Two tone pigs

The pigs were lying in the mud on one side only, so they (two of them) are browned right down the middle like mimes.

They look fully mudded, but they’re not.

There’s the pink side!

Yesterday they liberated themselves.  I came home, no pigs, and did my usual march all over all the places they could get themselves in trouble with a pail in hand, but I couldn’t find any trace of them.  It was too late to rouse them.  I was sure they’d chosen a place to sleep, and when pigs are asleep, you can walk right past them. Which meant they hadn’t gotten into any trouble, and I expected them home for breakfast.

They were.  They returned right to the place where they’d breached the fence.  They were a pain to get back in. Why should we, when we can just upset the chicken food?  But once recaptured, they were so tuckered out from their big adventure they spent half the day napping in their house.

Later when I was moving their enclosure, I discovered they had been right on the other side of their fence, exactly where I was shifting them to.  They’d gone for a sneak pre-root.  It’s a nice spot.  I’ve been working them over to here.  Now they’re under two big apple trees.  Not a lot of apples, but they can just wait for them to drop.

Moving the pig fence is one of the most nightmarish jobs I do here.  It’s like untangling a big snarl of wool while dragging it through dense brush, with a time limit.  If the snarl of wool were 40 lbs and also snagged on absolutely everything, as did your hair, and it tripped you.  It takes two hours, weekly when the pigs are big, and it’s exhausting and frustrating.  And I’ve got it dialed.  I can even estimate routes that make the fence ends meet pretty accurately.  It’s been worse.  Much worse.  But the results are good;  I’m slowly reclaiming the field, although it’s a multistage project to get rid of the glossy leaf buckthorn.

It’s not exactly a thankless job.  I get this:

Happiest pigs ever

The pigs are expressive and clearly joyful.  They have enough room that I can’t even see them from one side to the other.