Well its been a busy few week and I know I have been AWOL. Mostly due to entertaining our visitors, but we have had a few things that should be discussed.As I have managed to post our piglets are doing really well, and growing fast! The little girl and (possibly) the ginger one have homes. And as we’re planning on keeping “Berky” the white faced male, we just have the 2 black males still for sale. This in itself did provide a problem… castration. As I mentioned we are keeping “Berky”, and even though I have named him, he is intended for pork. However we didn’t “nut” him, as he was ours and personally I don’t believe “bore taint” affects the meat, most are killed for meat before they are mature anyway. So I see it as an unnecessary process. But for our bores to be “saleable” the others needed “nutting“.
Initially we caught the piglets using a landing net. This allowed us to remove them from the pen; and Mum, with little distress. She was not so stress free when I returned her piglets to her, minus a few bits!
We did use this opportunity to let our visitors hold the piglets. After this we called in assistance. I am afraid I could not hold the piglets steady enough for Matt to perform the “surgery”; some thing he was not too confident in either. So our friend came to help. He said he had performed this, but on older animals. However our research indicated the younger the better. The main thing I want to stress is that all the boys are well and recovered exceptionally quickly! Some Matt said would have taken him far longer to get over.
Part of the reason for “nutting” the piglets younger was so their recovery could be assisted by them suckling. As the saying goes “breast is best” this accounts for animals too. Although as I mentioned I don't really understand the "reason" for doing it at all.
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