pig in a truck

 

one of the berkshire/tamworth piglet runts didn’t make it through last night. He was acting a little weak the last few days, and was dead in their hay nest this morning. in an effort to isolate our fragile newborns from the sick piglet who has been hiding in their nest (see yesterday), we plucked him out of general population, and inserted him into our sow pen. hopefully the individual attention from his mother will help him recover. it’s clear that he’s feeling sick, because no healthy piglet would have been so easily carried and held. he had nothing in him.

on the whole, this litter of tamworth/berkshire crosses has proven incredibly hardy. at birth, every piglet who was born alive survived. the normal stats for birth on pasture is probably closer to a seventy five or eighty five percent survival rate. until this week, we were batting a thousand.

the rescue operation was not so much for this sick tam piglet, because the truth is, he may, or may not survive another cold rainy day, and there’s not much we can do. but our new piglets, with their growing immune systems, are probably happy to have little-mr-coughs-a-lot out of their bed.