So yesterday the pigs arrived around 1pm and around 6pm I thought, hmm, maybe we should try putting them in an hour or so before dark just in case they don’t easily run in. Side note: The day enclosure and night enclosure are gosh, about 100 feet apart.
The breeder told us to just shake some grain and they should follow us, but alas. No, maybe I should be happy because one did follow us, KimChi. She went right in and was excited until we shut the door behind her. The other two? Ridiculous. Running away from us, squealing. We would kind of corner them but they’d eventually escape. We’d shake the grain. They couldn’t care less. We’d try to lead them. They wouldn’t follow.
Since my anxiety has already been very high the past few days due to all the older people in my life who are at risk right now and my endless worries about them all, this pig business really put me over the top. We got them back into their day enclosure and I was like, fine, this is great. I can’t do this anymore. Christine wanted to keep trying but by then we had maybe 30 more minutes of daylight left and if they chose to really try to run away they could get into the horse enclosure since they’re small enough to squeeze under the gate and our horses are, well, jerks when it comes to other animals underfoot. It wouldn’t go well.
So after a long dialogue, the end result was that we decided to sleep in the suburban next to their enclosure with a gun to make sure coyotes did not get them. The fools. (Pigs? Us? Probably both!).
We slept on top of plywood which we then covered with yoga mats and some blankets. I mean, I’m young and it’s all good. Except we were kinda on a hill so our heads were lower than the rest of us and I was higher up on my side than Christine was on hers. Whoops.
The moronic pigs have zero sense of intelligence when it comes to being a prey animal (or am I somehow wrong here??? Are they not a prey animal? They weigh only 40-50 lbs!). Randomly they would get up and walk around, snorting loudly, almost begging a coyote to come on in. Jeez.
Today I asked in the pig groups on FB for more info. The breeder had said coyotes don’t seem to mess with them, but that just didn’t feel right. On FB many people said pretty much the same, that maybe predators around here are so scared of pigs because of the ferals that they keep away from all of them. Still, pigs are expensive. One reason we left poor KimChi inside by herself was that I could see the dollar signs and the risks just didn’t seem worth getting her back out again. A couple of people did comment saying that yes, they used a safe enclosure for night time. Really the best thing we can do seems to be to bond with them so they actually care to follow us. KimChi followed Christine right out this morning and back in with the little ones. We fed them all little snacks throughout the day and all three ate out of my hand (steamed zucchini!). Bon Jovi is the most difficult one to pet; he’s very shy. Kevin took to me in a way he hasn’t yet with Christine and he let me scratch him until he fell over (with mini pigs you call this “forking”–you can literally take a fork and poke them with it and then go into a trance and fall over and they stay that way for a short bit of time!). He’s a little cutie, I guess. It’s funny, as much as I loved my mini pigs Kune Kune just haven’t grown on me in that way. I can’t really find them cute; they kind of scare me a little and I can’t interpret their noises the way I could with the minis. But at least they are getting friendlier and it’s only been a day and a half.
So it may still take a few more days for them to trust us enough to go into the other enclosure. Anyone have any experience with these pigs and whether predators will mess with them? For now we’re permanently sleeping in the suburban. Don’t ever let anyone tell you meat eaters don’t love the hell out of their animals.
PS Happy 1st Birthday to Miss Mochi today!
