Holy Shit by Gene Logsdon

Author:Gene Logsdon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603583107
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2010-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Pigs Can Potty-Train Themselves

Put a pig in a roomy pen and it will pick a spot for its “nest” and, as far away from the nest as possible, a place where it will defecate regularly. If the potty area gets too clogged with manure, the pig will start doing its business elsewhere in the pen, and then finally all over it. Small-scale pork chop producers make sure that their hog pens are roomy and that the toilet area gets scooped out occasionally. With that regimen, pigs keep their living quarters surprisingly clean. In fact, the main reason that pigs are associated with lack of cleanliness in human folklore is because humans have traditionally crowded too many of them into too small an area. Do that with even mice and you will witness much filth and smell, too. The only time pigs willingly get dirty is when they wallow in mud in hot weather.

When I worked on farms in cold Minnesota, we used the pig’s natural potty training to our advantage while caring for hogs by using the deep litter method (as opposed to the all-concrete, flush-toilet method of huge confinement operations). Pigs do not like winter any more than humans do. They contract pneumonia fairly easily if exposed to cold, wet weather. If hogs can’t find any insulating protection in a drafty old-fashioned barn, they sometimes pile on top of each other to stay warm, which is how the term “piles” came into the language as a synonym for hemorrhoids. The weight of pigs piling on top of pigs can cause that condition.

We would make a winter pen for, say, twenty feeder pigs by putting boards over the pen gates to make a low ceiling. Then we piled straw on the floor and covered the ceiling boards with shocks of corn stalks. That shelter would stay dry and fairly warm all winter. The pigs had access to the outdoors and went there to defecate and urinate. Some farmers in earlier days would build a framework of posts and then cover the frame with a strawstack at threshing time, leaving an opening for the animals to get into and out of the room under the stack. Hogs, unlike cows, would not defecate in this straw shelter but went outside instead. Strawstack shelters were also a good place for sows with little pigs.

In the coldest weather, farmers often resort to electric heat lamps in addition to deep bedding to keep baby pigs warm. (Unless you are a commercial producer, you shouldn’t really be scheduling pigs to come in cold weather.) That is how we almost burned down our barn when I was a boy. Dad had bedded the pen with plenty of straw and the sow, rooting in it to make a nest for her pigs, pushed some straw up against the heat lamp, which was hanging too low to the ground. The straw caught fire. And unfortunately, the water tank close by was frozen over. I have never seen a man chop a hole in ice as fast as my father did that day, for water to souse out the flame.

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