Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

just roast the porky...

I was out voted on the Roast pork front Rupert. Brad Pigg has his own facebook following.
Well his pig pen is very nearly finished and was the site of a sweet potato patch. Brad thinks he is in heaven and regularly finds the odd sweet potato, his eyesight is not so good, so every now and then we get to find one or two.

Thats a lovely big pen for him Faye, room for a friend for him too?


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I was once young and stupid, i'm not so young now

I did say that perhaps we could get him a temporary pig friend.

Our lone pig really enjoyed the company of sheep and the goat, and even the chickens. Not so much the emu. The emu kept trying to love him in that special way mummies and daddies do.

Throw in a chicken or two. Pigs love anyone who loves digging

Will that pig pen become a garden bed again? ie is the plan to use him as part of crop rotation?

He is getting a turkey for a friend He does love Tia the Staffy in that special way, I have a photo that I will not share, Tia looks very unsure, I told her that Brad just wants a piggy back ride. The pen will belong to Brad for the term of his natural life. It would make great stables for rabbit breeding with a bit more mosquito proofing. Not planning to rotate hime through any more of my crops, that is why raised beds are good and fruit trees are fairly safe once established.

Turkey is perfect. They all look the same so he wont notice the change every year

Our sons had a pig for a 4-H project. She quickly became a pet. They taught her tricks. They would point their finger at her like a piston and go Bang! And she'd fall over "dead". Her name was Molly and she was a reg. pig. Forgot the breed - they are white and long bodied and their ears fall down over their eyes. She ran loose with our dairy goat herd on several hundred acres around us. One day the goats came up to our yard with the big oak tree and started chewing their cud. Molly fell down in the shade and went to sleep. After awhile the goats got up and went off down the hill to go browse some more. They were out of sight when Molly suddenly jumped up and realized they'd left her. I never heard such squealing as that, pure indignation! She either could hear their bells in the distance or smell which way they went and she took off at a dead run going off where they'd gone. Later that day she came in with them. Sadly, later that summer when it was really hot, she came in from the woods with the goats overheated and got into one of our ponds to cool off. We found her in the pond already gone. The breeders told us that when they overheat and then suddenly cool off like that, it causes a heart attack. They gave us a littlemate sister to Molly and the boys named her Dolly but she was never as personable as Molly (she was a lot older when we got her, too). And she ended up with fertility problems when it was time to breed her so we sold her for butcher. A few years ago we got a couple of small pigs from a friend to turn over our garden for the winter - we have fireants in our garden something awful. We were hoping the pigs would turn over the ant nests while it was freezing and kill them. This did seem to work fairly well as we had way less ants when we put in the garden later that spring (after the pigs went into the freezer). We never saw any ant bites on the pigs but we did see areas where we knew there were big ant hills all turned up big time. I think the pigs could smell the food the ants had put away and went after it. The ants made a come back by the end of the summer but for a while, the pigs turning things over in the winter set them back. The fireants think our garden is one big ant condo complete with buffet...

Some years ago we had a pot belly pig show up at our place - since we are a mile and half from the next neighbor, this was very weird. He was very small, too. Nothing but woods between us and the next house. We were breeding horses then and he took up with them. He finally made friends with us, too. As he grew, he started tearing up gates and fences so he could go wherever he wanted to go. We had a gaited Morgan stallion in a pen close to our house. He was amazingly tolerant of the pig and seemed to enjoy him coming to visit (through the hole he tore in the bottom of the chain link gate). One day I watched from my kitchen window as that pig stood up on his hind legs and was smelling all over the horse's legs while his front legs rested on the horse. One by one he stood up and checked out, all the way around. I don't know what he was looking for or smelling but Mystery stood there stock still and let him do it. It was something to see. We had a Morab stallion in another paddock and the pig would go to visit him, too, but Black Powder didn't like the pig (the only horse on the place that didn't like him) and would chase him right back out of the paddock. The pig would squeal and scream like he was sooo offended. When Powder would turn away, the pig would go right back in there, just asking for it and the horse would go after him again. It was like the pig just couldn't believe that this horse wouldn't make friends with him. He'd try every once in a while but never got the horse to accept him. Eventually we had to let him go as he was tearing up fences (like into my garden!) and gates and getting bigger and more destructive. When we had Molly and Dolly, we didn't have all the fences/horses/garden/etc. to worry about. They could run free and not bother anything. Those days are long gone. We've had other pigs, too, at other times. They are very smart. Too smart most of the time.

What a lovely story Libertymtn Thanks for sharing, Molly and Dolly sounds precious.

Thanks to some tosser pig hunter releasing some in our area we now have these digging up my parents farm and hiding in the bush.
Old man got this one yesterday but missed about 15 more.

Fences! What fence? Only thing that stops these is a bullet.

Braddy is about to get a visit from the mobile vet, if you've seen how big he is now, you will understand why the vet has to come to him and not him go the vet. The lovely man from the council came to visit and is so jealous that we can have a pig, and he said there would be no problem getting him registered. He said meeting Brad Pigg was his highlight of the day and could he take photos of him as his wife wanted to see. I told him that Brad Pigg loves having his photo taken. W
Anyway today he is getting his worm treatment and certification that he has been sterilised. Brad is making very good bedding mix for the dirt garden

sucks to hear that, although if your parents live anywhere from kalbarri south the whole way along the coastline all the way past esperance then chances are the pigs are already there. They breed very very well, better then rabbits IMO as they produce good sized litters and dont really have a predator. Mind you there are some knobs in that hobby, but then there are clowns in every aspect of life.

There are more ways then shooting pigs, in fact ive found shooting to not be effective at all. As an example there is a place I hunt, they hardly have issues with pigs now, but 2 doors down there is a guy that wont have dogs there but lets a guy shoot there, place gets overturned with pigs, yet they wont come 600 or so odd metres along the bush to come to the place I hunt.

Trapping is OK, dogging is the most effective(not just saying that because I am a dogger either, there is a reason the farmers only use me for pig control and no other way), poisoning is OK until they wisen up(like trapping) but it is a woeful way for any animal to have to die, and despite what they say they DO poison other animals.

There used to be on youtube a vid of a dog that had eaten 1080 and they video'd the effects of the poison.. if you want to be put of poison for life go have a look at what happened

hows this for some trivia - there are more wild pigs in Australia then there are people!

Know there has always been some around in other areas and at first we put it down to migration. But 2 we got in the early days had notched ears and not by dog teeth.

Shooting is just for the ones within easy range of the house in daylight. Also 2 trip action cage traps in use fairly often that catch a few. Some of the locals do dog hunt in the bush but its a big area and very hilly.
As you said they breed as fast as rabbits so they are here pretty much to stay now. Just have to try restrict the population.

Parents property adjoins part of Wellington National/state Park, Western Australia

ah down near collie I see, I would say you have had pigs there for a very very long time. I have heard of people whos grandparents used to catch pigs down that way when they were young(the grandparents).

Know what you mean about the ears, I have seen similar, you get some real idiots out there. Ive seen ears ripped/removed by other pigs too, when they fight I assume, pigs can do some pretty bad damage to each other when they fight! I got a big boar a while back that had a really big scar up his back leg from where he had been ripped by another boar, and pretty much most boars I catch have scars on their shoulders/back from where they fight with other boars.

thats a nice boar Privatteer, thats coming from someone who likes to hunt pigs and does so on farm land to control pig numbers, even if i wanted to i couldn't wipe them out and getting out on the land to hunt is a good way to keep fit and help the farmer out, I remember when i was in primary school (about 32 years ago) a class mate brought some pig tusks to school from Jarrahdale and i have since collected some tusks myself from the same area not so long ago, the best you can do is manage the population weather it's with doggers, trapping or shooting or all three it will be an ongoing battle, personally i wont use dogs or poison although i have just lost my best friend and hunting companion, a 17 year old mastiff cross i never terned him loose on pigs but he did save my bacon a few time if you know what i mean.