Tessio, Clemenza, it was nothing personal, it was only business.

May

Well, our experiment with pigs has run its course and seems to have been mostly a success.  Yesterday (Saturday 9/22/12), we loaded the pigs in a trailer and took them to the slaughterhouse.  In looking back on things I would say it went as well as it could.  We got them on May 12 and took them to the slaughterhouse on September 22.  Therefore we had  them for 133 days.  At the start of that 133 days they weighed 33 and 38 pounds each.  By the end they weighed 275 and 245, respectively (the small one at first, outgained the big one).  Meaning the biggest one at the end gained 242 pounds in 133 days (1.8 pounds per day), the other one gained 207 pounds in 133 days (1.5 pounds per day).  I had been expecting them to gain an average of 1 pound per day, so their growth rate was phenomenal.  Which is why they are being slaughtered in September rather than November or December.

They also were relatively little trouble to look after.  I had to refine watering them over time.  At first I was putting water in a pan for them, which went okay for a while, but they tended to want to climb into the pan or turn it over to make a mud hole.  So when it got really hot I got worried about them.  I then put an automatic waterer out for them attached to a 55 gallon barrel.  This worked much better, and after a little refinement was eventually the system I suspect I will use for all future pigs or goats, at least so long as it isn't freezing outside.

I did feed them every night.  If I do pigs again I may get them an automatic feeder so that I don't have to do that.  That said, it kept me in contact with them daily, and that seemed like a good thing.  Except, a lot of days the contact was closer than I wanted with an animal renowned for rolling in it's own feces.  I got frustrated with them for a while because they would come up and rub against my legs and I would go in the house smelling of pigs.  But I eventually started keeping a pair of "scrubs" pants in the barn, and slipping them over my shorts before I fed the pigs.  Once I did that feeding them ceased to be a problem.

July

Their housing and fencing also seemed to work out pretty well.  They never left their fenced in area (in fact at the end it was hard to get them out of it, more on that later).  Their house held up and seemed to give them enough shelter when they wanted it.  The old tin I put on it did leak some, and it looks like in one spot in particular the straw has started to mold and rot.  They also seem to have taken a significant chunk of the straw by the door out of it at some point.  Nonetheless it held up pretty well, and served it's purpose for the length of time I expected.

The day to take them to the slaughterhouse, however, was difficult.  The day before my dad went to the slaughterhouse and picked up their trailer to carry the pigs in.  Turns out it was a big horse trailer, and was about as much as his truck could handle.  Then in the morning I got up and put together a makeshift ramp, so I could just lead the pigs into the trailer.  They always follow me when I have the feed bucket in their pen, so I figured they would follow me into the trailer.  Then once Daddy was here with the truck, he got the trailer into position, and the pigs then made it clear they would follow me right up to the point where their pen usually ends, and no further.  So I called a friend (Thanks for the ideas Sean, they didn't pan out this time, but were an important part of the process).  He suggested making a tunnel they could go through and they usually will go through it.  So I used some T-posts and some cardboard boxes to make a tunnel, and daddy backed the trailer up almost right to their gate (the bottom of the ramp was now inside their pen).  Still, they decided they would just as soon stay in their pen (did they know where we were going or what?).  One of them did actually follow me all the way up the ramp, but wouldn't take the step off of the ramp into the trailer, and finally turned around and ran back into the pen.

Clemenza drinking water in September

This was getting frustrating, and I was concerned I may not be able to get them to the slaughterhouse in time.  Finally, my dad suggested hiring a Mexican guy he had gotten some help with in moving.  So we called Frank and I drove into town.  First I went to Southern States to see if they had any equipment that might help move a pig. (there is a snare thing that uses a wire to grab them around the snout, which is supposedly a pressure point and will make it easy to move them).  I looked for such an object, and came up empty.  Just in case I asked the lady at the cash register, and she said they had no equipment that she thought would help move a pig.  Fortunately, though, there were a couple of old timers there, and they said when they were young they would just get two people, each would grab a hind leg, and they would drag the pig backwards into the trailer.  They assured me that the pigs would scream a lot, but they wouldn't bite.  Well, this was good news, and in just a few minutes I picked up Frank and his friend Gabriel, and we headed back to the house.

Tessio enjoying a mud bath in September

I explained this plan to them, in some combination of my broken Spanish, and their broken (but much better than my Spanish) English.  They seemed uncertain.  I got Frank in the trailer with a pallet, so that once we had one on board he could block its exit.  Then Gabriel and I went back to the pigs, which were very nicely hanging out right at the gate.  I was pretty sure we had communicated the plan and gave an "okay let's do this now" kind of gesture/verbalization, and grabbed a pig by the hind leg.  Gabriel was apparently not yet convinced of this plan, but after I held on for a while he started trying to grab the other leg and was successful.  I can only say that this was very difficult.  Ultimately, it was successful, but the pig screamed a lot, and it took a lot of effort to get him up the ramp.  I didn't realize how much effort until it was over and I felt how tired my muscles were and my lungs were BURNING!  So we took a break.  Gabriel wanted to try using a rope, I told him we had already tried (we had, the results just weren't worth even mentioning early in this blog post), but I let him try.  He started to go for around the neck, and I told him that really didn't work, so then he tried to get it around the two hind legs.  This seemed potentially promising, and he tried it.  Before long the pig thrashed out of it so it was a no go.  By this time I was ready to do it again, and tried to communicate this to Gabriel.  It was more or less a repeat of the first pig, where I got the leg, and eventually Gabriel grabbed the other one.  This one was a bit easier, and we dragged it on board the trailer.  Then we all got out and locked the door and the pigs were in.  HALLELUJAH!!!

I took Frank and Gabriel back into town, and then came back and Daddy and I rode to the slaughterhouse. I really expected to see the experts at work here, and thought I would learn something about how best to move pigs.  Sadly that was not the case.  What really happened was the pigs were brutalized with pipes (only a PVC pipe. . . at first) to get them to go into the chute and then into the holding facility.  Honestly I found this whole scene pretty disturbing and will probably not take my animals to a slaughterhouse again if I can help it (though I'm hoping that the Chattacreek facility in Bowdon becomes a reality and is different from this).  Still, when it was all done, the pigs were there, and they weighed way more than I was guessing (I had planned to slaughter them at 200, and sort of guessed - after dragging them up the ramp - that they might have been 250 or so).  But they turned out to be 245 and 275 (as already noted above).  So we can expect to be eating a lot of pig for a good long while, and I'm a-OK with that.

So, to bring this to an end.  Raising the pigs was pretty easy, and they grew faster than expected.  Moving them was a royal pain in the ass, and slaughterhouses are brutal (which I guess shouldn't have been a surprise).  All in all, the only thing that feels like it wasn't a total success in this experiment was the last day of having contact with the pigs as living breathing animals.  Likely, most pigs we might eat have similar last days, so I still feel good about these animals having had a good life almost right to the end.  And next time, I'll try to be ready to take it all the way to the end and just kill them here on the farm.