Feeding & Nutrition

We got the piglet because the neighbor's sow crushed two of a litter of nine and the runt needed a bottle or a grave. I chose the bottle. His name is Barney, he is pink with a single black smudge like a thumbprint on his shoulder, and he thinks he is a small dog with a better sense of smell.

Bottle piglets are a different creature from weaned ones. The milk replacer comes as a powder you mix warm, and the first week is every three hours, including the 3am shift that makes you question your life choices in the kitchen at half past nothing with a squealing kettle-shaped animal under one arm. Then comes weaning, and that is where I did something the books did not mention.

Barney refused the standard creep feed. He would nose it, sneeze, and go back to butting my boots for the bottle he had outgrown but missed with the desperation of a toddler denied a dummy. The bag feed smelled of fish meal and dust. I did not blame him. So I roasted a pumpkin, scooped the flesh, and mashed it with a little of the creep ration, and set it down expecting another rejection.

He ate the whole dish. Then he looked up with the expression pigs get when they have discovered a truth about the world, and he went back for the smear on the side. Within a fortnight he was on solid feed, the pumpkin was the bridge, and the local vet, who came to do his castration and saw the condition of his coat, asked me for the recipe like I had invented a cure.

It was not a cure. Pumpkin is just a good weaning food. The flesh is soft, the sugar is gentle, the fiber keeps a young gut moving, and the moisture helps a creature moving off milk stay hydrated through the change. Pigs love it, which is the only qualification that mattered to Barney. The trick is not the pumpkin. The trick is meeting the animal where its mouth is, instead of where the feed mill says it should be.

I kept the pumpkin in through the summer, then eased it down as he took to pellets and kitchen scraps and the windfall apples he learned to knock off the tree by leaning on the trunk with his whole pink weight. A pig will eat almost anything. The art is not making him eat. The art is making the first bite something he remembers as good, so the next thousand come without a fight.

People ask if pumpkin fattens them. It can, if you let a pig free-feed it, because pigs will. But as a weaning tool, a few weeks of mash with a spoon of real food in it, it saved me a month of worry and a piglet with a sour gut. Barney is now a bored teenager who roots up the lawn, and the vet still mentions the recipe when we meet at the gate.

The deeper lesson was about patience with the transition. Pigs wean fast in the wild because they have to, but a bottle piglet raised by a human misses the social cue of watching his mother eat solids, and without that model he waits for the bottle out of habit, not hunger. I had to be the sow he watched, eating my own pumpkin at the pen side so he could copy the behavior, and once he saw an animal he trusted eating the mash, the refusal collapsed overnight.

If you are weaning anything hand-reared, model the meal. Sit with the food. Let them see it is safe and good. The pumpkin was the bait, but the copycat instinct was the hook, and between the two Barney crossed a gap that the bag of feed alone could not have carried him across, no matter how nutritious it claimed to be on the label.

Barney now greets the children at the fence with the same demand he once aimed at the bottle, and they have learned to bring the mash rather than their fingers, after one early nip convinced the youngest that pigs mean business about food. He is a pet, but he is a pig, and the line between the two is thinner than the children would like when the bucket comes out and the squealing starts.

The funniest incident came when he learned the sound of the blender, which I used to whizz the pumpkin, and began appearing at the kitchen door whenever it ran, certain a meal was imminent. The blender became his dinner bell, and the whole house now knows when Barney expects to eat because the whir summons a pink shadow at the step. I have stopped explaining to visitors why a pig answers the appliance. They see the shadow and understand, the way the vet did, that some recipes are worth asking after.