14. A Good Hog House
Houses. Hogs must be housed in dry, warm, clean, and well-ventilated houses. Sunshine is a very important agent in disinfecting and warming the hog house. The well-established breeder may have a colony house, but for the beginner the individual house of the A or square type is to be recommended.
During the summer a good pasture will provide cheap, clean feed, exercise and a clean bed. It may be necessary, however, to provide a shelter from the direct rays of the sun. This may be furnished by a frame of poles covered with straw or corn stalks.
Sanitation. It is much easier to keep a pig healthy than it is to cure him after he becomes sick. Cleanliness, proper feed, disinfection of houses and animals, together with plenty of sunlight, ventilation and dryness of quarters, will help to keep a pig in good health.
If care is taken that there are no unnecessary cracks or corners in which filth may accumulate, it will be easy to keep houses, troughs and feeding floors sanitary. A good disinfectant should be used regularly in the pens. Five parts of crude carbolic acid in one hundred parts of water is recommended. All filth should be removed before the disinfectant is applied. Once a year all buildings should be whitewashed. A pint of crude carbolic acid should be added to each three gallons of whitewash.
Feed lots and pastures cannot be disinfected in this fashion, but applications of lime and an occasional plowing will help.
Hog wallows and dips. The pig is not naturally a filthy animal, and if given an opportunity will keep fairly clean. During the extreme heat of summer the pig suffers, owing to the fact that he perspires but little. He seeks the shelter of a cool mud wallow to get relief from heat and parasites. The intelligent hog raiser will provide a concrete wallow and keep it filled with eight or ten inches of water. Coal-tar or crude oil added to the water helps to rid the animal of lice. Where the animals are badly infested with lice it will be necessary to wet them all over, as the lice are found behind the ears, inside of the legs and in the folds of the skin. A two per cent solution of creolin may be used for this purpose.
Worms. Pigs are often affected with worms which interfere with their thriftiness. A tablespoonful of castor oil and forty drops of oil of American wormseed should be given in the slop to wormy pigs. Six grains of santonin and four grains of calomel per 100 pound pig is also used successfully.
Hog cholera. It is not possible within the scope of a small book to describe all of the diseases that attack pigs. Every pig club member, however, should know something about hog cholera, the greatest scourge which attacks swine.