Arriving home from holiday I was curious to see how much all the animals missed me. Surely the pigs and dogs would come running as soon as I arrived home? I am after all the centre of their world am I not?
Well, if I ever needed a reality check, this was it.
We got home and stepped out of the car and the dogs came running around the side of the house and just stared at me and Aaron in kind of bewilderment and ran straight past us directly to Bex.
Bex had wanted a ‘Love Actually’ moment at the airport and I wanted a ‘Love Actually’ moment when I got home. It was not to be. The scene was the same when we went and visited the pigs.
You know those moments when you actually feel your heart break just a little, just enough to create a lump in your throat and bring just a single tear to the eye? Blink quickly and it’s all gone and you smile and hope no one is any the wiser.
Bex seemed mortified. “Mummy’s home” she kept telling the animals as they all stared up at her with adoration.
“I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed
And as much as part of me wanted to cry I was also overwhelmed by the realization that we had been right to completely trust Bex and Jay to look after our animals.
Before leaving on holiday Aaron and I had agreed that if anything happened to us, the people we would most trust to look after our animals and find new homes for them were Jay and Bex. After gaining permission from them we had written this directive into our wills. Just as any parent would want to ensure their child, if orphaned, would be cared for by the most appropriate person, we want the same for our animals. It was clear we had chosen well.
Being ignored by my animals was both heart-breaking and wonderfully reassuring.
Here Piggy, Piggy, Piggy!
Currently our animal menagerie includes 2 sets of piglets.
Phyllis had 7 piglets on the 13th of April and they are all very healthy and lively. With oodles of attention from Bex these piglets are particularly fearless and spend most of their day sunbathing on the drive or snuggled in a heap on a grassy spot under the trees in the septic tank field. Which sounds disgusting, but the fact is the kikuyu is thick under there and the water that releases into the field is processed, nutrient-rich grey water.
They have very quickly learnt that the adult food comes from inside a secret room (the coolstore) at the back of the shed. Once we started trying them on solids it really only took a week for them to realize just how wonderful pears and cheese are. Now when either of us heads down the driveway towards the shed we are often accompanied by a gang of squealing, excited piglets hoping like hell it’s dinner time already.
In fact a couple of times I have arrived home from work and there, sitting on the driveway, are all the bantam chickens and piglets, clearly counting down the minutes until someone arrives home and dinner is served.
I’m terrified I’m going to run over one of them. Last Friday I had to continually beep my horn to keep them moving. So eager were the piglets that they thought their best option to ensure they got fed was to surround the car.
Sometimes when I walk up the driveway they do that to my feet, just gather on mass, in a circle around me, pushing their snouts into to my ankles, pulling on my shoelaces or trying to bite my toes. All while squealing fit to burst. It can be hard to walk sometimes.
Honestly, piglets at that age are just soooo adorable. Their cute little bodies, their excitement and enthusiasm for life, their tiny little bottoms that wiggle and wobble as they run. I can’t help myself but try to give them all little rump scratches or belly rubs.
Mabel also had a litter on 30 April but things went horribly wrong there. The timing was terrible. She went into labour the morning before we flew back to New Zealand
Bex, to her credit, eventually figured out something was horribly wrong and was able to save 4, which unfortunately 2 days later became 3.
Had I been home I would have figured out sooner that something was wrong but that’s not to say I would have been able to save all 14. I had not anticipated any major birthing problems and so to save Bex any real stress I had told her just to let nature take its course. This was a mistake on my part. I should have explained the birthing process, told her to observe from a distance, but to intervene if things did not go according to plan.
It was a horrible situation to put Bex in, meant the unnecessary loss of many piglets and it took Mabel a good 2 weeks to lower her stress levels. As it is Mabel is still very pissed off at me and I am quite nervous about being in the paddock with her at the moment.
Why Mabel is pissed off at me I cannot know for sure. Was it my absence? Is it Bex’s absence now? Is it that she only has 3 piglets and she has become ultra-protective? Or is it that it was just a horrible labour for her that she’s making it clear she doesn’t ever want it to happen again?
Whatever it is, I am grateful for a pig’s openness in showing its emotions. A pig, unlike humans, never seeks to hide its feelings. If it feels happiness, anger or depression it just lets it show.
A pig is more than happy to let you know whether you’re welcome or not and that’s a good thing. Pigs are big and strong and no one wants any nasty surprises when they’re in a paddock with one.
Aaron admits he doesn’t see an animal’s state of mind as clearly as me. I watch and observe our animals a lot and I can recognize body language. Instinctually I know when something is not right. It may not be something I can define clearly but I know very quickly when an animal is out of sorts.
I wouldn’t say I have any particular talent with animals, but what I do have is years of observation knowledge stored somewhere in my brain. I’ve subconsciously studied human body language all my life, and although I’m no expert, I have no doubt that I often pick up subtle signals someone else would miss. Animal body language isn’t quite so obvious but it hasn’t taken me long to learn it.
I can meet someone for the first time and the hairs will stand up on the back of neck for no apparent reason. Rightly or wrongly I make instant judgments about a person when I meet them. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing but that voice inside my head will send out very clear messages about some people.
Warning bells can go off for no apparent reason and it doesn’t matter what a person does or says, if the voice inside my head says “Don’t trust this person”, I never do.
Sometimes I worry that I’m making it all up as I go along and that I am being stupid but really I don’t believe that. The book ‘The Gift of Fear’ describes this sense of intuition perfectly. As adults our instincts are based on years of actual subconscious knowledge. When things or people go wrong in life for us, all those subtle, little events that happened are stored away, so that when these events repeat themselves it makes us uneasy.
Maybe it’s the way someone holds their head, averts their eyes, the way they move, or maybe it’s the language they use. It triggers a memory inside our heads. We’ve seen that before or we’ve heard that before.
Then there’s that feeling that something about a situation isn’t quite right. Maybe it’s the way you placed that notepad on your desk, with the pen on top. The pen and notepad are exactly where you left them but instinctively you know you would never place that pen on that angle, something inside your head tells you that someone has been at your desk since you left.
And so I trust my instincts completely when I deal with our animals. Each time I look at them, even if it’s only in the minute it takes me to empty a bucket of food into their troughs and say good morning, I’m looking, observing, and somewhere in the background of my mind, every move, every gesture of the animal is being compared to all the other encounters I’ve had with that animal and if anything’s different a warning bell will sound in my mind.
It’s a good skill to have, as well as an odd skill considering I would describe myself as the least observant person I know.
Aaron will tell you that I seem to absorb nothing consciously. A car drives past and I couldn’t tell you what colour it was. A friend drops in and 5 minutes after they leave I couldn’t tell you what clothing they were wearing.
Aaron and I balance each other out well in this respect. He registers the details as they appear in front of him, and consciously remembers these things clearly. Whereas I look but don’t consciously see what is directly in front of me. Instead my subconscious soaks in the whole picture and stores it away for possible future reference, only firing off an alarm if something isn’t quite right.
Of course, having said all this, a pig or a human is vastly different from a duck.
Do I get our Runner Ducks? Certainly not as well as I would like.
They really only seem to show 2 emotions, excited interest and fear, and to be honest, I’m not even sure excited interest is an emotion. How though do you describe a duck which is convinced you may be about to feed it?
However, there is the occasional odd angle of a head or the desire to be alone that indicates when something is up.
All efforts to control and contain our ducks have so far failed. This is despite their choosing not to fly except in panic. We have a core group of maybe 15 ducks that like their paddock and like the verandah but the other 7 seem to see independence as a right and will do everything they can to find a week spot in the fenceline somewhere.
It is not unusual to see our ducks cavorting down in the stream, digging in the mud in the pig paddocks, sunbathing on the edges of the septic tank field with the piglets and the bantams, or to hear them quacking with abandon in the gully behind the house.
Virtually the only duck eggs we’ve found since coming home have been empty shells discarded by a greedy rat.
I moved their feeding area as soon as we came home. Instead of out the back by the vege garden it is now out the front by the dog kennels where it’s nice and flat. We’ve created a small area for them to swim, drink and eat. So far so good, kind of. They seem to like this area, with its sunny aspect and proximity to the house, and the 15 content ducks very rarely stray far from this area. The only problem really is that this area is right outside the master bedroom and the ducks will stand there on mass at roughly 4:30am and start up the dawn chorus.
And when I say dawn chorus, I don’t mean the happy, little ‘It’s great to be alive’ chirps of birds sitting high in a stand of trees early in the morning. No, what I actually mean is the raucous quacking of 15 – 22 Indian Runner Ducks all trying to reach maximum volume in their bid to get our attention.
“I’m huuungry. Weeee’re waiting. Are you awake? Seriously, we know you’re in there! Resistance is futile! Come out. Come out now and feeeeeed uuuusss!!!”
I’ll lie there in bed telling myself “I’m not listening. I can’t hear them. I do not hear them” until I fall back into a very light, barely asleep state.
The longer we stay there the louder it gets.
Every now and then they fall silent though. That’s what really wakes me. It’s that suspicious silence. Right then I’m listening, really straining to hear and that’s when I notice a few very low, quiet quacks and I know they’re discussing tactics, watching and waiting for a light to go on, a curtain to twitch.
“Okay guys. They’re not moving. Spread out guys. Line yourselves up along the fenceline and surround the master bedroom. You guys outside the fence, get up on the verandah and stand outside those bedroom doors. Right. Ready? Go!!”
“Quack! Quack, quack, quack!! Quack! Quack, quack, quack!!...”
I lie there in the dark, staring at what would be the ceiling if I could see it, trying hard to suppress a giggle. “You sodding little bastards” I whisper quietly, more a heavy breath than anything audible.
The body next to me turns, adjusts position. “Do you think they’re trying to tell us something?”
“I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about” I reply
I don’t know why they persist. We never get up to feed them just because. We have our routine. We have our set times on set days but this is of no interest to them.
It’s like they don’t truly believe you’ll feed them unless they remind you they’re there.
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