Three Peaches
I’ve often been asked if it is okay to feed peaches to pigs. The concern people have is the pits causing the pigs to choke or otherwise get caught in their digestive tract. While it is possible that it could happen I have never seen it. What I have observed is the pigs chew the peach and spit out the pits. They have quite dexterous tongues.
Pigs also routinely chew on rocks and dig through the dirt. This is a way that they naturally get minerals out in the pastures. Some of the pigs years ago learned to toss rocks into the bathtub to make it clang when it was empty. This was my signal to go fill the tub with whey. Chicken dance anyone? Or am I Pavlov‘s dog?
Outdoors: 85°F/63°F Sunny
Tiny Cottage: 79°F/61°F
Daily Spark: Man is a complex chicken —BF Skinner
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.
Yes its hard to imagine any pig dumb enough to try to swallow a peach pit. Some people yes, pigs not too likely.
Has that rock-tossing-in-the-tub practice continued through the generations? Have they taught each other this skill?
Considering what happens to the pigs in the end, I’m not sure they’re as clever as they think.
I don’t think they’re passing it on through the generations. Rather I think a few of the bigger sows figured it out by chance. They pickup things and chew on them and then drop them. Some pigs toss sticks in the tubs. I have seen them go and get sticks and bring them a fair distance to drop them in. The effect is more dramatic with rocks in the metal tubs that make a nice clanging sound. The bigger 300 gallon rubber tubs don’t have that effect.
Some years ago I was living in New Mexico, just south of Santa Fe, at six thousand feet, with a red-headed professor, a pack of wolf hybrids that looked astonishingly like your LLGDs, and a short-legged appaloosa horse named Skippy Joe. Skippy lived in a paddock about a hundred meters uphill of our house. In the depths of winter we sometimes slept in a bit due to blowing snow. Our rental had a few acres, was rural, but was a poorly made wooden house. and leaving the comforters long after the wood stoves had died was torture! Skippy learned that kicking his galvanized feed trough made a crash that would echo for miles. Once he started he was persistent and unrelenting. Eventually one or another of the tormented humans whose bedroom faceed toward his paddock would emerge, dash uphill, and put alfalfa in the trough.
It was deliberate, and he had an internal clock that was unerring. We never needed an alarm, and Skippy was really lucky neither of us was French.
*grin* Skippy had his pet humans well and truly trained!
Oops, someone forgot to tell me not to give peaches to my pigs! I had 3 cases go yucky almost overnight, so my pigs (6) got about 75lbs of whole peaches earlier this week. They’re all still alive ;-)
I read on one of your other blogs that you don’t feed your pigs meat. Is there any particular health reason that you don’t? I just got a 5 week old Yorkshire Hampshire cross. I actually asked you about why it’s front legs were giving out and if it might of been some disease. It seems to be better and i think it had just strained itself. I got a bag of sow starter from the feed store but i’m not liking that it has words that i can’t pronounce in the ingredients, so i’m looking for a healthier feed for it. I called one of the local stores to see if I could get their throw away items but they said that they couldn’t give me anything. I’m on a tight budget and i’ve been feeding it table scraps, which includes meat, and I was wondering what would be the best thing to feed it. Your help would be much appreciated. Thank you and God bless. Acts 10:11-15 KJV
The fear with feeding meat is disease getting passed to the pigs, particularly trichinosis. In some (most?) places it is illegal to feed meat to pigs who’s flesh will be sold. If you are going to feed meat then the recommendation is to cook it. Same goes for any post-consumer wastes. We feed only pre-consumer wastes: e.g., whey, apple pomace, etc. This avoids the problem of people infecting the pigs with a disease.