Circle M Farm

As we were watching this take place – the first hour of Pigabella’s long labor toward 14 piglets – Shannon said, “How does anything survive?!”

The very question was on my mind, too. Life is such a miracle, and you really remember that when you witness something like a huge litter of pigs learning how to nurse at the Mama Milk Bar. Unlike a sheep, a sow doesn’t do anything for the babies but lay on her side for them. And Pigabella didn’t even do that very well, squashing two of the piglets in the first hours of labor as she shifted her weight to let the piglets at the teats.

A sheep licks the babies off, pushes them toward the teats, cleans up their poop and in general fusses about them from the time they drop. Piglets, on the other hand, are born way out of site of their mom. They work their way, absolutely independently, toward the teats and then have to fight against their siblings there to find some food. It is during that journey toward the teats, across the mama’s rough rump and the velvety bodies of the other piglets, that the birth sac is rubbed off. Babies born in the sac quickly suffocate if they don’t get moving. We immediately broke and pulled off the membranes as the babies flopped out of Pigabella, after finding one of the first piglets dead in it’s sac.

Unfortunately after 2 days, only 8 of Pigabella’s 14 piglets remained. One dead at birth, three squashed as she got up and moved in the nest, one had a birth defect that wouldn’t allow it to poop, and one got trampled in the chaos of moving the family out of the nest and into a wooden shelter during a torrential thunderstorm. Life.