Double Stuff Nursing Piglets
This is just a piglet fix for those in need. These little guys are at that maximum cuteness age.
Outdoors: 35°F/25°F Partially Sunny, 1″ Snow
Tiny Cottage: 66°F/63°F
Daily Spark: I make plans, then I live life.
Jeffries Family Farm
Walter Jeffries Tinker, Tailor… A bit eclectic & a tad eccentric, polymath, quantum mechanic & Farmer. Also lucky at cards.Oven, Spit & Pit Roaster Pigs!
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OMGosh! This just takes me back to my uncle’s Iowa farm in the mid to late 50s. Nowadays, you cannot find a piglet outdoors in Iowa. Can’t see a piglet in the barn lots. Can’t even find a full-grown hog on a countryside drive. If I ever happen upon a lone “grown to butcher hog” or an Amish farm with sows and piglets, I take a picture!
Regarding your spark… there’s an oft-repeated quote- Want to make the gods laugh? Make plans. It never fails that we think, plan, pre-live, plan some more, rehearse, and then when we are ready to implement… something else of earth-shattering importance rolls in the way.
I like! I make plans but know to dodge. Hope says, “Life is filled with wiggly, squiggly twists and turns.” Holly and I have long said that “Plans are made to be changed.” I have to plan, it’s the way I am, but I also know I have to play the cards I have moving forward at any moment, adjusting as the situations change. Thus the spark.
One of my favorite quotes ever comes from Eisenhower: “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”
very cute
how many are there
i count 10
is it true that each piglet only sucks one nipple
i read that some where
There are 11 in that photo. One of them is very hard to see over towards her head. It is sort of hidden behind another but if you look very closely you can see it.
Piglets switch around which nipple they use. There is a myth that they always suck from the same teat but that is false. I have both video and still photos which prove they switch nipples – it’s very easy to observe it happening in litters like this where there are so many distinct colors and markings.
Very cute! Love that you named the sow double stuffed to complement your Oreo sow :)
*grin* Double-Stuff is the daughter of Oreo. She has nearly identical markings as her mother. Oreo in turn is a daughter of Blackie. All three of them farrowed the same week together in the north home field this last time so now there are oodles of piglets of many colors all running around there.
I am so very happy to see all the different colors, especially the blacks and the belteds. There was a lot of white in the last batches of piglet photos.
White is a dominant color gene and coat color is fairly complex, not being a simple either or. Some of our lines are pure white or white with speckles. Others carry the black, which is second dominant, red, yellow and then there is the belting, butts, manes, crowns, spot and nose color genes. It is quite fascinating to trace the lineages and observe how the colors and markings get expressed. Because the White gene is dominant over everything else a pure White parent can have piglets that are all white but they then might have colored piglets. Based on the litters our big boar Speckles is a pure white with just some small spots (thus his name). So he tends to throw litters that are all white, covering up any other colors the mothers carry. Genetics is fun. Breeding is fun.
Thanks for posting the photo, it’s a great sight for folks like me eager to get started with piglets! Looking forward to the pick-up date!
Wow. We have Tamworth pigs and the girls just had piglets. We do the natural thing and raise them in the woods. This was our first farrowing and it was amazing. The first litter was born on Wednesday and the second on Thursday. They are so sweet! Thanks for sharing your pics!
What kind of a shelter did you build in the background? Can you send a better picture of the shelter? We want to get a couple of pigs but want to get the shelter up first. Thanks Ellen
That is a hut made from half of a broken 3,000 gallon water tank that someone gave me. We’ve experimented with a lot of different shelters. That works very well.