Rough Days

July 13, 2011 
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I tend to write about the good or funny days around here on the farm, mostly because those are the days I like to remember, but sometimes it’s just tough and really no fun.

These hot dry times of year (105 every day) are very hard on the animals, especially the pigs since they don’t sweat.  We keep mud holes, shade, and plenty of water available to them and for the most part they do fine.  But, sometimes things seem to conspire to foil our best attempts at keeping them cool and happy.  Yesterday, between checking on them in the morning and that evening when I checked on them again, 2 pigs died of heat exhaustion.  One of our old boars (mostly a pasture ornament nowadays) was laid out in the sun, instead of the shady shelters or the mud hole, panting and obviously in distress when I found him.  I immediately got a water hose on him and while I stood there desperately trying to cool him off, he died.  Then, as Nathan and I were making the rounds re-filling mud holes and making sure everyone else was okay, we found one of our sows that we raised in a pasture she was not supposed to be in that had no water since we had no animals in the field at the time–she was also dead.  This all happened within a few hours during the hottest part of the day.

The evening before we had a sow farrow and her entire litter of pigs disappeared–we assume some varmint found and ate them, or the piglet rapture happened, I really have no idea.

Last night, after checking cows and taking care of everything else, we had to haul off the dead pigs, which took until 1:30 in the morning.  While trying to haul them off (600 lb carcasses are not easy to handle) pigs kept appearing in the field they weren’t supposed to be in.  We would chase one back in the correct field and turn around to leave only to find two more back out.  Finally we found the hole that the sow and all of the pigs were getting out of and repaired that so that we will hopefully have no more pig tragedies.

I have no idea why a pig can go through a hole to get out without any problem, but then can’t get back through the exact same hole to get water and keep themselves alive.  Pigs are supposed to be very smart but sometimes I really have to wonder.  Also, one of the gates leading out of the waterless field was not fastened, just pulled shut.  Now any other time when we were trying to keep her in, that sow would have pushed that gate open and gone on her merry way which would have included finding water and not dying, but oh no, yesterday when she needed desperately to get to water she didn’t push the gate open.  Sometimes I just feel like banging my head against a wall.

While all of this was going on, one of our cows who has horns somehow got her head stuck and then proceeded to flop around trying to get it out until she fell over and was hanging herself.  My sister Gracie was right there when it happened, thank goodness, and was able to get her out or we would have had a third dead animal in one day.

But, on the bright side of things, we got to work when it was much cooler, albeit in the middle of the night, we have 3 new calves who are doing very well, and most of the animals are alive and healthy.