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Thursday, July 23, 2009

my boars

Some of our customers have been requesting pink piglets; they give a variety of reasons for asking, but it appears to be cultural. When you scrape a colored pig it turns pink anyways, so as far as the final product, they're all the same color, but I've got no problems with having more pink pigs. So this is the new pink boar. I haven't named him yet. he's pretty relaxed and I work on handling him every day. Any animal that's going to be 600+lbs needs to be hand tame before it gets big.

My berkshire boar isn't doing well. Here's a picture of his side -- notice the folds in the skin? that's because he's dropped about 150lbs in the last two months. That's unusual -- a big boar like this gets his choice of food and usually continues to get bigger throughout their life. Not to say he's small -- he's still around 700lbs.

you can see the folds better with my hand in the frame. When I was talking about hand-tame, this is what I'm talking about. I need to be able to move in and among the animals so that I can assess their condition, treat them if necessary, and eventually to kill them. It's all part of the cycle.
He seems to be doing better now. Last week he was laying around more than usual.

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