How to Rescue Piglets

A few days ago a local farmer posted an urgent plea on Facebook - homes needed for orphaned piglets! The sow had just died, leaving eight four-day-old piglets. I’ve been wanting to get pigs, so I jumped at the opportunity.

I made a quick run to the General Store and picked up some milk replacer, and then loaded up the kids and headed out to the farm up in Copeland to get the pigs.

Although we started by bottle-feeding, we realized pretty quickly that bottle-feeding isn’t the best way. Piglets tend to aspirate the milk (get it in their lungs) very easily, and this can lead to pneumonia and even death. After we had been bottle-feeding for about five days, one of our little piglets aspirated. It happened very quickly, and all of a sudden this little piggy pulled off the bottle and started coughing. It lost all its interest in food, and for the next 24 hours it wandered around rather listlessly, breathing heavily. I started to get very worried when its breathing became wheezy, and started having chest retractions where we could see its ribs each time it took a breath. We were pretty sure we were going to lose it.

After doing some research I found Let them Grow Before They Grow on MiniPigs.info. Bethany sacrificed one of her old cookie sheets, and we immediately switched to pan feeding. Basically we just poured the milk into the cookie sheet, and the pigs would suck up the milk from the pan. It’s a huge mess, and the slurping sound is ghastly, but it’s much safer for the pigs.

Our little sick piglet stayed sick, and wouldn’t drink from the pan. There’s not much information on the Internet about piglet aspiration, and most of what we did find didn’t give us much hope - most Pigs that get aspiration pneumonia do not survive it. But I’m not one to give up hope, so we decided to try antibiotics. Getting the dose right was tricky given the piglets tiny body weight but we did figure it out and administered the antibiotic. Amazingly it worked, and the little porker recovered completely after about 36 hours.

Bottle-feeding eight piglets two at a time was utter chaos and bedlam. Eventually I got smart and duct taped eight bottles to a board, which was only chaos and not as much bedlam. Again, bottle feeding is not recommended; use pan feeding instead.

Pan feeding is relatively easy: just place a pan or baking sheet on the ground (make sure it’s level) and pour in the milk. The hardest part is pouring in the milk while the piglets are all scrambling for it. The have really bad manners.

The pan pretty quickly became too small, so we graduated to using a segmented goat feeder. This actually works very well because it keeps the pigs from pushing each other out of the way.

We also started mixing in some dry food with the milk, to get them used to eating dry food. We are feeding Purina Nature’s Match Sow & Pig Complete.

The piglets have adopted Mina, our German Shepherd puppy, as their surrogate mother. She loves to come visit the pigs at feeding time, and she will lie down and allow them to crawl all over her and nuzzle her. They love her, and when she visits each piglet will come to her to be licked off.

The piglets are now about one month old, and all eight are healthy and growing normally. Soon I’ll move them out into the pasture, where they will begin their hard work tilling up the soil for my future vegetable gardens.