how to handle PIGS
Pigs are not easy to handle as what Bob experiences for the first time. He said that hogs are the hardest of all homestead animals to fence in and small pigs are especially difficult to hold. Major undertaking and frustrations was his greatest reward of experience.
Hogs are about the hardest of all homestead animals to
fence in . . . and small pigs are especially difficult to
hold: They can go over, under or through just about
anything short of a solid board wall once they take it into
their heads to get out.
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That fact became very real to us last spring, when we
bought a couple of 40-pound feeder pigs. We started out by
making the animals a board pen (three and a half feet high
. . . (to begin with, anyhow) inside the barn. Then we
added an outdoor enclosure of sheep netting which we
salvaged from an old fence row on our place.
That was our first big mistake. Sheep netting is no
substitute for hog wire: The mesh is much too large for
pigs. Seems like the little rascals just squirt through
anything they can get their heads into up to the neck. We
couldn't afford to go to town and buy a whole new roll of
the proper fencing . . . so we compromised, got some
two-inch mesh chicken wire and ran it around the sheep
netting for greater strength and rigidity.
This precaution only sent the pigs under the wire instead
of through it. We were pretty discouraged until a neighbor
told us to lay logs around the inside of the pen at the
base of the fence so the critters couldn't get their snouts
under the wire and shove on through. That solved the
burrowing problem.
The next time the little porkers got out, they went over
the boards of the pen inside the barn. In other words, a
pair of one-foot-tall animals climbed a sheer wooden wall
three and a half times their own height Amazing!
Once loose, the feeder hogs rampaged around in the barn,
upsetting feed sacks, plowing through the worm beds beneath
our rabbit hutches and even rooting up chunks of the floor
where the frost had heaved the cement After that, I ran the
sides of their enclosure on up to four and a half feet . .
. a height that proved too much for them.
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