Fogarty!
From this day forward our little boar will be known as Hog Fogarty (or Foggy for short), in honour of the most successful World Superbike racer of all time, renowned for his high corner speed riding style, aggressive competitiveness, and loud squealing when he didn’t get what he wanted. Just like our own speedy, pushy, complaining little piggy.
Note that I say hoping, rather than expecting. We bought Yoda on the understanding that she was pregnant, and due to give birth either in mid-November, or three weeks later. The uncertainty arose as a result of some doubts about whether Marley, the would-be piglets’ father, was “working”, and we held off confirming Yoda’s purchase until her previous owners were confident that the Deed had been successfully Done. But, in the absence of direct observation of the romantic tryst, the alleged pregnancy has been diagnosed by behaviour (as so often seems to be the case) rather than anything more scientific. Yoda had, presumably “…gone three weeks and not returned to hogging” (Starting with Pigs by Andy Case), which basically means that, after her one-night stand, she stayed in for three weeks washing her hair and watching old movies, and instead of getting tarted-up to go back on the town with her mates, she took up knitting.
Which might mean she is pregnant. But it might also mean she just wasn’t in the mood, and didn’t fancy the guy all that much. Who can say? Only Old Father Time, it seems. So here we are, once again, in that oh-so-familiar world of Wait and See.
Of course, whichever way the reproductive cookie ends up crumbling, we have to be prepared for the possibility that New Pig Life might be arriving in our midst any time soon. And from the little we have so far discovered about breeding pigs, it seems that Yoda will need a place of her own in which to drop her sprogs – sorry, I mean ‘farrow’. So Simon has been busy with his saw, his screw-driver, and his architectural imagination, and has created a stunning little pied-à-terre in the lower precinct of pigland, for the exclusive use of a nesting Yoda, whenever the need arises.
I have to say that the Grand Designs were somewhat curtailed by a time-shrinking sense of urgency cast over Simon’s creative musings by an ominous sign of imminent birth. At the end of last week we noticed that Yoda’s vulva was “pink and swollen” (sorry folks…but when one starts down the interesting road of breeding animals, one finds oneself spending an awful lot of time staring at their nether regions), which according to the venerable Mr Case, “…is one of the general signs of approaching birth“.
But hang on a minute…..what’s this, from the section on Hogging (on heat) in the same book?
“Gilts are relatively easy to tell when hogging. They usually have a reddened and swollen vulva…….”
So the question arises….is Yoda about to give birth, or is she on heat, and not pregnant after all? Or, to put it another way, Is that swollen vulva pink, or reddened?
Surely, in this clever, easy world of Clearblue, someone somewhere must be capable of producing a home pregnancy testing kit for pigs. I, for one, would not object to holding a nifty bit of digitalized plastic under Yoda’s porky bum while she waters the daisies if it could tell me, once and for all, whether we should get busy knitting sixteen pairs of hoofy booties, or whether we should be searching Les Pages Jaunes for a proper manly ‘Stud Boar for Hire – no hog too small’.
