About 1 pm on Thursday, 4/29 Ramble started breating heavy and wouldn’t let Lisa leave her alone. I had to leave to do some shopping and pick Roy up from school. By the time we returned around 3:40pm, Ramble had just pushed out the first piglet. It took her another hour and a
half to have the next one. Around 5:05pm, she delivered two back-to-back. I had thought about calling them Jacob and Esau but I have no idea which ones they are now. By 6pm, there were 8 piglets and 11 by the time we went in for the evening. She was still acting like she had another piglet or two, but we had to go in to take care of dinner and homework.
When I went to check on the new family the next morning, I saw two laying off from the rest of the mass of wriggling pork. I hoped that they were just napping but in my gut I knew what I was going to find. Overnight Ramble had delivered a 12th piglet – stillborn – and I guess she stepped on and crushed one was she was trying to pass the last one. I am thrilled that we still have 10 that are healthy and vigorous, but I was sad to lose 2 like that. Aside from the emotional letdown, there’s a potential $500 – $750 of income lost. But that’s just part of the deal – for a Momma hog to be big enough to have 12 (she was well over 700lbs) and for the piglets to be small enough to fit in there (they weigh about 2 lbs at birth). Every once in awhile the two come together, and you know which one is going to give.
We are soon going to have some maintenance chores to do with the piglets which I’m not looking forward to. First will be castrating the little boys. I never look forward to cutting them, but I’m especially reluctant to take care of it with Ramble nearby. She is intensely protective. Though she is our sweetest sow, she gets very agitated when we approach the pigs or touch them. I’m probably going to have to lock her out of the farrowing house and do the deed quickly. So far, I’m not even sure how many boys she has because we haven’t wanted to get her too nervous. A nervous sow equals a less cautious sow around the piglets, which equals more crushed piglets. The other chore is weighing them to make sure they’re gaining weight. I imagine this will become routine and she won’t mind us handling them for that. But right now, we’re just standing back and watching. We haven’t had any reason to believe that they’re not growing with the way they nurse.
One of the chief dangers with farrowing, especially in confinement farms, is the danger of the sow crushing the piglets. (You have probably picked up on that already). Tamworths have a reputation for rarely crushing piglets but but I think that crushing deaths are minimized with most sows of any breed given room and treated with respect. We have noticed with both litters (from a Yorkshire and a Duroc), the sows have a routine to watch out for the little ones. Ramble grunts for about 30 seconds and nudges any that are under her away. Then she slowly drops to her front knees and grunts some more. Then she lowers her rear end straight down. Only then once she’s flush with the floor does she flop onto her side. The other factor that might have come into play the other night was that she was still in labor when she stepped on the piglet. When she was in labor, she was not aware of anything going on around her. The contractions were very strong and took a lot out of her. She didn’t move much for the first day or so after, taking a well-deserved rest. Now she’s up and moving around the farrowing pen.
