Pig Pen Expansion


Pig Maze?

While we're on the topic of letting wild animals loose, I might as well write about what the pigs have been up to. They aren't yet roaming in electrically fenced areas like the bucks (and the rest of our animals), but they're getting there. 

A few days ago I expanded their pallet pen for a second time. This time I wanted to create a chute so I could easily sort them and also give them a little more space. During the rennovation I realized it was a great time to test their willingness to plow through the electric fence.

For a little background on the pallet pens you can check out my prior posts: Pallet Pen for the Piggies and Revised Pig Pallet Pen. If you haven't read about The Great Ossabaw Escape, you should start with the Ossabaw? More Like Lostabaw post.

During this particular pen expansion I left the interior electric fence in the same place and I removed one pallet from the wall. The removed pallet will serve as the "chute" and also as the fence testing area. Right now there's a whole separate area of pasture that the pigs can see, but only the electric wire stands in their way.

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Revised Pig Pallet Pen

New and improved pig pallet pen

A few weeks ago I wrote about the temporary pallet pens that we built for the pigs to train them to the electric fence. My expectation at the time was to release the pigs into larger paddocks within a few weeks. To my dismay, that hasn’t happened. I wrote a bit about the frustration with the pigs in a couple posts during my weekly column on Farm Dreams. You can find them here and here.

The short of it is that the pigs remained very small and tightly wound. I wasn’t making a lot of progress with getting them to calm down and/or respect the electric fence. Sure, the electric fence was inside the pens and it would zap them if they touched it, but I noticed they were touching it a lot. At first I thought they might not be respecting it the way it was intended. I figured I’d give it a couple weeks and see if they learned better.

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Pallet Pen for the Piggies


8-Pallet pen for the weaners

When we posted about the great pig escape a few of our awesome readers suggested testing out a pallet pen the next time. Instead of releasing them into an area solely protected by electric fence, maybe put the electric fence inside a pallet pen and let them get used to it first. It sounded like a good idea, and an affordable idea, so we went with it.

In order to construct the pallet pen we first headed over to a neighbor’s place to pick up some used pallets. We thought eight would be good for each pen, the boars in one, the gilts in the other. He didn’t have 16 pallets, so we just got 8 and put all four of the pigs in it. Then a few days later we got 8 more from a different neighbor and built another one. One thing's pretty certain around here: there ain't no shortage of old pallets. 

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