Bye, bye mum

We removed Doris’s 10 piglets from her today as she was losing condition fast and they’re now old enough to live entirely on a diet of solids. Usually, we’d take the sow away from the piglets but as we hadn’t quite finished the fencing it was easy to catch a couple of piglets at a time and move them into a pen in the byre.

Six to eight would have gone to new homes within the next couple of days as we have buyers lined up, but I’m still waiting for the British Pig Association to complete the paperwork so I can birth register them, ear notch them and sell them. It’s more than a little irritating as I would have liked to put the two best gilts into the Rare Breeds Auction at Thainstone as pedigree animals, but without paperwork there’s not much point. Hopefully, it will come through this week.