The past couple of weeks have been very busy; I’ve have 5 AS-Level exams, been to the vet’s twice, visited family and a pig farm. The exams all went well and there were no major mistakes (as far as I’m aware) on my part, and at college we are already well into the next batch of modules.
At the vet’s, amongst other things, I have seen; a rabbit with diarrhoea, a spaniel with back pain, cats and dogs that had had spays and a boxer with an ulcer on its eye.
After visiting my mum’s cousins on the weekend, I spent a day at a pig farm. I got to see each stage of a pig’s development at a commercial farm. First, the sows and boars:
There were very few boars in comparison to sows as, at this farm, they use artificial insemination. Sows which are ‘in pig’ for the first time are kept separately from the others.
Next, I saw the pregnant sows and sows that had recently given birth:
All of the sows’ young had to be counted; alive or dead. A number of the piglets born that day were ‘mummified’ (they had died and started to decompose in the womb). The farmer also had to kill a couple, which were too small to survive. I was surprised at how sharp their teeth were, even the ones which were only hours old.
At four weeks old, the young are weaned off of their mothers, which five weeks later will go through artificial insemination again, and the process will begin again. Pigs do not have a ’season’ so this process continues all year. The piglets grow until they are about 150 days old when some of the sows will produce their first litter, and the rest will be sent to slaughter.
150 days seems a very short life and, as the farmer explained to me, it is, but farmers have not many other options as consumers constantly want lower prices. This was the opinion expressed in the TV program Jamie Oliver’s ‘Foul Dinners’ (although this was focused on chickens) which I watched recently. Hopefully, Jamie will have even more luck raising awareness with his ‘Foul Dinners’ as he did with ‘School Dinners’…
