We got a pig! A couple weeks ago, on Thursday during lunch, Jershon told me that he found a pig on craigslist that he was considering getting. haha. In our farm planning, we have always planned on getting a pig or two at some point, but it wasn’t on our current radar. … but we’re flexible so we started talking about possibly getting this pig. The listing said that this pig was pregnant and due in July.
Within a couple of hours, Jershon had talked to the owner of the pig and arranged to purchase it and have it delivered on Saturday evening.
So here we were… we had about 48 hours to get fencing up and some sort of shelter built for the pig. haha.
Jershon worked hard over the next couple evenings and all day on Saturday and when the pig showed up Saturday evening, everything was ready to go.
I had been doing some research over the last couple days about this particular breed of pig.
She’s an American Guinea Hog. … a rare heritage breed that was super popular during colonial times (Thomas Jefferson even had this breed) but was thought to be extinct until some were discovered on a farm in Georgia in the 1980s and now they are making a bit of comeback… although still considered an endangered breed.
They are known for being a great homestead hog because they don’t get super big, their meat is really good, high lard content, they are docile and easy going, they forage and eat pasture, and they will eat rodents and snakes…. which is a trait I really like (I really dislike snakes… although I know that some of them are beneficial… but snakes scare me a lot.)
I asked Jershon if he had been specifically looking for this breed but he said no. Haha. Turns out we just got lucky with getting a really good breed.
This pig is a 7 year old female. She has given birth to several litters in her 7 years of life and is a good mom. The previous owners think that she will probably have about 6 piglets this time, but American Guinea Hog litters can vary between 1 and 14 piglets, so I guess we’ll just have to see!
She’s supposed to give birth sometime around late July or early August. We’re excited to experience having baby animals born on our farm.
Her registered name is Honey (which is funny since that was Crosby’s womb name… since we didn’t know the gender). In keeping with our theme of naming our animals after our ancestors, we decided to rename her Remi, short for Remigia Castro, Jershon’s 3rd great grandmother. Remigia is one of the first ancestors names that Jershon discovered when he got started with family history last summer.
Remi loves to eat. Food scraps are her favorite. It’s really fun to watch her eat them.
The morning after we got her (Sunday), I was feeding Crosby and looked out the window… to see Remi out by the chicken coop. She had escaped! Jershon ran out there and put her back in. Turns out that we had forgotten to lock the gate. Haha
… Well, the next morning (Monday) rolled around and Landon came in our room around 7:30 am and said that Remi was out front, by the road. Jershon ran out there again and got her back in. This time she had lifted the gate off the hinges …one of the hinges was on upside down because Jershon had read somewhere that people only put the hinges on the other way if they’re worried about their gate getting stolen. haha. We weren’t worried about that. I guess we didn’t consider that our pig would just lift it off and escape. We fixed that so she can’t do that again. Haha.
I looked on the cameras that we have outside to see if I could tell how long she had been out. Apparently she spent the majority of the night (at least from around 1 am to 7:40 am) out roaming the yard, napping under one of the oak trees, and knocking over the trash cans.
I also went back to the camera footage from the day before and saw that she had been out for at least an hour that time as well… I thought she had only been out for a few minutes because she was by the chicken coop (which is right across from her paddock) when I saw her. But I saw on the footage that she had roamed the whole yard, gone to the front yard, gone next to the road, and then came back up to the chicken coop.
This is funny to us only because she didn’t get hurt or lost. We’re grateful that she was protected throughout the night.
I’m surprised that both times she got out, she stayed on our property (as far as I can tell from the camera footage), considering that she hadn’t even been at our house long enough to know our property. Apparently pigs are the 4th most intelligent animal (next to chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants). I think she’s gonna find all of our weak spots. Haha.
On Monday evening, she escaped again… but this time it was because Landon had thought he locked the gate but hadn’t actually clipped the carabiner to the right side of the fence…so she just pushed the gate open and walked right out. haha. We noticed this just a few minutes after her escape so we got her back in right away.
And I’m happy to report that it’s been 8 days since then and she hasn’t escaped again since. haha. We’re much more careful with making sure the gate is closed properly every time.
She also loves to wallow in the mud. She either makes her own mud by tipping over her watering trough…or we give her some mud by spraying her/the dirt with the hose.
So far, we are loving having a pig. 🙂
