7 May 2009
Well, the piglets only lasted another week on the loose and then one afternoon they must have decided to see where Aaron and the dogs had walked to when they went out the gate. Unfortunately instead of turning left and up Gary’s drive, they turned right and Aaron found them on the bridge, dithering about whether to leave the property or not.
Aaron took them back to their mum and then drove to RD1 for another electric unit and reel of electric tape. Apart from a few false starts, when the piglets decided to brave the wire, they are now permanently with their mum.
This has not been so good for Arthur. He clearly enjoyed their company and has gone back to being bored. So now Aaron and I have decided that when we get the stock yards built in the next couple of months we will also get a permanent fence on the ridgeline of Phyllis’ paddock. We will then put Arthur in the southern paddock. That way, he can at least have company on the other side of the fence, a bit like Stanley and Mabel.
The pond has been good for him to play in over summer but I think close company will be better for him. Dear Arthur must be at least 350kg now. I think most people who see him are impressed with his size. For the most part he is a gentle giant, thank goodness, because he’s bloody scary when he’s in a feisty mood. Not that I have any fear he would intentionally harm either myself or Aaron but Arthur’s idea of a play fight could potentially seriously wound someone.
For several weeks Arthur’s electric wire has been turned off so that the piglets could come and go at will. After a few zappings Arthur seemed keen to avoid touching the wire so all was well. Until last weekend when I saw Arthur studying the fence intently. I went up to him. “Arthur, don’t you go playing with that wire”. I had every intention of telling Aaron we needed to put a battery on the wire but somehow it slipped my mind.
Animals Aren’t Stupid
Last Monday I was up at 6:30 feeding out. I dropped the empty pig buckets on the drive and then took the dogs for their morning walk up Gary’s drive. As we entered Gary’s property I heard a truck blaring its horn somewhere near Koanga Gardens. It was a long, incessant honk. Our cows were in the paddock opposite Koanga and I could just imagine the effect on them. “You idiot!” I yelled “You’ll scare the bloody cows you dickhead!”
We were nearing the top of Gary’s drive when my mobile rang. It was Frank. “Your cows are on the highway”. The dogs and I sprinted back down the drive, into our property and up to the shed. I filled a bucket of pellets and then wondered what the hell I was going to do. I couldn’t have the dogs follow me and the only way to reach the cows was to run along the road. I dithered for a few seconds and then ran up the drive. We all jumped in the car and then I drove back down.
Transit New Zealand had got hold of Frank via a third party and Frank being Frank had raced out his drive and along the highway on his ATV and rounded up the 4 troublemakers and cornered them behind an Armco barrier.
My poor heart was pounding and I was shaking like a leaf. Animals on the highway scares the crap out of me. It could so easily result in a car accident and a whole lot of legal trouble for me. Not this time though. Frank managed to get the old DoC gate open by tying it to his ATV and yanking it away from its supports.
Baby Red, 46 and 84 eventually walked through but 86 got anxious and silly and refused. I chased her in circles around the grass, trying hard to stop her getting on the highway and she flat out refused to go in. There was only one other option. Part of the fence is missing at the end of the paddock but the exit is blocked by electric wire.
There I discovered that one of the steel warratahs holding the electric wire in place was leaning on a very bad angle. I could only assume one of the cows had leant on it and this had opened a doorway for them. I pulled the waratah out and lay it flat and went back out to get 86. Baby Red then decided to run out and join her. I chased them both back in and then while I quickly re-erected the waratah and wire Frank put the fence back into place.
There was a sudden yell from Frank. Baby Red was back on the highway. She’d found another exit. Frank raced out the paddock and chased her back in. She got tangled in the electric wire and dragged metres of it with her as Frank shooed her back in. Eventually she untangled herself and Frank chased all 4 cows down to the far end of the paddock and put them behind another electric wire.
I was absolutely mortified. Frank had wasted a good hour of his morning helping me, the electric wire was in a mess, and the cows were now on grass they weren’t supposed to be on. I thanked Frank and he was his usual ‘Oh well, shit happens’ matter-of-fact about it but quite frankly all I wanted to do was curl up and die.
I had to admit to Frank that that we had never turned the electric wire on in that paddock. It was so overgrown with grass and weeds that it wouldn’t have worked anyway. We had assumed the old post and batten fence was good enough to hold them in.
What we hadn’t realized was that the kikuyu grass completely covering the post and batten fence had actually pulled down a whole section of fence next to the highway. The cows had literally eaten their way out.
Frank left and I unraveled and reconnected the metres and metres of electric wire Baby Red had pulled loose. Eventually the dogs and I drove back up to the house. I got the hedgeclippers from the shed and we went back behind the stream. I spent the next 2 hours clearing the wire. Most of it I had to do by hand as the hedgeclippers were so blunt they refused to work. I was frustrated and annoyed beyond belief. I knew I had to work as fast as possible so I could connect the wire and prevent the cows from escaping again.
Apart from the grass, the wire was also tangled up in a wall of Wandering Jew, covered in bracken and huge canes of vicious blackberry and then damn near strangled to death by numerous grapevine tendrils.
I must have been ranting fit to burst because Arthur had clearly heard me, left the pond area, wandered across the paddock and was now grunting loudly on the other side of the stream. He was clearly looking for a good place to cross. I was thankful the stream was slightly swollen but I figured it was only a matter of time before he decided to chance his luck.
The dogs and I raced back along behind the stream, back out through gate and around the drive and then into his pond paddock. I called out and Arthur trotted over. I scratched his back and rubbed his tummy until his legs gave out and he collapsed on the ground. Lots of appreciative grunts later and Arthur slipped into a deep sleep in the sun.
The dogs and I raced back out the drive and behind the stream and I returned to clearing the fence line. The cows must have heard me because they soon appeared. Damn and blast again. I didn’t want them getting into the driveway paddock because we are short of grass at the moment and we needed to save this paddock for another week at least. To get to the paddock they also had to cross one of two very boggy areas and one of the cows could easily get stuck.
I raced around heaving huge rotting branches and logs out of the stream. Then, with much cursing and muttering I erected 2 dodgy looking fence-like structures across the 2 boggy areas. As I was doing it the cows watched me intently. They sniffed the logs as I dragged them from the stream and 46 kept trying to lick me. “This is serious, damn you! Stop trying to lick me and bloody well take note. You lot have caused me a huge amount of stress this morning and I’m so pissed off I’m ready to put you all in the freezer now. You got that?! Don’t cause me any more trouble!”
Baby Red looked at me and snorted as if offended and turned away. Then, as if on purpose, she walked straight over to a small cabbage tree by the stream, grabbed the top of it and ripped the green fronds out from the trunk.
I was going to let rip with a volley of abuse and then incredibly she walked straight into the knee deep stream water between my 2 log fences, walked over to the island in the middle, hung a right and walked through the very boggy marshland and into the driveway paddock. The other 3 watched for a minute and then did the same.
“Ahhhhhhh! You stupid f***ing cows!”
The dogs and I were well overdue for breakfast and I was getting the shakes really badly. I raced along the fence clearing what was left of the jungle from the wire. Connected all the wires together and then turned on the unit. I grabbed the useless, blunt hedgeclippers off the ground and one of the blades sliced effortlessly through the skin of my thumb. I watched incredulous as the blood ran freely down my thumb. My vocabulary failed me at the point.
The dogs and I then trudged out from the stream and back up the drive to the house. Coco, our HelpXchange girl, not long out of bed was sitting at the table with breakfast. She smiled sweetly and said good morning. I attempted to smile back. I kept my mouth shut for fear of saying something I didn’t mean to. I made the dogs’ breakfast and then my own and then my phone rang. It was Aaron.
I’d already hung up on him twice that morning while trying to chase cows. I went out on the verandah and started to talk and then the phone reception started to go. The conversation quickly became just intermittent snippets of sound. It was the last straw. I was screaming down the phone, not at Aaron but at Vodaphone, at the cows, at the hedgeclippers, at the whole god awful situation. I was so angry I wanted to explode. I hung up on Aaron and walked back inside.
Our guest was sitting slightly wide-eyed at the table. I apologised and briefly explained the situation and then resumed my breakfast in silence.
You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me
Tuesday I arrived home from work at 6pm. As I pulled into our drive, in the fading light I could see Baby Red in the drive paddock looking through the gate. What was she looking at? And then I saw him. 46 was out of the paddock and munching the grass on the other side of the drive.
I grabbed my phone and rang Aaron. 46 wandered up the grass bank and stood in front of my car. Aaron and dogs sprinted down the drive and Aaron quickly opened the gate to the paddock and herded 46 back in.
Aaron looked under the bridge and discovered a broken wooden plank between the bridge and the stream. We could only assume that 46 had leant in for a good scratch and ‘bang’ the plank had snapped in half and out 46 had walked. I cannot believe how lucky we were that it was 46 that broke out and that he had done so as I arrived home from work. Another time, another day, another cow and the situation could have been a lot worse.
Arthur Plays With The Wire
Wednesday morning Aaron went to work for a couple of hours and then to the orchard. When he arrived home he discovered Arthur up at the house talking to the dogs. As he’d walked up the drive Arthur had discovered his old mate Stanley and then Mabel in the next paddock. Apart from a slightly eaten kauri tree outside Mabel’s paddock Arthur appeared not to have caused any damage during his wanderings.
Fortunately Aaron was able to get him back down to his own paddock fairly easily, at which point he connected the electric fence up to a battery.
All seemed fine until the next day. It would seem that the meeting of Arthur and Stanley was enough to trigger some somewhat disturbing instinctual behaviour in both boys. Since then our 2 boars having been in an extremely agitated state of sexual tension and aggression.
Although they can no longer see each other that is not important. They are now aware of each others presence and are just itching for a fight. Every time I get in either of their paddocks I have to hurriedly do what needs to be done and get out. They appear to want a sparring partner to practice with and quite frankly I am not about to play-wrestle with a 350kg boar.
In this past week there has been much jaw grinding and gnashing, foaming at the mouth and spraying of urine. The smells emanating from their paddocks are pretty potent and not altogether pleasant. Arthur has taken to regularly humping a large strainer post lying in his paddock. Hour after hour the post gets a work out. As for his trough, well I don’t know if he’s humping that as well but it’s in a somewhat damaged state and twice we’ve found it in the stream.
To top it off, both boars have stopped eating everything except cheese. I wasn’t overly concerned but a little baffled about the lack of appetite. Then a colleague at work told me that wild male primates stop eating everything except protein prior to mating in order to increase sperm production. While they aren’t primates, this would seem to be a logical explanation for our boys’ change in appetite.
The strangest behaviour yet though would be the guttural growling that Stanley started the day after Arthur escaped. I was in the shed with the dogs and heard growling. Assuming it was the boys about to start fighting I started telling them off and then the growling started again. I looked around the shed door and there was Stanley looking at me.
“Was that you??” it couldn’t be. I had never heard such a noise coming from a pig. And then Stanley growled again. He didn’t look particularly upset or agitated but the growl had an extremely menacing tone to it. “Holy crap Stanley. When did you learn to do that?!”
And so for the last week I have found myself constantly telling off the dogs for growling, only to discover that half the time it’s Stanley.
Arthur Finds His Voice
4am Monday morning I was feeding out the pigs. I put Arthur’s food into his trough and as I turned around he attacked the trough, launching it and the contents into the air. I made a hasty retreat. “Dude, you need to calm down!”
I fed Phyllis’ squealing gang as Aaron drove out the drive on his way to work. Next was Joy and her lot up in the bush. They were screaming and squealing fit to burst. I climbed over the corner post and trudged across the paddock up to the back fence. As I launched the buckets of food over the fence the squealing died away to happy grunting. “Grooowwwl!”
My knees instantly turned to jelly and my heart started pounding inside my chest. It was such an incredibly loud, deep, big cat kind of growl that I turned around fully expecting to see the infamous Kaiwaka lion launching itself at me. “Grooowwwl!”
Oh my god, you have no idea how scary that sound is when you’re standing in the middle of a dark paddock at 4am in the morning. “Grooowwwl!” The noise washed over me again. I could hear Phyllis’ piglets squealing and grunting down the bottom of the hill and the dogs were quiet. That could only mean one thing.
“Arthur? Arthur? That better be you darling. Arthur?” The growling continued and then Arthur appeared in my headlamp view and it was definitely him. That’s the first time I’ve truly been scared of Arthur.
It was the most incredibly frightening noise, and as I climbed over the fence onto the drive I called the dogs and literally ran past Arthur and out the gate. As I continued jogging up Gary’s driveway with the dogs I actually contemplated not going back in case Arthur had broken through the fencing and gone on a rampage.
I did return of course and by then Arthur was just standing quietly in the same place looking through the electric wire towards Phyllis. I know it’s stupid but as I walked up to the shed with the empty buckets I kept looking behind me to make sure Arthur wasn’t following.
The Aggressive Behaviour Continues
For the last couple of weeks Coppa has been getting worked up. He’s picked a couple of fights with Whisky and the 2 boys have had to be pulled apart. The first time in our absence and my brother copped a nasty bite to the hand. The second time was 4am in the shed a few days later. It took me a long time to separate them and resulted in wounds to both dogs. Fortunately they were fairly superficial because they have so much fur protecting them.
This last Saturday the weather was miserable and I suggested to Aaron we put the dog mat down in the livingroom to let them get out of the damp and cold. Unfortunately Coppa became extremely territorial over the mat and Saturday evening they had a big fight.
Sunday during the day they had 2 more. Enough was enough. I rolled up the mat and put it away again. Since then Coppa has taken on a very aggressive, hunted look. He skulks around with his ears pinned back and glares at Whisky every time he moves. The growling will suddenly start and an attack will be launched within seconds. The fights are vicious and frequent and appear to be very territorial.
Coppa seems to have created an invisible boundary line around himself and if Whisky enters that zone all hell breaks loose. For the most part Whisky is doing his absolute best to observe Coppa carefully and back off as soon as Coppa’s demeanour starts to change, but a couple of times he has asserted his alpha dog authority and incited Coppa on purpose.
It’s all quite stressful and we are now having to resort to kennel time-out as soon as we can pull them apart. We have had months of good behaviour from the boys but it’s gone completely mental all of a sudden.
The indoor mat issue I can understand but the constant waking aggression from Coppa is hard to comprehend. I really have to wonder if he and Whisky are picking up on the aggressive atmosphere being created by the 2 boars. The smells the boars are making must be laden with testosterone and pheromones and perhaps that’s triggering subconscious reactions in our dogs.
Thank god the husband and the rooster haven't yet been afflicted with excessive testosterone levels!
Well, the piglets only lasted another week on the loose and then one afternoon they must have decided to see where Aaron and the dogs had walked to when they went out the gate. Unfortunately instead of turning left and up Gary’s drive, they turned right and Aaron found them on the bridge, dithering about whether to leave the property or not.
Aaron took them back to their mum and then drove to RD1 for another electric unit and reel of electric tape. Apart from a few false starts, when the piglets decided to brave the wire, they are now permanently with their mum.
This has not been so good for Arthur. He clearly enjoyed their company and has gone back to being bored. So now Aaron and I have decided that when we get the stock yards built in the next couple of months we will also get a permanent fence on the ridgeline of Phyllis’ paddock. We will then put Arthur in the southern paddock. That way, he can at least have company on the other side of the fence, a bit like Stanley and Mabel.
The pond has been good for him to play in over summer but I think close company will be better for him. Dear Arthur must be at least 350kg now. I think most people who see him are impressed with his size. For the most part he is a gentle giant, thank goodness, because he’s bloody scary when he’s in a feisty mood. Not that I have any fear he would intentionally harm either myself or Aaron but Arthur’s idea of a play fight could potentially seriously wound someone.
For several weeks Arthur’s electric wire has been turned off so that the piglets could come and go at will. After a few zappings Arthur seemed keen to avoid touching the wire so all was well. Until last weekend when I saw Arthur studying the fence intently. I went up to him. “Arthur, don’t you go playing with that wire”. I had every intention of telling Aaron we needed to put a battery on the wire but somehow it slipped my mind. Animals Aren’t Stupid
Last Monday I was up at 6:30 feeding out. I dropped the empty pig buckets on the drive and then took the dogs for their morning walk up Gary’s drive. As we entered Gary’s property I heard a truck blaring its horn somewhere near Koanga Gardens. It was a long, incessant honk. Our cows were in the paddock opposite Koanga and I could just imagine the effect on them. “You idiot!” I yelled “You’ll scare the bloody cows you dickhead!”
We were nearing the top of Gary’s drive when my mobile rang. It was Frank. “Your cows are on the highway”. The dogs and I sprinted back down the drive, into our property and up to the shed. I filled a bucket of pellets and then wondered what the hell I was going to do. I couldn’t have the dogs follow me and the only way to reach the cows was to run along the road. I dithered for a few seconds and then ran up the drive. We all jumped in the car and then I drove back down.
Transit New Zealand had got hold of Frank via a third party and Frank being Frank had raced out his drive and along the highway on his ATV and rounded up the 4 troublemakers and cornered them behind an Armco barrier.
My poor heart was pounding and I was shaking like a leaf. Animals on the highway scares the crap out of me. It could so easily result in a car accident and a whole lot of legal trouble for me. Not this time though. Frank managed to get the old DoC gate open by tying it to his ATV and yanking it away from its supports.
Baby Red, 46 and 84 eventually walked through but 86 got anxious and silly and refused. I chased her in circles around the grass, trying hard to stop her getting on the highway and she flat out refused to go in. There was only one other option. Part of the fence is missing at the end of the paddock but the exit is blocked by electric wire.
There I discovered that one of the steel warratahs holding the electric wire in place was leaning on a very bad angle. I could only assume one of the cows had leant on it and this had opened a doorway for them. I pulled the waratah out and lay it flat and went back out to get 86. Baby Red then decided to run out and join her. I chased them both back in and then while I quickly re-erected the waratah and wire Frank put the fence back into place.
There was a sudden yell from Frank. Baby Red was back on the highway. She’d found another exit. Frank raced out the paddock and chased her back in. She got tangled in the electric wire and dragged metres of it with her as Frank shooed her back in. Eventually she untangled herself and Frank chased all 4 cows down to the far end of the paddock and put them behind another electric wire.
I was absolutely mortified. Frank had wasted a good hour of his morning helping me, the electric wire was in a mess, and the cows were now on grass they weren’t supposed to be on. I thanked Frank and he was his usual ‘Oh well, shit happens’ matter-of-fact about it but quite frankly all I wanted to do was curl up and die.
I had to admit to Frank that that we had never turned the electric wire on in that paddock. It was so overgrown with grass and weeds that it wouldn’t have worked anyway. We had assumed the old post and batten fence was good enough to hold them in.
What we hadn’t realized was that the kikuyu grass completely covering the post and batten fence had actually pulled down a whole section of fence next to the highway. The cows had literally eaten their way out.
Frank left and I unraveled and reconnected the metres and metres of electric wire Baby Red had pulled loose. Eventually the dogs and I drove back up to the house. I got the hedgeclippers from the shed and we went back behind the stream. I spent the next 2 hours clearing the wire. Most of it I had to do by hand as the hedgeclippers were so blunt they refused to work. I was frustrated and annoyed beyond belief. I knew I had to work as fast as possible so I could connect the wire and prevent the cows from escaping again.
Apart from the grass, the wire was also tangled up in a wall of Wandering Jew, covered in bracken and huge canes of vicious blackberry and then damn near strangled to death by numerous grapevine tendrils.
I must have been ranting fit to burst because Arthur had clearly heard me, left the pond area, wandered across the paddock and was now grunting loudly on the other side of the stream. He was clearly looking for a good place to cross. I was thankful the stream was slightly swollen but I figured it was only a matter of time before he decided to chance his luck.
The dogs and I raced back along behind the stream, back out through gate and around the drive and then into his pond paddock. I called out and Arthur trotted over. I scratched his back and rubbed his tummy until his legs gave out and he collapsed on the ground. Lots of appreciative grunts later and Arthur slipped into a deep sleep in the sun.
The dogs and I raced back out the drive and behind the stream and I returned to clearing the fence line. The cows must have heard me because they soon appeared. Damn and blast again. I didn’t want them getting into the driveway paddock because we are short of grass at the moment and we needed to save this paddock for another week at least. To get to the paddock they also had to cross one of two very boggy areas and one of the cows could easily get stuck.
I raced around heaving huge rotting branches and logs out of the stream. Then, with much cursing and muttering I erected 2 dodgy looking fence-like structures across the 2 boggy areas. As I was doing it the cows watched me intently. They sniffed the logs as I dragged them from the stream and 46 kept trying to lick me. “This is serious, damn you! Stop trying to lick me and bloody well take note. You lot have caused me a huge amount of stress this morning and I’m so pissed off I’m ready to put you all in the freezer now. You got that?! Don’t cause me any more trouble!”
Baby Red looked at me and snorted as if offended and turned away. Then, as if on purpose, she walked straight over to a small cabbage tree by the stream, grabbed the top of it and ripped the green fronds out from the trunk.
I was going to let rip with a volley of abuse and then incredibly she walked straight into the knee deep stream water between my 2 log fences, walked over to the island in the middle, hung a right and walked through the very boggy marshland and into the driveway paddock. The other 3 watched for a minute and then did the same. “Ahhhhhhh! You stupid f***ing cows!”
The dogs and I were well overdue for breakfast and I was getting the shakes really badly. I raced along the fence clearing what was left of the jungle from the wire. Connected all the wires together and then turned on the unit. I grabbed the useless, blunt hedgeclippers off the ground and one of the blades sliced effortlessly through the skin of my thumb. I watched incredulous as the blood ran freely down my thumb. My vocabulary failed me at the point.
The dogs and I then trudged out from the stream and back up the drive to the house. Coco, our HelpXchange girl, not long out of bed was sitting at the table with breakfast. She smiled sweetly and said good morning. I attempted to smile back. I kept my mouth shut for fear of saying something I didn’t mean to. I made the dogs’ breakfast and then my own and then my phone rang. It was Aaron.
I’d already hung up on him twice that morning while trying to chase cows. I went out on the verandah and started to talk and then the phone reception started to go. The conversation quickly became just intermittent snippets of sound. It was the last straw. I was screaming down the phone, not at Aaron but at Vodaphone, at the cows, at the hedgeclippers, at the whole god awful situation. I was so angry I wanted to explode. I hung up on Aaron and walked back inside.
Our guest was sitting slightly wide-eyed at the table. I apologised and briefly explained the situation and then resumed my breakfast in silence.
You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me
Tuesday I arrived home from work at 6pm. As I pulled into our drive, in the fading light I could see Baby Red in the drive paddock looking through the gate. What was she looking at? And then I saw him. 46 was out of the paddock and munching the grass on the other side of the drive.
I grabbed my phone and rang Aaron. 46 wandered up the grass bank and stood in front of my car. Aaron and dogs sprinted down the drive and Aaron quickly opened the gate to the paddock and herded 46 back in.
Aaron looked under the bridge and discovered a broken wooden plank between the bridge and the stream. We could only assume that 46 had leant in for a good scratch and ‘bang’ the plank had snapped in half and out 46 had walked. I cannot believe how lucky we were that it was 46 that broke out and that he had done so as I arrived home from work. Another time, another day, another cow and the situation could have been a lot worse.
Arthur Plays With The Wire
Wednesday morning Aaron went to work for a couple of hours and then to the orchard. When he arrived home he discovered Arthur up at the house talking to the dogs. As he’d walked up the drive Arthur had discovered his old mate Stanley and then Mabel in the next paddock. Apart from a slightly eaten kauri tree outside Mabel’s paddock Arthur appeared not to have caused any damage during his wanderings.
Fortunately Aaron was able to get him back down to his own paddock fairly easily, at which point he connected the electric fence up to a battery.
All seemed fine until the next day. It would seem that the meeting of Arthur and Stanley was enough to trigger some somewhat disturbing instinctual behaviour in both boys. Since then our 2 boars having been in an extremely agitated state of sexual tension and aggression.
Although they can no longer see each other that is not important. They are now aware of each others presence and are just itching for a fight. Every time I get in either of their paddocks I have to hurriedly do what needs to be done and get out. They appear to want a sparring partner to practice with and quite frankly I am not about to play-wrestle with a 350kg boar.
In this past week there has been much jaw grinding and gnashing, foaming at the mouth and spraying of urine. The smells emanating from their paddocks are pretty potent and not altogether pleasant. Arthur has taken to regularly humping a large strainer post lying in his paddock. Hour after hour the post gets a work out. As for his trough, well I don’t know if he’s humping that as well but it’s in a somewhat damaged state and twice we’ve found it in the stream.
To top it off, both boars have stopped eating everything except cheese. I wasn’t overly concerned but a little baffled about the lack of appetite. Then a colleague at work told me that wild male primates stop eating everything except protein prior to mating in order to increase sperm production. While they aren’t primates, this would seem to be a logical explanation for our boys’ change in appetite.
The strangest behaviour yet though would be the guttural growling that Stanley started the day after Arthur escaped. I was in the shed with the dogs and heard growling. Assuming it was the boys about to start fighting I started telling them off and then the growling started again. I looked around the shed door and there was Stanley looking at me.
“Was that you??” it couldn’t be. I had never heard such a noise coming from a pig. And then Stanley growled again. He didn’t look particularly upset or agitated but the growl had an extremely menacing tone to it. “Holy crap Stanley. When did you learn to do that?!” And so for the last week I have found myself constantly telling off the dogs for growling, only to discover that half the time it’s Stanley.
Arthur Finds His Voice
4am Monday morning I was feeding out the pigs. I put Arthur’s food into his trough and as I turned around he attacked the trough, launching it and the contents into the air. I made a hasty retreat. “Dude, you need to calm down!”
I fed Phyllis’ squealing gang as Aaron drove out the drive on his way to work. Next was Joy and her lot up in the bush. They were screaming and squealing fit to burst. I climbed over the corner post and trudged across the paddock up to the back fence. As I launched the buckets of food over the fence the squealing died away to happy grunting. “Grooowwwl!”
My knees instantly turned to jelly and my heart started pounding inside my chest. It was such an incredibly loud, deep, big cat kind of growl that I turned around fully expecting to see the infamous Kaiwaka lion launching itself at me. “Grooowwwl!”
Oh my god, you have no idea how scary that sound is when you’re standing in the middle of a dark paddock at 4am in the morning. “Grooowwwl!” The noise washed over me again. I could hear Phyllis’ piglets squealing and grunting down the bottom of the hill and the dogs were quiet. That could only mean one thing.
“Arthur? Arthur? That better be you darling. Arthur?” The growling continued and then Arthur appeared in my headlamp view and it was definitely him. That’s the first time I’ve truly been scared of Arthur.
It was the most incredibly frightening noise, and as I climbed over the fence onto the drive I called the dogs and literally ran past Arthur and out the gate. As I continued jogging up Gary’s driveway with the dogs I actually contemplated not going back in case Arthur had broken through the fencing and gone on a rampage.
I did return of course and by then Arthur was just standing quietly in the same place looking through the electric wire towards Phyllis. I know it’s stupid but as I walked up to the shed with the empty buckets I kept looking behind me to make sure Arthur wasn’t following.
The Aggressive Behaviour Continues
For the last couple of weeks Coppa has been getting worked up. He’s picked a couple of fights with Whisky and the 2 boys have had to be pulled apart. The first time in our absence and my brother copped a nasty bite to the hand. The second time was 4am in the shed a few days later. It took me a long time to separate them and resulted in wounds to both dogs. Fortunately they were fairly superficial because they have so much fur protecting them.
This last Saturday the weather was miserable and I suggested to Aaron we put the dog mat down in the livingroom to let them get out of the damp and cold. Unfortunately Coppa became extremely territorial over the mat and Saturday evening they had a big fight.
Sunday during the day they had 2 more. Enough was enough. I rolled up the mat and put it away again. Since then Coppa has taken on a very aggressive, hunted look. He skulks around with his ears pinned back and glares at Whisky every time he moves. The growling will suddenly start and an attack will be launched within seconds. The fights are vicious and frequent and appear to be very territorial.
Coppa seems to have created an invisible boundary line around himself and if Whisky enters that zone all hell breaks loose. For the most part Whisky is doing his absolute best to observe Coppa carefully and back off as soon as Coppa’s demeanour starts to change, but a couple of times he has asserted his alpha dog authority and incited Coppa on purpose.
It’s all quite stressful and we are now having to resort to kennel time-out as soon as we can pull them apart. We have had months of good behaviour from the boys but it’s gone completely mental all of a sudden.
The indoor mat issue I can understand but the constant waking aggression from Coppa is hard to comprehend. I really have to wonder if he and Whisky are picking up on the aggressive atmosphere being created by the 2 boars. The smells the boars are making must be laden with testosterone and pheromones and perhaps that’s triggering subconscious reactions in our dogs.
Thank god the husband and the rooster haven't yet been afflicted with excessive testosterone levels!
