May 1952---Caring for piglets--From Mom's Journal

May 14, 1952---One of the young sows had a litter of eight pigs.  George put a gate in front of the hog coop to keep out the rest of the pigs.  Late in the day he opened the coop and while the sow was drinking, kidnapped the pigs.  We put them in a brooder coop.   Fred had to get the stuff we plan to feed them.   So about ten o'clock George came home with a hundred lb. bag of pig milk replacer.  At midnight we still hadn't had much success getting the pigs to eat.  So we decided to get up a 5am and try again.  About every 3 1/2 hours we mixed up milk and took it to them.  I drew the late (11pm) feeding and George crawled out at 5am. 
   Two more litters arrived on Thursday.  There were eight pigs in one and ten in the other.  The larger litter was from the older sow.  We used the same process to remove the pigs from the sows.  However, the 10 pigs stayed with their mother over night.  George notched the left ears of the last litter.  There was one runt pig in the 10 pig litter.

May 28, 1952--Wednesday   The oldest litter of pigs are two weeks old today.  To date we have lost one pig from the lot; that was one which had been on a bottle.  We finally managed to get it to drink from the pans but the other pigs must have rooted it out of the way too much.  It was very weak one evening.  By the 11:00pm feeding it was dead.

 Posted by Sarah