Goodbye Ginger :-(

The whole family and our Tamworth boar Ginger have been through allot together and this day was one that I’ve dreaded for some time. The dilemma of what to do with an elderly boar is not something you think about when embarking upon breeding pigs. I suppose most people who live on the mainland just get the vet to give them a jag then phone up the renderer, or load them into a trailer for the short journey to the abattoir and let them deal with him.

Living where we do none of these options are really viable, I suppose I could have shot him myself and taken him over to Sconser to meet the renderer but he weighs the best part of a quarter of a ton and I’d rather put his body to some use. I could have tempted him into the trailer and towed him for three hours to the local abattoir but to be honest that would have been a ‘cop out’ for me and agony on him. I could not put him through that again, for he’s a terrible traveller.

I’ll never forget when we picked him up exactly four years ago, almost to the day from Stonehead at   http://stonehead.wordpress.com/ in Aberdeenshire. It was just the boy and I that went to pick him up and my son still goes on about Stonehead’s Berkshire crackling 🙂 We’d set off the day before, as a 500 mile round trip in the day would have been pushing it for the ferry, I did a few wee jobs on ‘Harry’ Stoney’s old 110 Defender and he’d treated us to a special dinner. Sunday dawned clear and sharp as it often does in that part of the world and we spent a good while coaxing our new boar into the trailer. We stopped every half hour or so to check on our new boar, and every stop saw him more and more miserable, by the time we got to Inverness he was seriously crabbit and would not even eat one of Lidl’s apples 😦

Arriving at Arnish in the dark some eight hour later Ginger was in short, a train wreck, 200kg of disgruntled and bed tempered Tamworth boar. Letting him out of the trailer in this state would have been a recipe for tusks in shins and Lord knows what else, so we left him in the trailer overnight to chill.

The morning after we led him out and a much happier pig soon settled down to life on the croft

 

and before long he was doing his stuff 🙂

Over the next few years Ginger became part of the family, below is a post from a couple of years ago https://lifeattheendoftheroad.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/ginger-almost-drowned/

Ginger almost drowned

Filed under: the disaster thread — lifeattheendoftheroad @ 10:56 pm Edit This

Ginger our Tamworth boar is such a gentle chap and although we’ve only had him for a year he’s really part of the family.

A couple of weeks ago, just before Christmas I was down on the Clyde with the ferry and the dude was at a panto with his grandparents. Ginger who was suffering from one of his bouts of depression (despite having 2 young girls for company) chose this moment to get stuck in a ditch. Now bear in mind that we live 10 miles from anywhere or anyone and Mrs C is only wee then this was quite a disaster. The first I knew about it was when Mrs. C phones me up hysterical telling me that Ginger is stuck in a drain with just his snout sticking out of the water! Apparently his ears and eyes were submerged and just his 2 nostrils were sticking out of the water. Luckily she managed  to wedge his head up with a shovel and get the water flowing round him. As I said we are miles from anywhere I’m 200 miles away and mrs C is all on her own with 2 or 300k of boar in a ditch! the mobile don’t work and it’s a Sunday, luckily there are 2 strong heroes staying about a mile away at ‘the old schoolhouse’ and one of them has his phone switched on. I can’t thank these 2 guys enough for dropping everything to go and help Mrs. C and Ginger.  The 2 knights in question dropped everything and went to gingers rescue,  they managed to get him turned so he was well clear of the water and got some blankets and hot water bottles round him. At this point Ginger was pretty hypothermic and extremely stressed but after about an hours warmth and rest he still could not get out under his own steam. So the two shinning Knights managed to get a towel underneath him and with brute force lifted him out of the ditch. This was further complicated by one of the gilts coming in heat and wanting to get intimate with him!!! Ginger at this point was pure wrecked and was almost put back in the ditch by his amorous girl friend. Me I’m 200 miles away and feeling pretty useless but somehow it all worked out and after a wee spell of recuperation Ginger is back to his old self.

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Since then he’s been stuck in another ditch, had his tusks caught in a fence twice and had to be cut out. However he’s sired dozens of fine piglets and been great with the sows and piglets. However of late his litters have been smaller, he’s been spending less time out of his house, soiling it regularly, bullying the sows and generally becoming lazier and lazier. Twelve months ago we bought a young boar called Rocky in preparation for Ginger’s demise but have been reluctant to do anything about it.

The other day when I went to clean out his house and it was full of jobbies was the last straw, and I started thinking seriously about disposing of him 😦 He was costing us money, the sows were suffering and I was having to clean him out far more than necessary. It was not an easy decision but it had to be made.

As I said the ‘normal’ options were out so I decided to shoot him on the croft and make use of his huge fat carcass if possible, I say ‘if possible’ because many people, books and the internet had assured me that an old working boar would be tough, smelly and full of boar taint   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar_taint . Still I figured a humane death in his natural surroundings would be kinder on him, and if we could turn him into sausages and hams all the better.

So with this in mind I formulated a plan, the plan being to lead him out of his field to the field next to the workshop, put some feed down on the ground just in front of the gate and shoot him twice through the head. The spot was chosen because it’s very close to where I could hang him, the gate could be closed so in the unlikely event of a poor shot he’d not be able to harm anyone and the ground at the other side of the gate would be soft enough to stop a .243 bullet ricocheting.

          

I would use the .243 and my son would use the .22, the rifles may look similar and the calibres are not that different but just look at the bullets.    

There are plenty people who use a .22 on pigs, and it’s what I use on the smaller ones but for Ginger I just wanted to make sure. So after preparing everything

we did the deed. Ginger went down like a stone, no stress, no pain and as ‘happy as a pig in 5h1t’ until the day he died.

It was hard work dragging round but eventually we got him hauled up and I started the long and arduous task of gutting and skinning him.

I managed to get his guts out last night and most of his very tough skin off before stabbing myself in a wrist vein with the filleting knife :-(  Now I am prone to both embellishment and exaggeration but when the point of the filleting knife came out and blood spurted 3’ across the workshop floor, I have to say that I was worried 😦 Actually I was seriously  annoyed at myself but the rag I used as a tourniquet stopped it and once the colour came back into my face I decided to go inside and call it a day. despite feeling a little feint I did have to quickly carve off a bit of Ginger’s leg to take it in and try it. After all there’d be no point doing a proper butchery job on him if he was ‘honking’, once inside the house and playing down my injury to wifey I threw Ginger’s slice of leg in the frying pan. The boy and I both tried it and I can assure you that it was boodly delicious, not exactly the most tender meat I’ve eaten but by no way tough and far more tender than anything I’ve had from The Co op 🙂

Anyway that was it for yesterday, I went to bed early, tired and emotionally drained only to be constantly disturbed by the frigging phone 😦

Not a good night :-(

Lightning quick, this one, it’s six AM and I’ve just had the worst night in a long while. It was a hard and emotional day yesterday so I went to bed at 9:00pm emotionally and physically drained as I’d a busy day ahead. Well I did have until awoken from a deep sleep at 21:57 to be asked to work today. Of course she had to ask me twice because the first time my sleep numbed brain didn’t catch what she said. Anyway that’s life it can’t be helped and when told of the circumstance I more than glad to do it.

This of course now leaves me wide awake with the adrenalin rush and my mind racing about how I’m going to get all done that was planned for today. Having formulated some kind of plan on how I’m going to deal with a bucket of blood, a half skinned boar, an architect and a prior appointment at  http://www.uniquescotland.com/raasayschool/index.html .I finally drift off into a fitful and much needed sleep to be awoken by another adrenalin shot from the phone , I only answered the thing in the forlorn hope that it was someone from work telling me all was well and no need to turn in. No such luck, it was one who shall remain nameless phoning me with the essential information that the Scottish national theatre are doing a play about ‘Calum’s road’ based on Roger Hutchinson’s excellent book  http://www.amazon.co.uk/Calums-Road-Roger-Hutchinson/dp/1841584479/ref=pd_sim_b_title_2, a piece of information that could obviously not wait until today 🙂

Friday

So I’ll quickly recap on yesterdays events before going outside to finish skinning my boar 😦

 

The first job after feeding was to replenish the depleted wood store but as I started cutting the well seasoned conifers under a tarpaulin by the wood store the Husqvarna 42 started cutting out. It seemed like fuel starvation and as I recently had the carburettor off I knew all was well in that department so turned my attention to the filter in the tank, suspecting a blockage there. It was not blocked but the pipe had split and it had come off. As this filter is also a one way valve that stops fuel flowing back into the tank it was quite obviously the problem, trimming the end of the rubber pipe with a knife then refitting it solved that and after na good few pulls to get the fuel through the saw fired up and performed brilliantly.

Of course this ate into my day a little but eventually wifey and I got back up the hill to get on with fencing.

 

Well, I say wifey and I but we did have a little extra help from Bee, Thelma and Louise 🙂

In the early afternoon Ed and George arrived back at Arnish and were taken by their new owner to nearby butchers to be turned into all manner of delicacies over the next couple of days.

And do not click on that image if you don’t like seeing dead things.

The last ‘school run’ of the week followed a late lunch, normally I’d leave it to wifey but we were taking a couple of puppies down to show our friend at School Park 🙂

Driving through the wood below the youth hostel road for the first time in a couple of weeks it looked quite different as the man formally known as the ‘Grumpy digger driver’ was busy clearing cut timber to make a turning place.

As usual he gave me the traditional greeting 🙂

 Farewell to Ginger

Once back home we gave the pigs an early feed as I wanted to separate Ginger our Tamworth boar out from the rest of the herd and shoot him, but I’ll tell you all about that when I’m more composed, for now it’s after 7:00 and I’ve much to do before my unscheduled day at work.