Guest views are now limited to 12 pages. If you get an "Error" message, just sign in! If you need to create an account, click here.

Jump to content

  • CRYPTO REWARDS!

    Full endorsement on this opportunity - but it's limited, so get in while you can!

My Message for You

Markinsa

By Markinsa,
in Off Topic posts

 Share

Recommended Posts

smee2 Newbie

smee2

Posted
Posted

Note: If you bore easily, or don't like little real life stories, click to the next reply :)

Oh my, that is just too cute for words. My first husband (the marriage that lasted five and a half months) was a farmer. I loved the farm more than him I guess. He had goats, which I learned to milk, at five in the morning, chickens I learned to care for from hatchling to laying, and pigs. There was one old sow who would drop her little ones and then sit on them, or roll over on them. Only about half of them survived. I thought this was horrible and stayed out in the barn all night taking each piglet as it was born and putting it into a bushel basket lined with burlap ... bushel basket, and burlap, being things you city folk might not know anything about! Anyway, I didn't lose a one of those piglets. the last one born was the runt of the litter ... is that the way it usually is? I never did find out. It was the cutest little thing. It had a dark grey mark around it's curly tail where it joined onto the back. I called it piggy and when I would go to the pen and call it, the silly little thing would come to me. The others didn't, but then the others didn't spend their first night cuddled in my arms. I just loved that little piggy. I was a little stressed when my father-in-law, who did things the old fashioned way, came in and used a pair of rusty medical (haha) plyers to break off the back teeth, which I think the babies were born with. They squealed and squawked and just made the most terrible noises. Then there was the medical rusty screw driver that they would dip into a jar of iron filings and scoop up some and put them into the piglets' mouth ... real iron. I don't know if I believe all of that to this day and it has been almost forty years. But when I came into the barn and found them neutering the batch of piglets that were older than the one mine was in I almost had a fit. They just scooped up each piglet in its turn, held it by one hind leg, took a rusty medical knife, and sliced. Drop the piglet in the straw and grab for the next one. They were going to do that to MY piglet! Oh yeah! They fully intended to do that to my piggy and I just couldn't let them do it. I called a petting zoo that was at the time associated with the Toronto Riverdale Zoo, explained my problem, and got them to accept my piggy and shipped him off. My husband came in all confused that one of the piglets was missing. Oh really? My my! I never did confess. I guess I am doing so now.

It was about then that some people came to the farm and spoke with my father-in-law, and it looked like they were picking out one of the baby goats. I wondered what was going on and asked. I should have kept my mouth shut and walked away. They were selling the baby goats, as they did each Passover, to Jewish people who use them as Passover dinner. Apparently it all has to be consumed in one meal and none left over so they take the youngest, and smallest, and most helpless and defenceless mind you ... of the goats for this celebration! Celebration?

I asked my husband how much he got for each baby goat. He told me they sold for $10. You have to remember this was forty years ago and that was a lot more then than it is now. We had six that year and I gave him sixty dollars on the spot, herded the babies out of the barn and back to their mothers in a small barnside pasture, and felt the matter was closed.

Nope ... how about the cost of keeping them I was asked. Well, how much does it cost to keep them and we are getting milk and will get even more so what is the problem ... I felt my reasoning was sound. The only place I erred was in overestimating the call for goats milk at that time and in that place. Most people who wanted or needed goats milk (not being able to feed baby cows milk for one thing) had their own goats. Oops. Well, I contacted the petting zoo again. They suggested the petting zoo in London, which was closer, so off I went in the farm truck with six newly weaned baby goats to the London petting zoo.

The only other livestock was the laying hens. Usually out of every thousand day old chicks they would lose about ten, so each thousand came with an extra ten. My father-in-law and my husband told me how to care for them, and wanted me to do so which would keep them from tracking some sort of disease or mite of something from the adult layers to the baby chicks. Well, in the time I had to care for these three thousand chicks, we lost only one. And I cried over that one. I had him in the kitchen of my home, in a shoebox, with heat and water and cared for him so tenderly and he, or she, died anyway. My four year old step daughter knew more about the life and especially the death of farm animals and she was comforting me, for heaven's sake!

And it is a very good thing that chickens don't stay the cute little yellow fluffy things they start out as, or I would have been sneaking thousands of chickens off to the petting zoo!

Anyway, Markinsa, your picture of the little piglet stirred up some rather old, but happy, memories. I no longer have anything to do with chickens, goats or pigs, but I do have cats. Currently only two of them. But there was a time when I took in every stray that came along and anyone needing a home for a cat came to my place. I had fourteen of them. For stray cats I WAS the petting zoo!!!!!

:)

smee2

Oh ... by the way

I found pigs to be the cleanest of animals. Yes, they roll in the good clean unsullied mud. It cools them down and apparently it kills off some lice or mites of some "bug" they are ... well, bugged by. It is NOT the bathroom stuff they roll in. That expression of being "happy as a pig in s h i t " is totally wrong. Given a clean pen, with food and water in one area, straw bedding in another, and straw bathroom facilities in another, they will not dirty the water or food, they keep their sleeping area tidy, and they keep the results of all their bathroom activity in one place. The concrete floors of some barns cause the liquid and liquified bathroom stuff to run so it looks and smells dirty. But pigs prefer to be clean. They are not dirty animals. People wonder how someone can have a pet pig, either a pot belly Vietnamese or a regular old pink curly tail. It is easier than keeping a cat really. Don't tell my cats I said that :)

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites
AKVET Rookie

AKVET

Posted
Posted

Smee2

When I lived on the farm, we had a dairy farm, we raised pigs also and they are the cleanest of any farm animal I know of. Our pens were all out side in the summer and they all had a low and high side to them. If you placed the feed trough in the low side they would move it to the higher side away from the area they did their business in. We kept them in one area for two years then moved them to where we had our garden for two years. This kept the weeds down in the garden and we very seldom had to weed the garden. I kept the runt of the litter one year and raised him, we used him for breeding until he just got to big, ended up butchering him and he weighed in at 432# cleaned and cut up. I also had one the would see me off to school and meet the buss in the afternoon, I never could keep him in the pen, he was the only one to escape out of about twenty and no I couldn't find where he escaped from. Miss the farm and the clean living but don't think I could do that amount of work now, left the farm in 68 and haven't been back to work one sense then. By the way the saying is happy as a pig in mud and not ****.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
smee2 Newbie

smee2

Posted
Posted

Smee2

When I lived on the farm, we had a dairy farm, we raised pigs also and they are the cleanest of any farm animal I know of. Our pens were all out side in the summer and they all had a low and high side to them. If you placed the feed trough in the low side they would move it to the higher side away from the area they did their business in. We kept them in one area for two years then moved them to where we had our garden for two years. This kept the weeds down in the garden and we very seldom had to weed the garden. I kept the runt of the litter one year and raised him, we used him for breeding until he just got to big, ended up butchering him and he weighed in at 432# cleaned and cut up. I also had one the would see me off to school and meet the buss in the afternoon, I never could keep him in the pen, he was the only one to escape out of about twenty and no I couldn't find where he escaped from. Miss the farm and the clean living but don't think I could do that amount of work now, left the farm in 68 and haven't been back to work one sense then. By the way the saying is happy as a pig in mud and not ****.

I did not grow up on a farm, but in a small subdivision in a farming area. My brother and I worked on various farms during the summer. We were there for the haying season, and some of the second planting for two season crops. We learned how to grab and crate the old layers that went to the Campbell's Soup Company to become soup, not the cleanest job on the farm. I learned to milk cows by hand at an early age, and spent an inordinate amount of time chasing the lambs in ... the sheepdog just sat and watched us and I am sure he was laughing all the while.

My dad was the one who used the more offensive "happy as a pig" version ... I think he enjoyed throwing in a few not-so-nice words occasionally just to get my mom going. I remember being outside one warm summer afternoon and hearing mom and dad talking in the kitchen through the kitchen window. Mom had overheard my brother repeat some of my dad's "language". So she said to him ... "Bill, you have to stop your swearing around the children. They are picking it up and it sounds like he11." We teased her about that for years.

Anyway, it is nice to know there are some people around who have a farming background. I couldn't do that kind of work now either but I am glad I did when I had the opportunity. It is a way of life that I think most kids could profit by, if they were to be involved for a few seasons. I really miss it.

:)

smee2

Link to comment
Share on other sites
precious1 Newbie

precious1

Posted
Posted

Hehehe, what an adorable lil piggy and a sweet sentiment, Thank you!

My dad had pigs, cattle and such when I was pre-teenager growing up in California. I had my fav, Boregaurd, a BIG ol male piggy. He would always come up to the fence so I could scratch his back. Then, I started plucking some of his hairs :o to make an artist paintbrush which he endured, bless his heart! He loved cupcakes! ;)

Thank you for reminding me of his sweet nature.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
smee2 Newbie

smee2

Posted
Posted

Short Piggy Story

When I was married to a chicken, goat and pig farmer, we had an old boar who, quite assuredly, was past his prime. I had been married, and living on the farm perhaps a month, when they brought the boar to the sow so they could do what they must do to produce little piggies. The sow stood, looking bored, but not boar-ed, if you get my drift. He got into position. He seemed to be doing all the right things from what I could see. But then, what could I tell not being raised on a farm? So, finally my father-in-law motions to my husband who goes to the back of the rutting pair. It seems that the old boar was having a small problem with orifice detection and recognition. He was humping away like crazy, and getting nowhere, because he was nowhere. Yeah, you get the picture. So my husband of a month of so, shocks the living daylights out of me by reaching down, grabbing the old boar's ... er ... ah ... well ... boar part, that's do ... and jamming it into the right orifice. Left to his own devices he wouldn't have made the right connection there.

About two months later we finally had to get rid of the old boar. I was afraid I knew where and how and just didn't want to know so I didn't ask. Very early version of don't ask and don't tell.

So, needing a boar to do his duty by the other sows, my husband borrowed a very young boar from a neighbour. Seems this is done all the time. Anyway, he was the handsomest young male pig I had ever seen, and by this time I had seen a few. He was very excited to be presented with the sow in heat. He raced to her backside, took his position, found his place immediately, and went to town. Man, that youngster had energy. Unfortunately he didn't have stamina. What appeared to be partway through his performance, he got this worried look on his little pink face, and collapsed behind the sow. The job he was doing finished itself outside of where it should have been. (Why on earth am I blushing as I write this?) The young boar could not stand up. It just lay there looking sorrowful. The sow was let go and wandered off for a quick bite to eat.

My father-in-law contacted the farmer from whom he had borrowed the young boar and explained what happened. Seems it had happened for the boar's owner too. He felt in time the boar would grow up enough to be useful. But in the mean time the young boar just lay in the straw. He couldn't move to get to his food, so we brought food and water to him. He couldn't move to use the toilet corner so my husband hosed him down twice a day. It took six days for that young boar to regain his strength, or equalibrium, or whatever it was he needed to regain. And sure enough when he was up and going he was up and going. He did everything he could to get out of his enclosure and get to one of the sows. Not wishing to take any chances my father-in-law took him back to his owner ... let him be the one to pigsit when the little boar collapsed again. Which he did. He never did get over it and the owner tried to get him to service sows several times. I didn't want to know what happened to him either.

Anyway, I may have a sick mind but I thought it was funny. And since we don't often have a thread about pigs ... this seemed the time to reminisce. By the way, where is Cisole these days?

:)

smee2

Link to comment
Share on other sites
kosman Newbie

kosman

Posted
Posted

Thank you, you made me laugh and smile when it was really needed.biggrin.gif Of course everyone here where I work is looking at my kind of funny like, but they just don't understand that the voices are talking to me . They are whispering, don't worry, RV before you know it, RV when you least expect it, Don't worry. Ok, back to reality, wait...that is not much fun. EVERYONE MUST HAVE A GOOD DAY! (Its a new rule)

K.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Saint Newbie

Saint

Posted
Posted

Smee

I too was raised on a farm in Canada and we had all your basic farm animals. As a small child we in fact played with the babies. However we were never exposed to the " brutality city folks call animal husbandry" as that was one part of farming. We also had wheat as uor cash crop. I was actually born by the light of a kerosene lamp, mom delivered me in the farm house before dad got the doctor back to the farm. Yeah that piggy picture can sure stir up older memories. Thanks you guys are great. :twothumbs:

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Markinsa Grand Master

Markinsa

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Thank you, you made me laugh and smile when it was really needed.biggrin.gif Of course everyone here where I work is looking at my kind of funny like, but they just don't understand that the voices are talking to me . They are whispering, don't worry, RV before you know it, RV when you least expect it, Don't worry. Ok, back to reality, wait...that is not much fun. EVERYONE MUST HAVE A GOOD DAY! (Its a new rule)

K.

Hehe, When I'm at work, I walk down the halls by myself whispering, "Will you stop talking to me!" Talk about funny looks. :lol:

-

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.


  • Testing the Rocker Badge!

    Take This Quiz

  • Live Exchange Rate

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.

  I accept