So the big day finally arrived on Saturday and we headed off to pick up the latest additions with a combination of excitement, anticipation and trepidation. Despite the preparations over the past months with a day at a breeders, an introduction to smallholding day and plenty of reading on the subject, nothing matches the feeling when you actually get started with something new like this!
Given that the car journey back again from Yearle Tamworths took about 90 minutes, I was surprised to see quite how chilled out they were by the time we got them back home. Even more surprising perhaps given that they are not used to a great deal of human contact and certainly not used to us clumsy beginners.
Even after unloading from the back of the car they were still quite content to just look around for a couple of minutes while we arranged things for the short trip round the back to the woods. I can’t help thinking that if we’d left it any longer then we would have had to borrow a bigger dog cage from the local vets.
There had been a fair amount of thought about which breed to try for our first weaners but in the end the fact that we expected to “free range” them in the woods led to the idea of a couple of Tamworths. Maybe next time we’ll try a different breed but we have plenty to learn with these first two I think.
I hope they appreciate their new home in the woods but they’ll never truly understand the effort needed to drag a pig ark through 3 fields and a wood with a quad bike. It’s certainly not something I’d want to do too often but at least the ark made it in one piece.
And below I have included a better close up picture which I have labelled Pig 1 and Pig 2 because they won’t be given any names. It just seems safer as they will only be with us until early November – we’ll give them the best life we can until that point but ultimately we are raising them for meat and mustn’t forget that.
I did wonder whether Butty and Chop would have been good names though?
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