Well if you thought herding geese out of a neighbor’s wheat field in the rain on Tuesday morning was enough for one day….you were wrong.
That afternoon Fern was leaving our barn to go live in another barn. Who is Fern you ask? She is our neighbors pig. She was here before we bought the place and we asked that they have her moved out by the end of 2014 as we need the room for our animals.
Meet Fern.
She is probably 500 lbs and the sweetest pig I’ve ever known. Ok, so I’ve never known any other pigs but she really is a sweet pig.
She is Glory’s pig. Every year Fern would have babies and Glory would show them at 4-H. You may have seen the pictures of this year’s babies at the bottom of this post.
So, how do you get a 500 lb pig into a trailer?
You just tell her to get in there….right?
Wrong. She decided she didn’t want to go. She wanted to go back to her stall.
She almost made it too.
Let’s try this again.
Wrong way Fern!
Yeah! She is almost there.
Nope. At this point I’m in the trailer enticing her with food. No more pictures from me so if you want to know how it continued just keep going over the pictures about ten times.
Over and over and over again we tried to get her in the trailer. It is very difficult to get a 500 lb pig to go somewhere that she doesn’t want to go.
The boards that they were using are an absolute must have.
We tried fresh pumpkin. We tried pushing …..pulling….more food. We tried building a ramp so she didn’t have to step up the eight inches or so to get in the trailer.
What finally changed? Glory got home from school and came over. It still wasn’t easy (she is a very stubborn pig), but at least there was another person there that knew how to work with pigs.
45 minutes after we began we finished.
And what a beautiful end of the day it was.
What were the goats doing during the wrangling of Fern?
Eating of course.
Now we are ready to receive our three new nine week old doelings on Sunday. I’ll have pictures for you on Monday.
Thanx for following along on our adventure,
Karen
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