Sucker

That's me!  I'm a sucker for baby animals.  A few months ago, I met a farmer who raises pigs.  We chatted for a bit, and I told him if he ever had any runt piglets and didn't want to deal with them, I'd like to raise them.  I got an email from him yesterday asking if I wanted a runt pig, because he was weaning the litter and she was just too small to go on feed and off milk.  I thought about it, because timing isn't perfect with the house getting worked on and being busy with lambs and things.  But who can say no to a baby pig?

So I got her.  She's really cute, as most piglets are.  First thing I did was give her a bath in the kitchen sink. She was a little stinky.

She seemed to enjoy the warm bath water. And she really enjoyed being bundled in a towel to dry.

She had a hard time getting warm after her bath, so of course I wrapped her in a fresh towel and snuggled on the couch with her. What else is there to do but snuggle when your piglet is cold?  :)

This morning at her 4:30 AM feeding, she started to get the hang of the nipple on the bottle. Sometimes piglets do better with dishes of milk rather than bottles, but this girl got really mad when I tried to get her to drink from a dish.

The dogs really like her, although Elmer wasn't sure about things when she wanted to lay on top of him.  Buford loves her to death, and will lick and lick and lick her if you let him.

After she eats, I take her outside and put her on the ground and she potties.  I'm going to see if I can get her mostly potty trained, at least while she's in the house.  Then after she eats and does her business, she wants to snuggle and nap again.

Because the farmer raises quite a few litters, each pig gets his/her ears notched.  Other livestock animals get ear tags, but ear tags don't work very well with pigs. They are so curious that they can bite and rip each other's ear tags out.  So, notches are a good permanent way to identify individual pigs.  The notches are done when the pigs are only a day or so old, so they don't even remember it.

Here's the system used:

So her left ear looks like either a 2 or a 6. What do you think?  Or, I guess it could even be a 4.  Sort of hard to tell here.

Her right ear is her litter number. To me, it looks like litter # 17.

Most people put human babies in baby carries, but I prefer swine babies.  This way I can hold her and get stuff done.

Snug as a bug in a rug!

Our initial plan is to raise her for the freezer, and Kylee mentioned wanting to show a pig at the fair before. So, this gal will likely get shown this summer and then we'll see.  As much as I'd love to keep a pig permanently, I really don't think we have the space for one year-round.