Into the Woods

The pigs were finished with their old pasture.  They’d snuffled and rooted and then snuffled and rooted again, and it was past time for something new to explore.  Today, not knowing exactly what would happen, I opened their gate, and Michelle and I led them, without fanfare, to their summer home, a couple acres of oak trees on the north side of our property.  There’s an element of unpredictability when six pigs are at large.  I had a plan which called for calm and patience in the face of chaos; Michelle was less comfortable with this, and Chloe, who did not participate, thought that I should, at the minimum, have a Plan B.  There was not.  There’s no doubt that they’ve been longing for the lush grass in the yard just beyond the single strand of electrified twine of their enclosure, and I expected that they’d at least sample some on their way to the oak trees.  Michelle carried a bucket of high value slops.  I carried a bucket of grain.  They simply followed us through the yard, over the driveway and up the path into woods.  We rewarded their good behavior with the contents of our buckets, and that was it, a drama-less transition of a few hundred feet.

I spent the rest of my morning sprucing up their summer shelter, and walking around with them so that I could watch them get to know the limits of their new environment.  There’s a round bale of hay in case they get tired of last year’s acorns, a steady supply of spent grain from the neighborhood brewery, and, just in time, El El Frijoles, Sedgwick’s taqueria, opens for the season this week, meaning a steady supply of nutritious slops for the next three months.

Here’s a ten second video I posted on the pig’s facebook page showing a special method of eating dandelions.

https://www.facebook.com/michael.sheahan.739/videos/200151917462933/