Pigs in small spaces

Hungry pigs are not only loud, but they bite your feet. A farmer in New Zealand told me he knew a man who got drunk, fell into a pigpen and passed out, and was eaten by the pigs.

The pigs almost caused my early demise as a farmer.

We have this great compost system here, the intricacies of which have not been made entirely clear to me yet. But what I do understand is that the pigs save us a lot of time and effort by mixing the manure. (A tall order for pigs, who actually like to be clean.) We faciliate this process by making deep holes in the manure in their pen (with a big heavy pry bar) and pouring corn into the holes. The pigs snuff out the corn faster than you can say jack rabbit, and after a good 3 minutes of digging, voila, another section of manure has been mixed. But that's actually the easier part. The hard part is getting the slop in the trough.

The pigs currently live in a part of the barn that might be a clausterphobic's nightmare. The pen is raised up about four feet from the floor and also on a thick bed of manure, so that while in the front you can actually stand up straight, in the back there is a ceiling that is approximately waist-high. This back part is, conveniently enough, where the trough is located. My job as pig-feeder requres me to carry a five-gallon bucket of pig slop (actually soaked oats) past the hungry pigs (don't worry, there are only four of them) and under the two-foot ceiling to dump it into the trough.

This is where things get tricky. Rachel assured me that I am the dominant species in the pigpen, and that these pigs are young and small, but with a slimy nose in my face and nothing but a rubber boot between pig teeth and my toes as I duck under the two-foot ceiling, I'm not so sure who is dominant. As a distraction, we throw in food scraps first, before making the mad dash to the trough. In theory this would work great, but in reality, pigs like soaked oats more than food scraps, so by the time I duck under the two-foot ceiling and get the bucket emptied, there is pig snot all over my pants and there is pig slop mostly on the pigs' heads.

I can't believe I used to collect stuffed animal pigs.