Pig Industrialisation

When we arrived back from holiday one of the first things we did was to check on Betsy.  Poor girl, we found her all by herself in her run, very miserable, with Bobby off with some other ladies and the piglets, who weren't really ready to leave their mother, removed to Hughie's barn.  Of the ten piglets, four have now been sold.

So this morning I walked over to Kilchoan and, while Hughie wasn't looking, had a quick look around his barn.  It's a bit like Aladdin's cave, full of all sorts of things - old furniture, sacks of coal, farm machinery, chickens, last year's lambs, four tups, a cat who runs the place and keeps the mice down, a locked room which I suspect is a whisky distillery, and....

....the six remaining piglets.  Apparently, the reason Hughie had to bring them indoors was the weather.  They really weren't thriving, and two of them had developed prolapses.  They look fine now, and are fattening up quickly.

Meanwhile, there's a rumour that a new resident in Ormsaigbeg, who lives near the shop, is going in with Hughie on some sort of industrial-size pig facility, to be built on several floors in his back garden.  This all sounds a bit unlikely, except that yesterday the two of them were working on what looked liked footings.  It's bad enough having the tone lowered in Ormsaigbeg by fields full of free-range pigs which sometimes range well beyond their pens, but the idea of having heavy lorries bringing huge quantities of pig feed along the peninsula is appalling.  Worse still, there's been no planning permission, though sometimes farmers are exempt.  Trust the Diary to keep everyone informed.