Little Big Pig

A blown-up pig's bladder - in other words, a "Colonial foot-ball"

It works!

Yesterday our friend PJ came out and very generously assisted in processing a pig to roast whole for the birthday this weekend.  It was the only remaining boar among the spring piglets, and we also didn't want him to start breeding his sisters.

You know, it's hard to tell how big things are out there.  I'm not sure if this is because of all the distance makes the perspective different, or because we have a mixture of large and small animals.  Out there, Belle appears to be an average-sized dog, but when I brought her into town once for her rabies shots, she towered over all the other dogs there and everyone was commenting on how enormous she was.  She is so small next to the cows.

Bee, the huge mama sow is so big, everything looks tiny in comparison.  Ethan estimated the spring pig was about 55 lbs, and last week when PJ saw them, she said it looked about 55 lbs, too (I had no hand in this, I should add, but they all looked tiny from a distance).

Well, that pig was huge.  He weighed probably 150 lbs, and was as long as Rosie.  Mirin stunned him with the .22, and got a perfect shot.  He went down immediately.  Later, when I was cleaning everything up, I found a 3-foot metal rod that turned out to be the spit to roast the "small" pig that PJ was going to loan us....it looked comic next to the actual pig.  There were more problems with that - because it also didn't fit in the cooler.  We had to make one out of hay, ice, and a scrubbed-out water trough.  And Ethan had to drive a long way to pick up a spit that would actually fit the thing last night.

So...we'll see how it goes.  Theoretically we would need to wake up at 3am just to start the fire....