He’s a Wanderer…

Normally I like to post a pic of the latest topic. Not this time. Smelling the little unwelcome thing is enough – I am not going out to take a flash shot of him as he strolls by the house after dusk, so that he can get all scared and spray the crap out of the yard. Or me.

You really can smell skunks as they walk by. And they are territorial. We discovered shortly after we moved in that we were in the territory of a male skunk. While trying to figure out the best way to get rid of him, we noticed that he’d stopped coming by. Then he was found in the hay barn, squished by a large round bale that had shifted. Fortunately it was the time of year that the smell from the shock had dissipated, and he had turned into a freeze-dried skunk. Much easier to deal with.

Now that he’s gone, we are in the territory of the next little unwelcome thing that has replaced him. And let me tell ya, having the house shut up sometimes doesn’t do the trick, even in the dead of Winter. If he gets close enough his perfume can find whatever little nook or cranny through which fresh air makes it into the house, and then it’s just time to do battle with candles. The latest guy’s trick is to start digging where the soil is the least resistant – around the foundation of the house. What a pain!

So, there’s this pig…

It turns out that a friend of ours knows a nice Amish guy who raises pigs. So rather than raising a pig ourselves, we decided it would be a much better idea to get one from him, and just pick it up and drop it off at the butcher. I am so very glad we did that rather than getting all sorts of stuff set up to raise one pig. And then actually having to raise the pig. The picking up was pretty easy – that sucker just hopped up into the trailer and off we went, which was great as he weighed about 280 pounds. 

The fun started when we dropped him off at the butcher’s place. They have a nifty little chute and stall setup where you can unload critters, and they let you drop off critters outside of their normal working hours, no pressure there... This was one of those times where it’s really handy that Sis not only knows how to handle animals, but can back a semi-trailer into a tin can. I am really good at letting her back trailers. After getting the trailer to the chute, she got the door opened and went in to get the pig out. It took a sharp smack on his nose (after about 10 minutes of pushing, and being pushed, around the trailer), resulting in him squealing like, well….anyway he complained a lot about that indignity, then he trotted off the trailer.

This little video is the soon to be BBQ complaining to the pig in the pen next to him after he was unloaded. The noises he’s making here are nothing compared to the massive amounts of very loud squealing he was doing in the trailer. Honest – if I had not been holding a panel of wood to keep him from jumping off the trailer and running off into the great unknown (about all I was qualified to do) I would have shot a video of him insisting on staying in the trailer and screaming loud enough to make you think he’d got something valuable pinched in a door. (That, and I was really too busy laughing at him to be able to get a good shot.) 

 

One of the most enjoyable things about having farm animals are the noises they make. One of these days I’ll try to get some good video of a screaming goat…