The Ethics of Chronic Pain

For the second time this season, I have a pig with chronic pain. They aren’t sick and they grow fine, they are just clearly in constant pain in their back ends. There are no obvious injuries. They just mince around when they walk, sit on their butts while they eat, and spend most of their time lying around. The simplest description would be “growing pains,” although they aren’t around long enough for me to find out if they would ever grow out of it.

I have been wondering what, if anything, my ethical obligation is. Generally speaking, I think I have an obligation to keep the animals under my care from suffering. But, what to do with a pig that has chronic pain? Certainly, I am not going to put the pig on a pain medication regimen. Am I then obligated to have the pig slaughtered to (ironically) relieve it of its pain and sell it (at a substantial loss) as a roaster? Or, is it ethical for me to do nothing about it? Can I just let the pig live in pain and have it slaughtered on schedule when it reaches slaughter weight?

I took the last option with the first pig. I just kept an eye on him. I decided that if it became clear that his pain was getting substantially worse, or if the pain became so great that he was no longer well enough to get around, that I would have to do something about it. With that pig, that never happened, so I kept him around and made no interventions. He grew fine and went to slaughter on schedule with the rest of his paddock mates.

So far, I have been taking the last option with the current pig as well, but taking the last option has me ill at ease. I don’t like knowing that the pig is in pain and doing nothing about it. Yet, I also don’t like the option of selling the pig at a loss as a roaster. And, I really don’t like making a decision about whether to relieve an animal of pain based solely on how that will impact me financially. And, yet, that is exactly what I am doing.

It is pretty clear to me that while I am having trouble admitting how I should act, ethically speaking, it is not actually an ethical dilemma. A dilemma, by definition, has more than one outcome and all of the outcomes are “bad” in some way, which is what gives force to the dilemma. In this case, ethically-speaking there are two outcomes: 1) relieve the pig’s pain (by whatever means) or 2) don’t relieve the pig’s pain. Option two is unethical, so it is therefore not a dilemma, and the ethical imperative is clear.

I have to admit, therefore, that I am acting unethically, in spite of the fact that in an effort to retain the illusion of ethical behavior, I have lowered the bar all the way to the ground by stating that I will act to relieve the pig of its pain only when that pain becomes unbearable, evidenced by an inability or unwillingness to rise. While the pig spends more time than the others lying around, I do see her up and grazing, so by my definition the pain is not unbearable.

There is more to say (there is always more to say), but I have to go out and do chores.

 

Big Pig Move

Sunday was moving day for the middle-sized pigs. For the past couple of months, I have been rotating them around a mixed grass permanent pasture, but it was time to move them onto the annual oats + rape pasture about 1,500 feet and a hedgerow away. For about four seconds, I considered walking the pigs from one field to the next. After four seconds of imagining pigs scattered all over the farm, I decided that the best thing to do would be to load them onto the trailer and drive them from one field to the next. With my two brothers visiting (Peter here for the month of July, Anthony here for our grandmother’s funeral), I had plenty of help.

I hooked the trailer up to the tractor and backed it up to the paddock with Peter and Anthony guiding me back. Once the trailer was backed up, we adjusted the electronet and opened the trailer door. Then I put the two feed troughs on the trailer and poured feed into them while the pigs watched. As soon as they saw the feed start pouring out, a few of the pigs hopped onto the trailer.

Peter stood behind the door, holding it open, ready to close it, while Anthony and I walked out into the paddock to “push” the pigs toward the trailer if necessary. There are three duroc barrows in the group that come from a different farm than the others and are quite skittish, so I was worried that they wouldn’t get on the trailer, but as it turns out, within a couple of minutes, they hopped right on. Unfortunately, about half of the rest of the group didn’t. A couple were wary of the trailer, and one monster has gotten so big so fast that he couldn’t really work out how to hop up on the trailer. So, rather than lose the group that was on the trailer, I told Peter to just close the door.

We drove those pigs over to their new paddock. Once they were inside, we watched them for a couple of minutes to make sure they would respect the paddock fence, which is a stranded fence rather than electronet. It was clear that they recognized the strands as electrified, so we went back over to the old paddock to load up the rest of the pigs. Unfortunately, that one big pig really couldn’t work out how to step up into the trailer, so after a few minutes we gave up. It was about 3pm and we hadn’t had lunch and we were all hungry, so we took a break.

After lunch, we went back out. I built a step for the big pig out of a pallet and a board to cover it, and he and the others used it to step right up. Anthony closed the door and we headed over to the new paddock. Because the other group of pigs was already in the new paddock, unloading the remaining pigs into the paddock was going to be complicated. If we opened the paddock to get the trailer in, the pigs that were already there would escape. The back of the trailer had two doors, one large door that runs across the whole back that can be swung open, and a half door that slides open. Since we couldn’t swing the big door open without opening the paddock, I backed the trailer up square to the fence. In my mind, I thought we would lift three of the four wires so that the pigs on the trailer could jump down to the ground. We wouldn’t lift the fourth, lowest, wire, which was below the level of the door, and which would keep the pigs that were in the paddock from escaping. What I actually said to Peter, however, was, “just lift the wires up so that the pigs on the trailer can get off after I slide the door open.” So Peter, following my instructions perfectly, just lifted all four wires up. Four of the pigs that were already in the paddock scooted out into the open field behind Peter as we watched the door for the other pigs to start coming out.

This is important: When pigs (or other livestock) escape, do not panic, especially when there are still more pigs inside the fence than outside. Livestock are herd animals. They want to be together. When one or two happen to escape it is almost always the case that all they want to do is get back inside the fence to be with the rest of the group, so all that you need to do is figure out a way to let them back in. When the whole gang gets loose, it is a little bit different, especially when they are in a new place that hasn’t yet imprinted on them as home. However, the reality is that even when a whole group of animals escape, they (usually) don’t go charging off, running for the hills. They pretty much stop at the first patch of good grass and start eating. All that you need to do is make the inside of the fence more attractive than the outside of the fence. Usually all that that takes is some grain.

When Peter saw the pigs getting out, he started to freak out. I told him to not to worry about, to just let go of the bottom wire to hold the rest of the pigs in and just get the pigs off the trailer into the paddock. Even though the wire was down, a couple more pigs scooted out to be with the escapees, but at the same time, six new pigs hopped out of the trailer into the paddock. Once they were out of the trailer, Peter let go of the rest of the wires. As soon as the escapees heard the trailer pigs in the paddock, they started to run along the fence line trying to find a way back in to greet their friends. All that we had to do was lift the wires back up and they ran right in. Once they were back inside, I waved to Anthony, who was 800 feet away at the other end of the pasture and waiting for me to signal him to turn the fence charger back on. Peter and I stood inside the paddock with the pigs for a couple of minutes. One or two got shocked and that was it. The strands were reestablished as the painful boundary line and the pigs no longer got too close. I waved to Anthony again. He turned the fence off, and Peter and I stepped out of the paddock. I waved to Anthony once more and the pigs were secure.

Peter and Anthony had done as much as they could do. The rest of the pig move was tractor work. I had to move the shelter. However, the middle pigs had outgrown their shelter, so I needed to swap their shelter for the shelter that the little pigs were using, which is about 40 square feet bigger, and is also set up to have an awning attached that doubles the size of the shelter. I knew that this was going to take a long time because I had to drive down the road to the neighbor’s to use his driveway to get into the field where the little pigs were, and I would need to go very slowly with the little pigs’ shelter because I built it heavy and huge. It is portable, but just. I nearly racked it apart when I moved it the first time. There was a rut going across the path that I hadn’t seen and the corner of the left skid caught it. I heard a great creaking sound over the sound of the tractor engine and immediately stopped. I looked back and the shelter was all cockeyed. Luckily as soon as I eased the tension, it went back square, if a bit less tight than it had been.

I started moving the shelters at 6:30pm and I finished just about 8:30pm. Part of the reason it took so long was that while I was moving the shelters, I also shifted the little pigs into a new paddock. They were ready to move anyway, and I thought it would be easier to deal with moving the shelters if I could move the them without needing to get in and out of a paddock with pigs in it.

Peter came over to help me get the shelter into the middle pigs’ paddock. He fed them at one end of the paddock and stood with them, while I opened up the paddock on the other end and towed the shelter into place.

After that, I checked on the sheep and closed the chicken coop, and we finally had dinner at about 9:30pm, which my cousin Zach, who was also visiting, cooked for us.

 

Swimming Pigs

Starting at about 6:15 yesterday evening, and ending about thirty or forty minutes later, we had torrential rain, and when I say torrential, I mean torrential. There was a torrent running down every inch of the slightest slopes and pools in every depression or hole. About twenty minutes into it, I realized that it was bad enough that the pig shelters would be flooded. So, after having changed my wet clothes for the third time already, I put on another dry pair of pants and shirt, slipped on my rain gear and knee boots and headed back out into the rain.

I stopped at the barn and loaded four bales of hay onto the forks of the tractor. I checked the middle-sized pigs first. Half of them were laying in wet, half of them were standing in an inch or more of water in their shelter. I looked around the paddock for a dryer spot to move the shelter to, but there wasn’t one. There were rivers running through the paddock in some places. My only option was to spread out two bales of hay in their shelter, which I hoped would be enough to keep them dry. As soon as I was finished spreading the hay, the pigs all went running back into the shelter. I realized just how hard it was raining when I stepped out of the shelter. It was like I had been whacked with a board. It just slammed right into me. I put my head down and trudged over to the tractor.

I checked the big pigs next. As I passed through the hedge row, I turned onto the pig field road. If I were driving a car and not a tractor, and even if the road were paved, I would have had to turn back. The water was probably eight inches deep in some spots, and rushing past me. There was about four inches of water in the big pig’s shelter, much too much to manage with a little bit of hay. I decided that I would need to move the shelter, but I hadn’t brought the chain with me, so I would have to come back.

On my way to check on the little pigs, I had to cross a narrow stream, over a foot and a half diameter culvert. The water had overwhelmed the culvert and jumped the stream banks. If I hadn’t known the road so well and where the edges of the culvert were, I might have ended up off the road with a wheel buried in the stream. As I crossed, it looked to me that the water was more than a third up the back wheels of the tractor. I could see the water through the holes in the floor of the steel operators platform, rushing past just a few inches beneath it.

My brother Pete and I had moved the pigs to a new section of the field earlier in the day, a bit higher up the hill, so the flooding in the shelter wasn’t as bad as it would have been. The spot where they had been was pretty well under water. As it was, the water had seeped into the shelter in the new spot, but it wasn’t that bad. There were a couple of wet spots, but since the pigs are still so small there is still a lot of space inside the shelter for them. Nevertheless, I didn’t know for how long it would continue to rain, and I did not want the pigs to get chilled, so I spread out two bales of hay in the shelter, concentrating it along the length of the driest side.

Mercifully, as I was finishing bedding down the little pigs’ shelter, the rain stopped, just like that, literally as if someone had turned off the tap. One second a torrential down pour, the next, nothing. When a rain like that stops just like that you realize just how incredibly overwhelming it had been. I hadn’t realized it, but while it was raining there had been a constant great roar that drowned (literally) everything else out. In its place, an eerie silence and utter stillness, broken only by the quiet grunts of the little pigs settling into their bedding. Within moments, however, the birds started to chirp, slowly inching back out from deep in the crooks of the tree boughs into the open air. I looked around and listened and took it in for a second, but then I got back to work because the big pigs were still under water.

As I drove from the little pigs’ field back to the barn, it started to spit a bit, but the rain had finished. The middle pigs were out, playing and rooting around in the wet ground. I stopped and checked their shelter. The bedding was still reasonably dry in most places, but I was worried that the moisture would wick up through the hay over night, so I decided to add one more bale of hay. Back at the barn,  I loaded three more bales of hay onto the forks and grabbed the chain.

I distracted the big pigs by putting some food in their trough and then drove the tractor into the paddock and hooked up to the shelter. I had scouted the paddock after I filled the trough and there weren’t any really dry spots, but I did find one spot that would do. I dragged the shelter slowly into place and then unhooked the tractor and then spread two bales of hay inside the shelter. By the time I was finished, the pigs had finished their food, so I had to put some more in the trough so that I could get the tractor out of the paddock.

On my way back to the barn, I stopped and spread the last bale of hay in the middle pigs’ shelter, and then finally parked the tractor at the barn and walked up to the house where I announced that I would most definitely not be cooking dinner. Pete, Jen, and I went down to Middleburgh to Hubie’s, where I nodded in and out of sleep between bites.