After months of waiting the day finally arrived for the first two of the piglets to go to the abattoir. Two of the sheep should have gone before Christmas, but my registration as a smallholder hadn't been completed. I am quite relieved that it is the pigs we are taking first, I haven't got attached to the piglets, it is difficult when there are ten of them and they all look much the same. Perhaps because I knew we would eat the pigs I have deliberately kept my distance. I think anyone considering keeping farm animals as opposed to pets, ponders whether they will actually be able to deal with the decision to take an animal to the abattoir let alone eat the meat. Perhaps the number of piglets we had has been a blessing in disguise, the cost of feeding twelve pigs for the last five months has been approximately €25 per week, it is not feasible for us to continue to buy this amount of feed indefinitely. So I guess the decision has been made easier by the practicalities, the longer we keep the pigs the more out-of-pocket we will be.
The first problem is catching the piglets, particularly if you need to catch specific ones. Of course we have designed a holding pen that should make it easier to catch them (see previous blog post - What a Pig Sty!).
Last Sunday evening Steve and I set off on our mission to catch the two largest girl piglets and get them into the transportation cage ready for our 4.30 a.m. trip to the abattoir on Monday morning. I was not feeling optimistic, one of the larger girl piglets had never been known to enter the holding pen, she always stays in the permanent pen with her mum. I prepared the holding pen, opened the door in between and threw pig nuts on the ground as is our routine, Steve went into the girls permanent pen to distract the mums. Within ten minutes I had the two largest piglets and two smaller ones in the holding area, time to shut the connecting door. That was when all hell let loose, all four of them panicked and started running around squealing. Have you ever heard a pig squeal when it is frightened? It is the most ear piercing noise you will ever hear. We backed away from the pen once we had the door secure in the hope that the piglets would calm down, which they did.
The next stage in the process was to tattoo the two that we were taking to the abattoir. You can't take animals to the abattoir unless they have official identification, that is ear tags for most animals, including pigs, or you can tattoo your pigs with your official registration number. We decided that tattooing was probably much easier than ear tags for our pigs, either option is going to cause the pigs some pain and distress. Tattoos are suppose to be on the pigs shoulder or inner ear, we opted for the shoulder. What we didn't realise is that when you do the tattoo you can't see it through the pigs bristles as it doesn't produce solid lines, but pin pricks, these are only visible after the pig has been killed and its bristles removed. I was concerned that we hadn't done the tattooing properly and that we would be turned away from the abattoir. The thought of having to return home with the pigs after all the stress of catching them and getting them there was quite upsetting. We took our tattoo equipment with us in the hope that if we hadn't done it properly someone at the abattoir would show us how the experts do it.
Next we had to grab the pigs we were taking and get them into the transportation cage (this is actually a large dog cage), we can fit one of our fully grown pigs in it or two of the piglets. The easiest way to catch pigs is to grab them by the back legs and lift them clean off the ground, this is suppose to reduce their movement, it does but they can still wriggle an awful lot and if you don't hold on tight they will escape your clutches quite easily. The other reason for grabbing them this way is their head and therefore sharp teeth are held away from you. Doing this with piglets is one thing, trying to do it with adult pigs is extremely difficult, particularly when you consider the weight of them. For adult pot-bellies you will need two people to carry each pig. For full-size pig breeds this isn't possible, for two reasons; first you wouldn't be able to lift them and secondly they need to be transported in an animal trailer not a cage. It is much easier to train pigs in the same way you train a dog, get them to follow you by walking in front of them with food, if they follow give them a bit of food as a treat, keep doing this on a regular basis and you should have no trouble getting your pigs to go where you want them to.
Our pigs came to us when they were over a year old, we only had them for a month before they gave birth to the piglets, this was unfortunate as we didn't really get a chance to get to know them properly or have time to attempt to carry out any training with them. Because the mums didn't know us well we didn't go into the pen much when the piglets were little, I had read that the mums can be very aggressive when they have newborns. Now, five months later I don't think we would have the same problems, the mums seem quite happy for us to go in the pen, particularly if we take them apples or carrots as a treat.
Grabbing the piglets and putting them into the cage went well. One of the difficulties of moving two pigs in the same cage is that if you put one in the cage and then open the door to put the other one in, the first will try to escape, they are very fast and if they are running straight at you there is nothing to get hold of to stop them. To solve this problem we put the cage upright so the door is at the top and then the piglets are lowered into the cage gently, once they are both in then you lock the door and very gently turn the cage so that it is the correct way up.
Our plan was to leave the two piglets in the cage overnight, we left the cage in the holding pen as a double precaution, then if they managed to get out of the cage they still couldn't go anywhere. Part of the reason for doing this was because we had to leave for the abattoir at 4.30 a.m. in the morning when it would still be dark. Getting the piglets into the cage in advance also meant that they would be much calmer by the time we had to put the cage into the car. In fact, when we went to collect them in the morning they didn't make a noise at all, I think they were half asleep.
When we arrived at the abattoir there was one guy in front of us unloading two of the biggest pigs I have ever seen. I went into the office to give my paperwork in, the transportation document which needs to accompany the driver of live animals, this includes your registration number, a copy of it is sent to the EdE (Establissement de l' Elevage). We then went and unloaded our pigs in their cage into the holding pens, because the holding pens are for larger animals we had to leave our pigs in their cage and I made arrangements to go back and collect the cage later that day. That was it, within half an hour of leaving our home we were driving out of the abattoir having left the two pigs to meet their fate. I thought I would have felt quite emotional or upset when we left them but I felt a massive sense of relief that they had been accepted at the abattoir and that everything had gone so well, in particular the pigs seemed quite calm and not in the least big upset by the change in their routine.
When I went back to the abattoir later that day to collect the cage, the lady in the office asked me to speak with the butcher, I assumed it was to explain how I wanted the butchering carried out, but the butcher didn't want to butcher our pigs, he said normally pigs of this size (they were 15 and 16 kilos dead weight), are not butchered as they are for spit roasting, I agreed that I would pick up the full carcasses a few days later and then dashed home to do some research on butchering pigs. Next blog; A Steep Learning Curve
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