Diseases of Pigs State Exam

We’ve just sat our penultimate exam of vet school, the Diseases of Pigs State Exam.

After a month off for Christmas and a pretty chilled rotation block I found it hard to get back into study mode but in classic Lewis style I crammed it all and passed - with an A!

Last day on the uni farm

We’ve reached the end of an era, Group 4's last day at Zemplinska Teplicka the university farm.
We started off vaccinating and castrating a load of piglets and then did pregnancy diagnosis of sows and vaccinated some bigger animals.

The very last pig to vaccinate was the big boar so a few of the girls went in to do it together. As soon as he stood up they ran away scared so I (pretending to be) confidently walked in and (absolute fluke!) managed to do it first time.

One of the teachers was watching us and said I was excellent so I asked if it deserved an A in the State exam 😂

This little piggy...

...got castrated.

This morning we headed to a private pig farm to do some pigs work and it was actually really fun!
We had to don these sexy disposable overalls which are one size fits all, so a little snug.
My group started with castrations which I've never seen done in piglets before, the best age to do them is younger than 7 days old but the ones we had were just over a week so that we could practice giving intra-testicular anaesthetic blocks and being bigger I think they were a bit easier.

It was the usual "no no you do first" with people nervous to do it so I went first and it was pretty straight forward - kind of like a cat (scrotal incision and exteriorise) and a calf (using emasculators).
Afterwards we applied a topical antibiotic powder, injected iron, vitamins E, D, K and vaccinated them.

We didn't take our phones in to the pigs because of biosecurity with African Swine Fever and zoonotic Salmonella etc so no photos of piglets!

Hygiene & Welfare Trip; Pigs

I tagged along to the Hygiene & Welfare trip again today, to visit a pig farm about an hour away from Kosice which they said was a poor example but it had all stages we needed to see; natural breeding, farrowing, weaning, pre-fattening and fattening.

Most places nowadays will use AI, farrow on site then send the piglets off for weaning and fattening so it was good to see it all together.

All the pigs are Middle Whites, a quick growing, early maturing breed with apparently excellent flavour and a lightweight carcass.

The piglets are given constant access to feed and water from day one with heat lamps for the first few days, though there wasn't much ventilation in the shed so it was very warm in their anyway. They are vaccinated and have ears tattooed at a young age, though I didn't ask what they're vaccinated against.

After 28 days the piglets are weaned and castrated and moved to another building for pre-fattening, then finally fattening in small groups. In theory it's an all in-all out system where everything is washed and disinfected between litters but it didn't look like anything had been cleaned in a long time.

Once they reach 110kg liveweight they are sent to slaughter.

After her piglets are weaned, the sows are then moved to these small crates for 21 days while they get back into oestrus before being put back with a boar for mating and placed in a bigger pen for gestation; 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days.

Sows usually have 5 or 6 litters before their milk quality decreases meaning piglets don't thrive, making it economically unviable to keep them so they are sent to slaughter and gilts (young females) are chosen from the younger pigs to replace them.

We had stud boars at the farm I worked at in Aberystwyth which were kept immaculately in brand new modern buildings which you had to have a shower and put on a clean boiler suit to even enter so this was a stark contrast to that. Those boars had semen collected which was looked at in a lab, chilled and sent off to various breeding units around the UK once a week.
The other pig production unit I've spent time on was a huge free range outdoor unit in Cambridge where they use AI, sows farrow outdoors and the piglets are kept outside in groups until slaughter with lots of space to run around and wallow.

Cambridge Agric Tour; Pigs

The sows farrow in these outdoor units which are bedded down with deep straw. When they're due to farrow they nest down and the little windows at the back means the farmers are able to check on them easily without disturbing her.

 Once the piglets are a couple days old they'll be up and about, running around the sty and outside.

 The sows had loads of room separated off by electric fences which the piglets could run underneath if they really wanted to but they tended to stick close to mom and not venture too far.

 After about a month the piglets were weaned and moved into groups with big automatic drinkers and feeders which they soon got used to and had a lot of space to run around and wallow in.

 You can see here the size of the field they were in and how much space the pigs had, this was just once of the fields they kept - they had tens of fields like this full of pigs.

 Everything is arranged like a clock around the central unit in the middle so if the pigs need to be handled they can just open one of the gates and herd them into the middle making it stress free and easy for the staff and the pigs.

The middle unit had lots of gates and panels to allow them to separate groups of pigs by size, sex or for any other reason easily then back up a trailer to load them straight into to move them off site or for slaughter.