pump up the jams

[dragonlady7]

I put that picture in my Instagram Stories with the caption "one of these things is not like the other". The upshot of having the pigs and chickens in a single barn, my sister explained, is that the pigs have all learned to be very attentive while she is in collecting eggs on the chicken side, because if she finds a cracked one, or if there's one on the floor that she can't ascertain is freshly-laid, she tosses it over the fences (the barn has a central aisle, and the south bays are the chickens and the north bays are the pigs) and into the pig enclosures for the pigs to eat.
But the chickens also like to promote themselves to free-ranging, and wander in among the pigs. This is something that can be dangerous-- pigs have been known to kill and eat chickens-- so far it has worked out well.
Pigs are kind of weird because they're so omnivorous. Also I was learning about secondary domestication-- how neolithic farmers figured out that sheep and cattle could be kept for milk as well as meat, and eventually got sheep to mutate into having proper wool, etc.-- and there's literally no secondary thing you can feasibly do with pigs. But they can eat waste other animals can't or won't, and can derive nutrition from shit you wouldn't believe.
Ours don't, they get expensive organic feed, but. Still.

Merlot, one of the pregnant young sows, is very fond of scritchies. Farmsister was doing chores and Merlot came up to the fence and made a bunch of noise, so Sister scritched her ears. Merlot's response was to immediately lie down with a groan, and Sister laughed and said "ok ok fine" and put down what she was doing and climbed over the fence to go in and give Merlot belly scritchies like you would with a dog.
While she was like that, we counted her nipples, because apparently pig nipples are wildly variable? and sure enough. Fifteen. Yes, an odd number; one of the middle ones on one side is an unusual little nub that's probably not functional.
"You don't have bilateral symmetry," I cooed to Merlot, who gave a long sighing grunt and stuck her legs all out straight.
"None of us really does," Sister observed. "You're so beautiful, like a giant dog, aren't you?"
Merlot probably weighs around three hundred pounds.

They moved some fences so that the boar is now in solitary. He wasn't much interested in being inside the barn anyway, so he can't get in now; he's got a water trough up next to the side of the chickens' currently-unused pasture unit, which will shelter him from the wind if needed. So now all the sows are segregated and can farrow in peace.
The old boar never hurt any of the baby pigs, but it's just better to keep the boar away from the babies anyway-- if nothing else, fewer hooves, as pigs have a terrible tendency to step on their babies and only the fleet survive. The sows who'd farrowed were segregated so that they have no access to the outdoors, but since the other three sows are likely to farrow soon, it's probably best to just have them all in together, so they've been given the run of the barn and adjoining pasture.



Last night after dinner Farmsister and I went over to Middle-Little's apartment. Over the winter, her landlord said he wanted to paint it, and said if she just moved the furniture and stayed somewhere for a week, he'd get it done. She said no, she'd do it herself, and so he made arrangements to pay for all the stuff and give her a rent credit once she was done and such.
Three months later, Farmsister has managed to get the entryway and two walls of the main room painted. Middle-Little has done basically nothing, and has had everything piled in the middle of her living room since December, and has not been able to live normally.
So I went, and sure enough Middle-Little, who had said on at least two different nights that she was working on the painting on her own, had touched nothing since Farmsister's last visit, and when we arrived, she had just begun to move things around.
(And during Farmsister's last visit, she had actually left for the entire time and gone to a bar where she has a trivia team that no one else cares about but her. "If I don't go it's just gonna be the two guys, that's not a team!" "I guess I will paint your apartment by myself," Farmsister answered, "because Monday is the only night I have free from running my small business, being on the board of a volunteer organization, and parenting a child." "Okay," Middle-Little said, and went to the bar. Farmsister said "honestly it was kind of relaxing and I got a lot done, but she freaked out afterward because I'd thrown out some magazines and taken out the recycling.")

I got the trim around the kitchen door painted, and then painted the bathroom door trim and door. Farmsister had scraped the bathroom door, and then went and got up on the ladder and cut in all around the track lighting in the living room, and the medallion where a light fixture used to be, and the edges of the wall, and then rolled the ceiling.

Middle-Little moved some furniture and petted her cat.

There was another crisis when, after moving some boxes, Farmsister took a few crumpled magazines out and threw them in the recycling, and Middle-Little freaked out.
In my head I'd been thinking she's like me, just a terrible housekeeper who can't get organized enough to throw things out, with a terrible penchant for hanging on to things that mean something or might be useful or -- you know, hoarding-- but that was downright weird, the way she freaked out, and I realized that no, that's not what I have. That's like, actual OCD.
I know she's under treatment for depression and her doctor had determined that medicating her anxiety would make the depression worse, but I really really really really think that's got to get revisited, because anxiety and OCD intersect badly, and her genuine belief that she's going to get work done on this project coupled with her demonstrable complete inability to do so strikes me as a serious executive function misfire. Like, she wants this done, but it is not going to happen unless Farmsister literally drags her the entire way. She is a sensible and practical person who has moved across state lines like five times in her life, she is able to assess belongings and cull things and move on with her life, and this is sliding into atypical and not functional.
So.


Oop I'm being Farmkid-summoned, gotta go, lol.

Comments

[starshipfox]

I love the pig picture! Pig looks so happy and relaxed. I'm also really pleased that I've learnt the word "farrow".

I hope your Middle-Little sister is able to get some help, or make changes of some kind. It sounds like she's having a hard time, although it's great that her family is around for her.

[dragonlady7]

There is so much specialty livestock terminology in English that is really fascinating to learn; it's as colorful and beautiful as the deprecated old English words we all coo over online, but they're actually live words in heavy current usage-- just in specialty industries. But livestock farming is an ancient and unbroken thing, so the specialty language is largely antique words worn smooth with use.
I knew horse words, as a kid, so I was aware of the concept, but it's interesting to encounter more now-- because of course each subset of livestock will have their own language. No two female livestock animals give birth with the same terminology-- even things like, horses: when a mare foals, she "drops" a foal, while a ewe "throws" lambs. I actually don't know, when a sow farrows, if that's throwing or dropping pigs-- I know one would be correct and the other incorrect. (There might be yet another term that I don't know!) (And it's not like sheep actually throw anything-- you're absolutely right, they can't even give birth on their own; the lambs are often born and then don't know how to breathe and have to be pounded to life by the attentive farmer.
More specialty pig terms: a pig of market-weight or greater maturity is a "hog", and when smaller, is a "pig", and the word "piglet" is rarely used; an immature female is called a "gelt" and an immature male a "barrow" but I think barrows are usually castrated, and so an uncut immature male would be called a boar and there isn't a word to distinguish him from a full-grown adult boar. (Barrows are less aggressive and grow much larger much faster, and also don't smell as bad; uncut boars are often inedibly off-flavored.)

I am concerned for Middle-Little; we remind ourselves that, well, she's meeting her obligations, she's working two jobs, she's not addicted to drugs or anything, she's not self-harming, she's paying off her loans, she's mostly keeping her spending under control. She's stuck in a job she hates that she slaved away for an MBA that's not doing her any good for, and suffered for years to get it, and it's awful and not working out for her. So like. It's super understandable that she's having trouble, and so us just hauling her forward through this ordeal is not just spackling over problems and ignoring them, it's genuinely likely that we just have to help her through this rough patch and she'll sort it out just like she's sorted out the others. She's genuinely had a harder life than the rest of us, in some respects at least, and we respect that.
But.
I might try to respectfully ask her who's supervising her mental health care and if she's considered getting that re-evaluated in respect to whether the anxiety/OCD is now worse than the depression. I get that it's situational but it's also obviously changed. This is the kind of thing a therapist is useful for and I know that's hypocritical of me since I'm not under anybody's care at all, but. I'm also not asking anyone to paint my house for me.

[starshipfox]

Those are all great words. I used to work in a veterinary practice, and we would use some specialised words, but not as many as within the farming community. (I always loved how rabbits "kindle" rather than giving birth. I don't know if they drop or throw, though.) I imagine these words probably change regionally, too, at least to a degree: it would be interesting if someone made a study of the livestock and farming terms used all over the English-speaking world. For example, here in Ireland a lot of land is divided using dry-stone walls, and there is a specific vocabulary for building and mending those walls. I'm always fascinated by the vocabulary used in different livelihoods and situations: it makes our language so much richer.

I think it would make sense to ask your sister about her mental health care. I don't think it's invasive or threatening to suggest that she may need to be re-evaluated: to me, it certainly just seems like you are showing her that you care about her. It sounds like she is in a hard situation and it would make sense if she needed some support.

[krait]

Sometimes I really wonder about the domestication of pigs; it seems like our ancestors really chose an uphill battle there. It reminds me of the funny Tumblr post about domesticating horses involving choosing an animal conditioned for thousands of years to assume 'something on my back' means 'I am in imminent danger of being eaten' and convincing it otherwise - whoever first looked at a gigantic sharp-toothed pointy-hooved omnivore capable of eating a human and thought, "I'd like to keep that in my yard" was clearly a very farsighted and radical-thinking individual. :D

[dragonlady7]

I mean... they're fucking delicious, is the thing.
And if you can domesticate aurochs, then boars aren't such an insanely mad thing to go for. Just like any of those animals, if you catch them young and train them that humans are ok, you've most likely got them for life.

Here's a weird side thing, though-- like, baby chicks are super chill with humans, very tame, totally handle-able, but if you don't handle them daily they get shy as they age and can wind up unfriendly. Most animals are born pretty tame, and if you handle them, they're permanently tame.
Pigs?
Pigs are born shy; their mothers, even the tamest sows, get aggressive when they're tiny, and so they're near-impossible to handle, but even if you can catch them, they're just like innately terrified of being held, and generally do not want to snuggle. it's only as they get older, four to six months or so, that you can start to kind of handle them a bit without them startling and running off. The two youngest sows were separated from the rest who were processed, and it was only then, around six months and at pubescent age, that my sister finally was able to handle them and start to really tame them, and now Merlot demands belly rubs.
I thought it was just us but it mentions that in the Wikipedia page about domestic pigs-- they're born shy and can only really be tamed once they're bigger. (By then, they've had months to realize that humans bring them food.) (Ironically, that's when we eat them, but they also generally become complete assholes at that age, instead of just shy, so.)

[krait]

Aurochs are herbivores, though? They might knock you down and step on you or gore you, but they won't eat you! Same goes with goats and sheep and chickens and most of the other things we figured out were useful to keep around in tame forms.

Pigs, on the other hand, are as omnivorous as we are, and can eat us (and we're aware of it). It's kinda like deciding that bears would be a good addition to the farm animal collection!

They are delicious, though.

[dragonlady7]

Oh, chickens would eat you too, if they could, they're just too small!

I suppose that's a relevant distinction, though. Pigs are just so efficient-- they don't need good pasture, because they'll eat your children, lol.

[oracne]

I wish pigs weren't so delicious....

[dragonlady7]

Well, if they weren't, we wouldn't interact with them at all, so it's kind of. Chicken/egg etc. :)
If it's any consolation, they don't seem to understand death. Turkeys do, so you have to keep them out of view of their comrades when the Big Day comes (we put up a barricade so they can't see, which we don't have to do with the chickens at all), but the pigs just don't get it and don't worry about it. It doesn't make it any more fun, but it does mean that if you do it correctly and quickly, they just never know-- one minute they're happy, and then they're wherever pigs go after they've left this earth.
Pigs seem to be about as smart as dogs, and that encompasses a great many charming behaviors (as well as annoying ones), and a great capacity for pleasure that is gratifying to witness, but does not encompass any kind of existential angst. It's not so bad, as lives go, I think. We've had trouble making them profitable but have stuck with them because BIL likes them so much, as animals. And if you're going to eat them, it's better to eat ones that you know were happy.

[starshipfox]

That's how I always feel about eating animals: they're not having an existential crisis about their inevitable end, and I always feel pretty OK about eating ones that I know have been cared for properly. Weirdly, I can't stand that taste of pork at all so it doesn't really come up for me re.pigs but I'm a huge fan of both hanging out with chickens and eating chickens.