Animals: Veritable & Virtual

Horse sense is the thing a horse has 
which keeps it from betting on people.

~ W. C. Fields

I can’t honestly say I like horses very much. Oh, I enjoy looking at them and I appreciate their beauty and sleekness. However, I never want to care for one (or two) again. The two we owned were purchased for the kids. They enjoyed riding the horses but the day to day care was often haphazard. After three years, the boys sold the horses.

When counting, try not to mix chickens with blessings.

~Unknown

When our children were growing up, we had fresh eggs from eight cage-free laying hens. We also raised fryers. My mom and dad, living next door, took care of butchering the fryers. Our freezers were filled with all we could eat of that prime meat.

If I had the space, I would raise free-range chickens for their eggs. On a small piece of urban land there would be no rooster. However, on two or three acres there’d be a strutting head-of-the-hen-house rooster so I could always have farm fresh as well as fertilized eggs (go figure!).

If you’re short of trouble, take a goat.

~Finnish saying

The less-than-acre of land my brother and I grew up on was in a riverine part of the exurbs. Fertile, loamy alluvial soil produced bountiful crops of fruit and vegetables. Our parents raised chickens and owned four goats, April, May, June and Chloë. As soon as mom quit nursing us, my brother and I drank goat’s milk, not cow’s milk.

When my sons were young, we owned two goats. The first one, Rowan, was a just-weaned male given to me as a housewarming gift when we moved to a mini-farm. I guess he was too high class to eat the blackberries and weeds on the three acres— he sure had no problem at all munching on the flowers in my perennial gardens. After a year or so, we gave him to a local woman who said her pregnant goat needed the companionship of a neutered male (don’t we all?).

A year later, we adopted sweet, fully-grown Ms. Sylvia Goat. She loved to run, jump and play with my youngest son. She would even walk along with him on the roadway as he went to visit neighbors. Sylvia did have an issue with being “non-human” however. She really wanted to be with the family all the time.

One icy, bitter cold winter afternoon I heard what sounded like “Maaaa-maaaa, maaaa-maaa” coming from the back yard. I ran outside and just as I turned the corner of the house, I saw Sylvia paddling around in our above ground pool. Somehow she’d freed herself from her pen, climbed up on the wooden deck, slipped and fell through the cover over the 5’ deep pool.

Her cloven hooves were no help as she desperately tried to climb out. In the process of trying, she ripped much of the liner to shreds.

Fortunately my parents lived next door. Dad ran over to help me pull that wet, cold, frightened goat out of the water. Sylvia was none the worse for her escapades; however, we realized she needed more room to roam and more freedom than her daily romps with my son provided. A local family with other goats adopted Sylvia.

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. 
Pigs treat us as equals.

~Winston Churchill

Over the years we raised three sets of pigs, two each time. Sonny and Cher were the first residents of the lean-to pied-à-terre built on the back side (downwind side) of our barn.

We’d heard all the stories about pigs favoring mud and wallowing in filth, about how noisy they could be. None of that dissuaded us. We loved the “end products” and my father offered to take care of their feedings when we were at work.

As much as one could read the mind of pigs, we figured out they really did appreciate clean bedding and good food. At least, we humans preferred to keep the pen clean and the food healthful, and the pigs didn’t seem to mind.

Those two pigs grew fat and healthy and the ham, bacon and pork chops from them proved to be worth our investment in time and money.

The next two were males: Barney and Fred. My dad did all of the feeding of these two and much of the “housekeeping” as both my husband and I were working full time. Dad, ever the frugal one, wasn’t feeding them as much as I felt necessary.

As with the first pair of pigs, when grocery shopping I stopped by the fresh food section to collect any fruit or vegetables heading to the discard bins. However, I went further with this second set:

My husband and I attended formal company banquets five or six times a year. In those days the banquet fare was usually steak, baked potato, a limp, gray-green vegetable and some nondescript dessert. At least half of the attendees left huge amounts of food on their plates. What a waste! My pigs would love this stuff!

One particular evening, dinner having been served and the speeches just beginning, I watched as the waitress moved up behind me, pushing her cart full of dirty dishes and assorted clumps of leftover food. As she leaned down to query me: “Are you finished, Ma’am?” I asked her, sotto voce, if there was any way I could collect all that discarded food for my pigs. “No problem, not at all. Sure, drive around the back when you leave and I’ll have it in garbage bags for you.”

Oh, I felt so very proud of myself! My partner grinned knowingly when I told him about my coup. And, in an hour or so, there we were, he in tux and I in cocktail dress, hoisting four 30-gallon garbage bags full of table scraps into the trunk of our car.

The next day before wheel-barrowing the bags down to the barn, I looked into one of them. To my dismay, almost every half-eaten potato or steak had a cigarette butt mashed into it (oh yes, did I forget to say? Those were the days when smoking was allowed—every place!).

Well, MY pigs were not going to be fed cigarettes! Dishpan in hand, hour upon hour, I took every single bit of those leftovers into the kitchen sink, sorted through the garbage, found and discarded all the butts. Fred and Barney were forever grateful, of course.

By the time my family and I were raising the third and last set of pigs (two males again, Andy and Bax), we felt we knew what we were getting into. The boys and their dad picked up the two little weaners as soon as they could be taken from their momma and all went as planned with the care and feeding.

The time came for Andy and Bax, full-grown, healthy and quite active, to be taken to the abattoir. By this time, my father had sold his slat-sided trailer. However, we now owned an old car with a hatchback and no back seat. This rig had served us well for hauling hay, straw and animal feed. We saw no reason it couldn’t be just as good as the trailer for taking these piggies to market.