The Devonport Show's on this weekend, and this year there's a real focus on bringing the show back to its roots - agriculture.
In an effort to get more kids through the animal nursery, the coordinator got school classes from the local area to adopt an animal from the nursery and create artwork and projects about it.
The grade 3/4s from Devonport Primary adopted the Wessex Saddleback and have been investigating rare breeds and the idea of having to eat bacon to save their bacon (some struggled with this idea!).
Guy and I visited the school with a couple of piglets and a bottle of milk to round-off their studies.
Watching a sow feeding her piglets is mesmerising. It’s a show of sound and movement, of chaos and rhythm. And it shows that, in this case, milk is life.
When a sow wants to feed her piglets she calls them with a low, repetitious grunt. If she’s near other sows they’ll all start grunting too. In the wild this collective grunting makes sure that all piglets in the area can get a feed, even if it’s not from their own mum.
The sow doesn’t let her milk flow till she’s relaxed, and you’ll see a change in the piglets’ behaviour – suddenly they’ll stop bashing her boobs and just settle in for the feed.
These piglets are just a couple of days old and are still getting the hang of who goes where in the drinking line-up. In another couple of days they’ll have their own teats, a bit like having a coffee mug with your name on it.
Our piglets spend their first week in a straw-filled stable, with access to a heat lamp to snuggle under. Tasmanian nights are pretty chilly, and we believe this is the most humane way to bring them in to the world.
Generally the biggest and strongest piglets get the sow’s front teats which produce the most milk, and the smaller ones get the back teats. That’s why the runt is always the runt (except occasionally when they’ve got a touch of Small Piglet Syndrome and they defy nature and take over a front teat).
We let our piglets feed from their mothers for six weeks, and then we wean them. That’s about twice the time of pigs reared in intensive systems, and it ensures their immune systems are well-developed. And milk’s free, too.
