One of the things that I try to always do when interacting with our animals is to just sit and watch them. I usually try to take about 10 minutes or so per pen. Sometimes they act so ridiculous, I tend to get immense comedic relief. It makes it feel worth it with all of the hard work that we do.

One of my favorite pens to hang out around and watch is the pig pen. At this point, they get what we call pig zoomies. Especially when we’re spraying water in their wallow spot. They run around snorting, acting a fool running in and out of the water spraying and it is hilarious to watch! I have laughed to the point of tears watching them frolic!

One of my other reasons for sitting and watching critters is to make sure that they all are acting normal. Up until yesterday, they all were…

Last night at feeding time, dad was doing the nightly check on pigs. While doing so, he noticed that Bacon wasn’t acting normal. She is typically the leader of pig zoomies, is super vocal and loves to hop around in excitement when we are around. This night she was laying in their house just watching. He called me over to take a look and we both decided that we’d keep an eye on her and check again first thing in the morning. I was honestly hoping that she was just bedding down early as they tend to calm down quite a bit right before nightfall.

Morning comes around and on inspection we see that she’s not better. I decided to call the vet and have her come out. We did this for a couple of reasons…if it’s contagious, I want to keep it from spreading, if we can help her get better, then we obviously will do what we can. Meanwhile we continued doing chores while checking in on her periodically.

Early afternoon rolls around and the vet showed up. Her schedule was booked but she managed to squeeze us in which I thought was pretty cool. Anyways, we head to the pig pen where I find Bacon still laying in her house with obviously labored breathing. She scared me at first by not responding to anything I was doing. Normally she would’ve popped right up and grunted at us. The vet grabbed her by her front legs and pulled her a little bit. At this point she started to show some life.

By this point, the other pigs started noticing us messing with her and they were NOT happy with us. Meanwhile the vet did her assessment and came to the conclusion that she had a viral respiratory illness. We gave her a pretty potent antibiotic and anti inflammatory to hopefully help her out. We also decided that it would be best to separate her from the other pigs as they can get quite mean and we want her to rest, eat, and get better. At this point we play the waiting game….the vet seems to think she’ll be ok, but only time will tell.

…to be continued…