I was on about my pigs in another thread so decided to post some pigs (i mean pics! lol )
just to explain, i had 2 "female" pigs when i was 11 and they were mis-sexed so i had babies and kept them all, but they all escaped one day and you know can guess the rest....
i loved the babbas so i went to a breeder and got some and bred some babies on purpose, but i struggled to get good homes and found out that the homes i'd got had re-homed them without telling me, so i stopped breeding.
i wanted a self black more than anything, but kept getting splodges of colour on them.
i liked my golden agouti but she never had any babies that were the colours i wanted.
i always wanted a himalain pig but couldn't find a breeder
we made our hay racks from hanging baskets. you couldn't buy any products for pigs like you can now. we made all our own toys
and that's all the ones i have uploaded.
This is the set-up in the garage. I made pens out of fire-guards pulled apart and they had wooden hutches that we attached legs to and made wooden steps up to, so they could go underneath.
this is how they came out onto the lawn in the summer (free range roaming. they had no barriers. they just "knew" where they weren't allowed and never wandered off.
no, i haven't had a pig for 9 or 10 years now. i miss them when i see piggies and when i hear the noises that they make, but i really aren't tempted because i just don't have to time or energy to look after them. It took 2 hours to clean them out and it was a hard job. 2 hours cleaning hams doesn't seem hard but that sort of back breaking scrubbing was something else! scraping poops off the garage floor with a chisel is not something i miss!!
Also, every month we had to clear the whole garage and wash it down with disinfectant. i'd say it was more similar to having a stable than anything!
Also, we had no lawn to sit on ourselves because it was covered with poops!! They had free run in and out of the garage the whole day in summer (i was at school, so at home for 6 weeks in summer) and they just pooped where they were grazing rather than going into the garage. You can see in one pic that we have a virtually bald lawn. we never mowed it ever. I miss them trotting in and out going cluck cluck cluck