Pigs, Hogs, Swine - General

[mnjrutherford]

We have 2 pigs, one about 7 or 8 months old and one about 4 months.

The older pig is named "Bacon" and the younger is "Ham" for clear and obvious reasons....

How can we tell if the older pig is male or female? We THOUGHT it was a "she" up until today, due to a lack of testicles and what appeared to be a lack of a penis. Today, someone told Mike that if the urine goes forward, the animal is a castrated male, if the urine goes behind, it is a female.

Google just shows idiocy if I search "hog genitalia" and I'm not interested in the sorts of things that will likely show up if I use other terms.

Regarding the younger animal, he is clearly male has he has penis and testicles. Question is, how does this affect the flavor of the meat? I don't want to castrate the animal at this late date. We are beginners, and that is just a bit to much for us at this point. However, we do need to have him slaughtered when he gets a bit larger. If the meat is going to taste ok, we will slaughter him small and have a barbecue. If not, we will get him a little bit larger and turn him into dog food.

All knowledge in this area would be greatly appreciated!

[blueadzuki]

I'm just going on what I have read (I don't have any pigs (or for that matter, other livestock) myself, but I seem to recall that the meat of uncastrated male pigs tends to get really gamey, really quickly Look up "boar taint" (oh no wait a second, I just imagined what might show up online if you put that in google!) Post puberty uncastrated male pigs are generally only used for breeding. So I'd plan on the "dog food" line. One minor note, if you decide for some reason that it is better for you to keep the pig around (say you are planning to have many pigs eventually and need a stud boar, or think it would be more economically remunerative to sell it, it is traditional to mark an uncastrated boar by putting a notch into one of the ears, as a form of shorthand.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I was brave and ran the search... There is a comprehensive article on Wikipedia about Boar Taint.

[oxbowfarm]

I have no personal experience with boar taint. There is some interesting perspective on it on the Sugar Mountain Farm Blog.

[Deleted]

(Fetal) pig anatomy in college dissections:
www.whitman.edu/content/virtualpig/sexing-your-pig/female
www.whitman.edu/content/virtualpig/sexing-your-pig/male

www.anselm.edu/homepage/bpenney/teaching/BI102/Elements/6PigDissectionI.pdf
(Pg3 for diagram.)

Mar 4, 2013 10:35:27 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

I was brave and ran the search... There is a comprehensive article on Wikipedia about Boar Taint.

If I could do only one of three things -- castrate an animal, use a dangerous vaccine, or keep the feeding area clean -- I would personally prefer the harmless, low tech way.

But, I have to put human life first.

Will an intact boar get aggressive, if you move him, clean around him, or confine him with other boars?

Feral hogs are being euthanized in my area for annoying dogs. The details were not made clear to me, yet.

But, I was offered plenty of meat, if I could learn to butcher them reasonably. So, I listen-in, whenever they are being discussed.

[Deleted]

I was also wondering how you would fatten such a large animal on a household economy, even while we're discussing how to keep people fed. What kind of food is so plentiful and cheap, and can it be produced independently?

(Depending on which search terms I use, I'm getting results for video game cheats.)

[12540dumont]

I have personal experience raising hogs.

1. You must castrate the boars. They are vicious to the females and aggressive to everyone they come in contact with. As sweet as our female pigs were, the boars were absolutely nasty tempered and the one that we didn't castrate tasted absolutely foul.

2. Getting extra food. Here there's a place called Second Harvest Food Bank. They get a lot of food that's going out of date, and then some that is just going bad. We used to get a lot of stale cereal products from them. We also had someone making tofu near us, from which there is a lot of milky waste. We would get that and mix it with the cereal.

3. Leo invested in four 55 gallon plastic drums and used to put them in the back of the truck. We'd leave them at the local grocery and at one restaurant and ask them to dump anything that was edible in it. This would often be a ghastly mix of things that only a pig could love. Trimmed greens, green meat....eww. I remember once after Thanksgiving getting 200 packages of brown and serve rolls. (Well, I put those in the freezer!)

4. We had the vet castrate the boars. It was worth every penny. Why did we keep a boar? We were trying to keep our own boar to mate with our lovely female. He used his tusks to totally lacerate her sides. He would charge the fence when I was around. After that, we took the female to someone who kept boars to be re-bred. The 4-H kids here do artificial insemination as part of a class. Bet you can do that too.

[blueadzuki]

Mar 30, 2013 10:21:13 GMT -5 @degzing said:

I was also wondering how you would fatten such a large animal on a household economy, even while we're discussing how to keep people fed. What kind of food is so plentiful and cheap, and can it be produced independently?

(Depending on which search terms I use, I'm getting results for video game cheats.)

One of the big reasons that, if I was planning to keep pigs, I think I'd probably go and try and get some Ossabaw Island hogs. While I believe fairly small by food pig standards, they do have the advantage as being as close to the Haitian Black pig as still exists (well, as close as you can get without having to mess around with trying to import pigs from the Carribean, say, from the Dominican Republic or, god help me, Cuba). And one of the things that made the Haitians Black pig so good for the Haitians (and probably why the CIA killed them all in the 70's (probably on orders from the World Bank, who wanted Haiti to move from subsitience agriculture to export monocrops.) was that it was basically a 100% forage pig; it could live completely on garbadge, bugs and whatever it could root up and convert that to what was generally regarded as very high quality meat. In other worlds, it could eat like a feral pig while producing like a domestic. That's the kind of pig I'd look for.

[mnjrutherford]

Well, "Bacon" went to slaughter 2 weeks ago. We had them make knockwurst, bratwurst, and breakfast sausage (my seasonings) with part, we got back snouts, tail, and ears which we smoked for doggie treats, we made pork chops the first night we got the meat back... haven't had chops in ages and they were DEEElish! carved the loin out of the ribs, brined, smoked, and now we have home made Canadian bacon... Made the most INCredible eggs Benedict with some of it... Now, we have an 18 pound ham in the smoker getting ready for dinner tomorrow.

We are butchering the intact male which we estimate to be about 5 months old on Thursday. We will BBQ half for a party on Saturday. The rest will go to bacon and sausage and smoked doggie treats. I am crossing my fingers that it is still to young to have taint. please please please please. We are also on the look out for 3 more piglets.

As for food, we purchased about 400 lbs of corn over the course of 8 months for the one animal at about $20 a month. We also fed her ALL of our scraps and another friend brought there scraps to her as well. She fattened up pretty well. We fermented most of her feed.

[steev]

Given the need to feed humans before pigs, while pigs are food for humans, I think we must look to the means of feeding pigs used occasionally by Woo in "Deadwood".

[olddog]

Pretty scary if we come to that; though I do know a few amoral politicians.........

We did raise Russian Wild Pigs, and the boar was like no boar I had ever seen, the sweetest, gentlest soul ever. Yes, we all cried when he was slaughtered. Now the female was another story, she would chase us out of the pen, and at that size, and ferocious look, we ran as fast as we could, and my relatives would actually dive over the fence. Did not take the time to open the gate!

[Deleted]

I realize there are different sizes, but how much do you have to feed a hog, to keep it happy?

[12540dumont]

Deg,
We fed our sow about 2-3 pounds of food a day, more if she was preggers. If we had it to do again, and I would like to, we would get Kunekune Pigs. They are smaller and can live on grass and good grazing. I think I would plant and let them follow the chickens, in an endless rotation.

By the way, our sow was over 300 pounds when she graced the table of the homeless shelter. The slaughter guy killed her for free, and the meat cutter cut her for free, and we donated it all to St. Joseph's Table. They were desperate at the time for any meat. They even took the evil boar and made sausage out of him.

[castanea]

I've never had hogs but if I ever do, I thought I would try these smaller varieties:

Guinea hogs
Choctaw
Ossabaw
Kunekunes
Mulefoot

[olddog]

i was not in charge of the regular feeding, i just fed the table scraps, but i do know it was around $100 per month.

They were expensive to raise, as they took twice as long or longer to put on the same weight. as other breeds.