a hard time getting near the food trough.  
    We needn't have worried.  
    She quickly learned to stand in the trough so as to protect the maximum amount of food.  She now tells Piggledy where he can eat and what he can eat.  She may be watching his weight but she certainly isn't watching hers.
    Other endearing and not-so-endearing porcine traits appear now.  Not having kept pigs last summer, I had almost forgotten the quick feint with the feed bucket required to get the slops in the trough.  The pigs know a food bucket when they see one now, and anxiety levels are high until some food is actually in front of them.  It does no good to put the dry pig chop in first.  If it is pelletized they stand on it so as to be closer to the bucket of slops and if it is ground into meal they sniff at it and blow it all over the place.  
    In our experience, "all over the place" means "all over the bucket-wielder" because the wind at such moments is always on shore.
    One of the girls used to take a stout broom handle with her when she took the slops to the pigs.  She said she was teaching them to stand back from the trough until the food was ready.  I thought this a novel, if somewhat utopian, plan, and wished her god-speed.  It worked all right for their young and impressionable days as I recall but there is a clear point beyond which your pig is no longer either young or impressionable.  By then even a stout two-by-four would probably not make much impression, and etiquette is not part of their agenda.
    But here we are, "poised," as Alexander Pope said in another context, "on this isthmus of a middle state," in the season that comes between a late spring and an early frost.  We declare it to be summer and we revel in it and, like the pigs, we look neither forward or back.  
19 July 1988