The most nutritious and succulent food that circumstances will permit should be furnished them. Newly-weaned pigs require five or six meals in the twenty-four hours. In about ten days, one may be omitted; in another week, a second; and then they should do with three regular meals each day. A little sulphur mingled with the food, or a small quantity of Epsom or Glauber salts dissolved in the water, will frequently prove beneficial. A plentiful supply of clear, cold water should always be within their reach; the food left in the trough after the animals have finished eating should be removed, and the trough thoroughly rinsed out before any more is put into it. Strict attention should also be paid to cleanliness. The boars and sows should be kept apart from the period of weaning.
The question, which is more profitable, to breed swine, or to buy young pigs and fatten them, can best be determined by those interested; since they know best what resources they can command, and what chance of profits each of these separate branches offers.
RINGING.
This operation is performed to counteract the propensity which swine have of digging and furrowing up the earth. The ring is passed through what appears to be a prolongation of the septum, between the supplemental, or snout-bone, and the nasal. The animal is thus unable to obtain sufficient purchase to use his snout with any effect, without causing the ring to press so painfully upon the part that he is forced to desist. The ring, however, is apt to break, or it wears out in process of time, and has to be replaced.
The snout should be perforated at weaning-time, after the animal has recovered from castration or spaying; and it will be necessary to renew the operation as it becomes of large growth. It is too generally neglected at first; but no pigs, young or old, should be suffered to run at large without this precaution. The sow’s ring should be ascertained to be of sufficient strength previously to her taking the boar, on account of the risk of abortion, if the operation is renewed while she is with pig. Care must be taken by the operator not to go too close to the bone, and that the ring turn easily.
A far better mode of proceeding is, when the pig is young, to cut through the cartilaginous and ligamentous prolongations, by which the supplementary bone is united to the proper nasals. The divided edges of the cartilage will never re-unite, and the snout always remains powerless.
FEEDING AND FATTENING.
Roots and fruits are the natural food of the hog, in a wild as well as in a domesticated state; and it is evident that, however omnivorous it may occasionally appear, its palate is by no means insensible to the difference in eatables, since, whenever it finds variety, it will select the best with as much cleverness as other quadrupeds. Indeed, the hog is more nice in the selection of his vegetable diet than any of the other domesticated herbivorous animals. To a certain extent he is omnivorous, and may be reared on the refuse of slaughter-houses; but such food is not wholesome, nor is it natural; for, though he is omnivorous, he is not essentially carnivorous. The refuse of the dairy-farm is more congenial to his health, to say nothing of the quality of its flesh.