Page:The Hog.djvu/171

169 tend to prevent them from becoming rickety or crooked in the legs.

Butter-milk, whey, and the refuse of the dairy, with boiled or steamed potatoes, pollard, and oat or barleymeal, may be given as food; also boiled cabbage and lettuce, macerated and bruised oats, barley, and even wheat; in short, the most nutritious and succulent food that circumstances will permit of, and a daily run at grass wherever it is possible. At first their food should all be given to them warm, and be tolerably soft, in order better to assimilate with the state of the digestive functions; gradually and soon they must be accustomed to take it cold, it being far better for them so when once they are used to it; and they must also learn to masticate their food.

Newly-weaned pigs require five or six meals in the twenty-four hours. In about ten days one may be omitted; in another week, a second; and then they must do with three regular meals each day.

But let it be understood that, while we would enforce the necessity of good and ample feeding, we highly deprecate all excess, and all stimulating, heating diet, such tending to vitiate the animal powers, often to lay the foundation of disease, and never to produce good, sound, well-flavored flesh.

A little sulphur mingled with the food, or a small quantity of Epsom or Glauber's salts disolveddissolved [sic] in the water, will frequently prove beneficial.

A plentiful supply of clear cold water should always be within their reach; the food left in the trough after the animals have done eating, should be removed, and the trough thoroughly rinsed out before any more is put into it. Strict attention should be paid to cleanliness; indeed, many persons assert that there is no comparison in point of thriving between an animal well cleaned and repeatedly brushed and another that is left to itself; although both shall be in feeding and all other respects treated exactly the same, the latter will not weigh so much as the former by many pounds.

This treatment will bring them on to the time when the owner must separate those he intends for breeders from those which are to be fattened for the market. The boars and sows should be kept apart from the period of weaning.

The question of which is most profitable to breed swine, or to buy young pigs and fatten them will best be determined by the individuals who have to study it, for they know best what resources they can command, and what chance of profits each of these separate branches offers.

There was an interesting paper published some little time since in the Farmer's Magazine, calculating the number of pigs which, in the course of ten years, may be raised from two one year old sows,