Pigs!

Our family currently has six pigs: two boys and four girls. They are not at all like the storybook pigs who happily eat a bucket of kitchen scraps and call it good. Ours are food snobs. They turn up their noses at vegetables but go crazy for doughnuts, Halloween candy, and steak. Just like our chickens, they get all of our food scraps- just with much stronger opinions about what qualifies as a “treat.”

When they were smaller, they treated the ranch like a hotel where they could check in or out at their leisure. One day, our neighbors called to let us know the pigs were in their front yard… almost two miles away. Nothing quite compares to the mix of embarrassment and panic that comes with retrieving your wandering pigs from someone else’s garden.

The biggest takeaways so far: pigs are a lot more work than cows or chickens. These ones are fairly gentle, but they are also big, hungry, and very motivated by food. I’m pretty sure if they were unfed and I walked out without a big stick in their pasture, I’d be the most interesting “snack” they’d seen all day.