Kali and Sienna are home.
They have been for about a week now, and it is very nice to have them back.
When I mentioned to a friend that they were gone for awhile, she asked if they were on holidays. My reply was that they were, kinda.
Kali and Sienna are going to be brood pigs, but first they needed to go and have a visit with Boris, the boar.
Now moving animals from one farm to another always takes a bit of extra work. And pigs are no different. I am sure it is from trying to convince a pig to go in a certain direction that the term “pigheaded” came into the English language. You might as well push a chain uphill.
When we were trying to load “the girls” (as I call Kali and Sienna), we started by putting food and water into the trailer as an enticement for them. Then we let them into the pen that the trailer was backed up against.
After that, things got difficult.
Neither one of them was very interested in going in the direction of the trailer. Especially if that was where we wanted them to go.
In fact, it being a hot day, they decided that they would just like to dig a new hole in the ground and lay on the cool soil. Of course, this just happened to be where the chute for the trailer was, so now, not only were we trying to get them into the chute, we were also trying not to break an ankle in the newly excavated hole.
With a pig there is no convincing them that they should go where they have decided not to go. And they are almost solid muscle, so they not only refuse to load, they push back.
With only Al and I trying to load them, we had our hands full. We weren’t much of a match for them.
Thankfully it was also the same day that my parents were expected to arrive. My father used to raise pigs when I was growing up. So when nothing seemed to work for us, we decided to wait for Dad, who might have some insight on how we could load the pigs.
Turns out he did. We narrowed the chute, so that they couldn’t turn around and muscled them up. So with his brains, and our energy, we managed to get them on board and on their way to Boris.
On the day “the girls” were to return, we knew that it would again take some doing. But this time we didn’t have Dad around to help. Thankfully, Tom, Boris’ farmer, had handled pigs before and had a plan: it was just brute force. There were also five or six people to help with the loading. And even though there was still a fair amount of pushing and shoving, the pigs were loaded in a much smoother manner than the first time.
When we got home that evening, both Kali and Sienna seemed happy to be home. And when I went out that night to see how they were doing, Kali made it clear that she was glad to be there by coming over to have her back scratched more than once.
Now we just have to wait and see if Boris had the desired effect on “the girls”, otherwise, we will have to take them for another visit and I am not looking forward to that.
