water trough

My neighbor gave me a couple of feral piglets to raise one being just past weaning size the other possibly 40 lbs, I had a concrete bowl that held about a gallon, for their water but over the past month they have managed to almost bury it twice and every day it was filled with dirt from their rooting around, so I decided to up their water bowl with a steel trough.
It is made from 14" of the bottom of an oxygen cylinder split in half and welded together mounted on 3" channel
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Holds about 3 gallons, of course even though it sits higher from the ground they will manage to root the dirt up to it so I will have to fluse the dirt out but that is just the nature of pigs
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Frank - put a ring in their noses. It's almost a necessity with hogs on dirt. They'll tear up everything.

I raised a lot of hogs in my better [younger] days.

Very nice-looking trough!!! I used to make them out of old water heaters. The local plumber saved them for me whenever he installed a new one for a customer.

I enjoy your posts!

Paul

Hog nose rings, I think that's what my cousin uses, else they will escape to the wild.
I didn't see paul_j post. But same idea.

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Originally Posted by metric_taper

Hog nose rings, I think that's what my cousin uses, else they will escape to the wild.
I didn't see paul_j post. But same idea.

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Not sure 10 people could subdue the larger of the 2 He was quite a bit older than I would have preferred when he was captured no way of knowing how many generations feral either of them are.
One of them is about 6 weeks away from a .22 to the brain right behind the ear they are both uncut boars and I don't want them reaching maturity I'd rather deal with less meat than have it take on the taste of an adult boar either one would be just about right for spit roasting now

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Originally Posted by Frank S

Not sure 10 people could subdue the larger of the 2 He was quite a bit older than I would have preferred when he was captured no way of knowing how many generations feral either of them are.
One of them is about 6 weeks away from a .22 to the brain right behind the ear they are both uncut boars and I don't want them reaching maturity I'd rather deal with less meat than have it take on the taste of an adult boar either one would be just about right for spit roasting now

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Hoping this works out for you Frank. It would be nice to have some of your own meat. I waited to long to castrate my boars one time and I have to despatch them on the small side to be sure as you are saying. But they still tasted good.

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Originally Posted by Frank S

Not sure 10 people could subdue the larger of the 2 He was quite a bit older than I would have preferred when he was captured no way of knowing how many generations feral either of them are.
One of them is about 6 weeks away from a .22 to the brain right behind the ear they are both uncut boars and I don't want them reaching maturity I'd rather deal with less meat than have it take on the taste of an adult boar either one would be just about right for spit roasting now

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I've only raised 3 hogs. One Hampshire (black and white) who was friendly and easy to get along with, named "Porkchop" when I caught him at the Delta County Fair. Sent him to the slaughter house at 180lbs. Maybe 20lbs when I caught him by tackling him, and picked him up in my arms. Replaced him with a couple of red hogs, acquired at about the same age Porkchop was when we got him. They were not at all friendly. When we decided it was better not to keep them any longer, we slaughtered them ourselves. Used a 250-3000 Savage so we didn't have to get all that close. The previous week I'd gotten a groove cut in the toe of my new boot by one of them trying to take a bite of my foot while my toe was through the fence pouring food into their trough. I was 16 or 17 then, had little brothers and sisters that we didn't want anything to happen to. I don't know if all red hogs are mean, but those two were. Still tasted pretty good.

Might have made a difference if we only had one, like with Porkchop. He'd gotten his back scratched, and choice bits of garden refuse hand fed to him, where they were too wild acting. I don't think they were feral, but they sure weren't socialized. They were not pets, but food animals, though my dad treated all his animals as if they were his pets. Even Hercules, a 1500lb Hereford bull he raised from a calf long after I left home. I know that the big growers & suppliers of pork can't and don't treat animals all that well, but ours got a good and comfortable life before they landed on the dinner table.

I don't think I'd even try to fatten up ferals. Of course, there is a reason I don't live on ranch or farm, even though that was my dad's idea of Heaven. I am too flinking lazy for that lifestyle. ;)

Bill

I normally let my hogs get to 380 or so. There are many different kinds of hogs. I remember seeing ones for bacon that were near 700 when I was knee high to a grasshopper and was determined to go into their pen and check them out. Good thing my Dad knew about my crazy ideas and he grabbed me and pulled me out fast enough. I surely would have been a snack to those big boys. Come to think of it I also got a good smack on the rear end for being so careless. Eventually I started to wisen up!

I had a large sow put her jaws around my leg. I've never hit a living thing as hard as I hit that pig. I knocked her out cold. Thought for a minute that I killed her and started to look around for a knife until she woke up looked around and staggered back to her pen. I don't mind saying I was scared for my life. That pig never came close to me again!

"I had a large sow put her jaws around my leg. I've never hit a living thing as hard as I hit that pig. I knocked her out cold. Thought for a minute that I killed her and started to look around for a knife until she woke up looked around and staggered back to her pen. I don't mind saying I was scared for my life. That pig never came close to me again!"

Hogs are dangerous. An old sow with pigs can be very defensive, and a herd boar with tusks can make a nasty wound. When the boar's tusks got big and he was aggressive with them, we would catch him with a nose loop, cinch his head to a post and break the tusks out with a big hammer. That would take the strut out of him for a while.

Someone mentioned red hogs - we raised red Durocs, along with Hampshire and Yorkshires. The Duroc sows were the meanest to deal with. The others were usually pretty docile, but still deserved respect in close quarters.

I enjoyed raising hogs. We kept around 60 head here on our little place, but I sold them all about 1980 when the market was getting close to my break-even point. When I was young, every farm in the community had hogs. You could walk outside on a still night and hear hog feeder lids banging in every direction. I don't know of any hogs within a ten-mile radius of here now.

When I was 4 yr old we still lived in Austin Tx, where I was born. about every weekend my parents and I went to Lake Travis to work on dad's boat house he was building. It was moored at J.O. Jones' fishing camp and marina. Anyway, MR Jones raised hogs for sale. His big sow had too large of a litter so 1 piglet was naturally the runt of the litter not figured it would survive. I saw it and wanted it. I was told that if I could catch it I could buy it for a copper penny.
This is the pig with me and my dad's chihuahua after we had it about a week
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Good picture/good memory Frank. Pigs like that one make real good pets.

In the late 60's I worked with a guy from Union County, Illinois. The first morning that I dropped by Corky's house to pick him up, a 300-pound Yorkshire sow walked out the front door of his house with him. He said that she had been a runt and that his kids had bottle fed her into a pet. That evening she was lying on the porch waiting for him to come home and she jumped up and ran grunting out to the truck when she saw him. Corky swore that she was housebroke, but I'd been around a lot of hogs, and I was skeptical. Whenever I put a new batch of feeder pigs in a fattening pen I would dump a 5 gallon bucket of water where I wanted them to do their "business". I cleaned the concrete floor with a flat shovel every evening, so I wanted the manure close to the fence to make my job easier. But housebroke??? I just smiled and nodded and let it go, ha.

After just a couple of months it was plain to see that the pig was not only going to live but thrive. We hauled it up to my uncle's place which was a couple miles from where my grandpa was in the process of purchasing a farm. We left it with my older cousins who raised it and entered it in the 4H program I have no recollection of how it did in competitions but I do know he grew into a 600+ lb boar that was bread to many sows over the years there were probably over 300 pigs born from his seed. Not bad for a penny pig that probably would have died before getting old enough to wean

Good hog story Frank!

My two sons had FFA and 4H hogs. Most memorable were two Yorkshire sows (sisters) that consistently raised 25 pigs between them from each farrowing. Those two sows were as gentle as a feather. Each would birth 12 - 13 pigs and save them all. The boys won a lot of first place ribbons with those two girls. My average when I had brood sows was 6 surviving pigs - sometimes 8, but never more. The boys treated their FFA sows like they were family, and they responded well to the special treatment.

I have a lot of good memories of raising hogs. Enough time has passed that the bad memories (and there were many) have faded. Life is good - the good memories outweigh the bad memories as we get older, thank God.

A determined little guy! Amazing that you have this pic Frank!

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Originally Posted by mwmkravchenko

A determined little guy! Amazing that you have this pic Frank!

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More than you can imagine. Had it not been for my younger sister shepherding all of the family pictures after our mother passed away while I was in Kuwait. then asking her oldest grandson to scan everyone and save them to a box full of CDs which have now been saved to DVDs and thumb drives and on probably 2 dozen family computer drives, I wouldn't have it.

That looks almost pig-proof! I used to breed pedigree Berkshires and Gloucester Old Spots back in the 90s. I installed drinking nipples on mains water after the third week of clearing out their water trough. I miss those pigs, especially Tulip, the matriarch of the herd, who lived to a grand old age

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Originally Posted by neilg4dbn

That looks almost pig-proof! I used to breed pedigree Berkshires and Gloucester Old Spots back in the 90s. I installed drinking nipples on mains water after the third week of clearing out their water trough. I miss those pigs, especially Tulip, the matriarch of the herd, who lived to a grand old age

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I'm not sure anything is completely pig proof not even larger pigs from smaller pigs.

My late uncle (a career hog farmer) once told me that a fully grown sow could snap a 2 X 4 in half with her jaws.

Seems like yours was sending a message, eh?