To market, to market

Well it's mighty quiet around the place today. The pigs were successfully delivered to the butcher. For the uninitiated, here's how it went, in a nutshell:

We had ten pigs to go to town, one trailer. The butcher shop allows them to be brought in either Wed. afternoons, or Thursday mornings before 9 am. Since pig loading is almost never a sure thing, we decided to try to get them all loaded and delivered on Wednesday. That way, if we needed extra time or ran into any difficulties, we still had the Thursday am window. Always good to have a backup plan when it comes to pigs, or any livestock for that matter!

I backed the trailer up and opened it up for the pigs the day before, to let them get used to it. Some went on, most were uninterested. We had decided to cut them off from their sleeping quarters, to encourage them to use the trailer for sleeping. but they had other plans, and went right through the wire to their old house. Hmph.

Karen and I started out several hours before we needed to leave on Wednesday. We encouraged the piggies with treats on the trailer. We were having a good deal of success, most of them would get right on the trailer, but not all of them, of course. I did succeed in closing off 3/4 of the rest of the pen by bringing up our poultry netting and stringing that across the pen, giving us a smaller space to work in.

As fortune would have it, an eager, strapping teenage boy who lives next door and is itching to help us with farm chores showed up on his riding lawnmower at just the right time! After a brief wait while he ran home to get his "rancher coat" and hat, he returned ready to work in the pig pen with us. We advised him that perhaps a full-length leather coat was not really advisable inside a pig pen. He quickly agreed and took it off, and grabbed the other end of a heavy 5 foot long gate. As Karen petted, rubbed, and scratched our piggies, and we enticed them with donuts, Jared and I slowly crowded the remaining 3 or 4 piggies from behind with the gate. Soon they had nowhere to go but on the trailer. Two of them hopped right on, but there were two (the biggest 2, wouldn't ya know) who simply did not want to get in the trailer! The big red barrow turned toward the gate we held. I stood on the bottom rung of the gate to hold it down. Big Red Barrow put his nose in the gate, and I was then airborne! Lofted straight up a foot in the air! No harm was done to me, Jared, or the gate, but it was startling, and honestly just a little fun to defy gravity like that, if even momentarily. Hey, ya gotta enjoy the little things.

At that point, Karen and I agreed it was time to close the trailer up, and go with the 8 pigs we had on. We'd have to make two trips.

We drove to Lake Geneva and off-loaded the 8 pigs, then came back home. We decided to try and get the last two pigs on the trailer right away, as we still had daylight left, and I wanted to take advantage of that. We opened up the trailer door for them, and with just a few spinach leaves as enticement, they, magically, quietly walked right on! Guess their issue was they didn't want to go into a crowded trailer! Maybe they didn't like that it smelled like pigs (and goats) in there. I don't know. But we gave them more treats, and let them sleep in there.

Next morning, soon as Birk was on the bus, we started back to Lake Geneva with our two big boys. Unloading at the shop was just as quiet and easy with them. I'm thinking it might simply be easier in smaller groups. Good food for thought for future loads.

While we were at the loading dock, we helped a guy which had pulled in ahead of us, who was trying to unload 8 pigs by himself. Turned out he was unloading Berkshires, which is the breed we are wanting to get into for the next phase. It was good to talk to him, and we got his number.

Now when I come home, I still sometimes hear a pig grunt or a feeder lid bang, and I quickly remind myself they are gone. I've been hearing what I want to hear, what I am used to hearing. Karen says she is experiencing the same thing. People often ask us isn't it hard, getting attached to something and then taking it in to be slaughtered? My answer is usually yes, it is. And it should be, at least a little bit, don't you think?