Alright, friends….buckle your seatbelts! Are you ready for a pig birth story?
File this under things I did not expect to writing about in 2023! Haha. A year ago we didn’t even know we would have land, let alone animals, let alone pigs, let alone a pig giving birth under our watch!!! But here we are…and boy, is it a story!
We have three pigs- a female and two males. Obviously, pregnancy is possible but we hadn’t officially observed any heats and therefore weren’t watching for a gestation period. The last few weeks we have wondered at a possible pregnancy as our female seemed quite large. Still, she’s very young and it was improbable that she could already be pregnant, let alone at the end of gestation. But the past two days we’ve noticed more signs pointing towards the end of a pregnancy and yesterday afternoon we started to wonder if she may be in labor.
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Lo and behold, just as we were googling “signs of labor in pig” she gave birth to her first piglet.
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She was safely alone inside her hutch, but since we didn’t know that she was pregnant, we hadn’t separated the males from her in the paddock. Shortly after she birthed the first little one, one of the males went charging into the birth hut and being all aggressive (think exactly the opposite of what you want during labor 
). Theo tried to get the male out, but that resulted in even more squealing and wrestling and turning of hay and Mama was NOT having it. She just up and walked out of that hut, leaving her sweet baby behind.
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She had piglets #2 and #3 within 30 minutes of the first being born and we were all so very excited for this big moment on our little homestead! We were thankful the weather was warm, that Theo was on his day off and that we were able to fairly quickly separate the males from the laboring Mama.
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At this point, about an hour had passed since piglet #3 had arrived. Mama was showing zero interest in any of the babies. She would birth it and walk away. We were keeping the piglets together for warmth while also trying to coax Mama to lay down near them. But no luck.
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We also know that a laboring woman needs to do what she needs to do, so figured letting her be while she finished labor would also be the right thing to do.
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She hadn’t delivered a placenta yet, which is the sign of the end of labor so we backed way off and let her wander around her paddock while laboring, while we tried to keep the three piglets together in the hut for warmth.
Mama wandered around and labored a lot before she finally had piglet #4. We put the four piglets together in the hut, but she still had zero interest in her babies. She was, however, very interested in her male counterparts and what they were doing in the next paddock over. She was also getting irritated by any noise the humans were making.
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We sent the kids inside to watch a movie and I also threw dinner in the oven since I had already prepared it earlier in the day (literally the only time I’ve done this in my 30 weeks of pregnancy…and I’m so glad I had already made dinner before all the labor started!)
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After the 4th piglet, labor seemed to stall. She passed the one hour mark and then the 1.5 hour mark and we just weren’t sure what to do. She hadn’t passed the placenta, wasn’t interested in nursing her babies, and only wanted to be near the male pigs. So Theo opened the fence and let the males back in to be around her. They were very interested in her and wouldn’t leave her side. They kept ripping up grass and bringing it to her and just kind of doula’d her along. It was kinda sweet after all that initial aggression! Theo had to sit at the opening to the pig hut to make sure the males didn’t go into where the piglets were.
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Finally, she had piggie #5 and immediately passed a placenta. I had read that pigs sometimes have two placentas, but at this point we figured she was done.
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Now we really needed her to get back to her babies and nurse them and keep them warm. We separated the males again and tried to facilitate interest. The babies kept trying to crawl out of the hut and it was getting dark with impending rain so we were feeling a little out of our element and starting to worry that she wasn’t going to take the piglets…
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Shortly after dark she delivered a 6th piglet and a second placenta. Now we knew she was done. We left her alone to see if she would take to the piglets, but this Mama had zero desire to be near them and while she acknowledged their sounds, she wouldn’t even go in the hut. We decided to leave them for the night and let animal instincts kick in and nature take it’s course….
We woke up in the morning to difficult news. One of the babies didn’t make it during the night and Mama was still not interested AT ALL in her piglets. At this point it had been way too long for the piglets to be without food and we had to make some quick decisions on how to proceed best.
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First, Theo coaxed Mama into the barn and put her in an enclosed stall, then introduced the piglets to her. Mama FREAKED out and attacked the piglets 
Like, clearly trying to kill them. It was so horrifying. Theo snatched them out as quickly as he could and brought them inside for warmth. A quick run to Rural King and we are now the proud bottle feeding parents of all five piglets 
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The second morning, we woke up to find a second piglet hadn’t made it. And on the fourth morning- another. We now have three living piglets and three that have passed away.
We are learning that piglets are very hard to keep alive through bottle feeding. They latch just fine and drink from the bottle, but their digestive systems are just not build to go on formula so soon after birth. I read one statistic that said that a piglet without a Mama has an 80% mortality rate. It’s really hard to have these tiny, helpless babies that we are feeding around the clock and to know that there is a high possibility that none of them will make it.
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It’s hard to tell a story without a happy ending. As animal owners, we would have liked to see this go a totally different way. We don’t know why she rejected her babies, but it’s hard to not wonder if it’s because *we* did something wrong. What if we were more experienced? What if none of the piglets make it? It’s just impossible to predict outcomes, and especially since we are still trying to learn how to care for our animals, this one took us completely off guard. I do find some comfort in knowing that it most likely would have turned out this way even if we had been more knowledgeable and prepared, since the sow is SO young and just literally doesn’t know how to be a mother.
At this point there is a lot of unknowns to how we will proceed. It really all depends on if and how many piglets survive. We will then make decisions about whether to allow the pigs to breed again, how to introduce the piglets to the bigger pigs and how to get the piglets safely through the winter without having pig housepets haha!
