Empty Pens

If you’ve followed this page for any length of time, you’ll know about Emmaus. We picked him up in Pennsylvania back on our whirlwind trip to Alabama in February.

And since this is not going to be one of those updates that Facebook is going to like very much, I'm putting it in the much-neglected blog.

Emmaus was 6 months old when I bought him and absolutely gorgeous. He was shy at first but slowly became very sweet. He loved head scratches and even started to tolerate when I had to put ointment on his ear when he ripped out his ear tag.

We ran Emmaus with all our girls over the summer. Come fall though, we had no babies and we didn’t really know why. We were able to witness him with Luna but something wasn’t right. He knew what he was supposed to do but couldn’t make the pieces connect. After some very non-vet level assessments we did call the vet. She was able to determine that he was intact and the parts were there but she couldn’t explain why he didn’t breed the girls.

So Dad and I built a mounting block and kept Emmaus in the barn with The Witches to see if we could get a sample off him that we could bring to the vet to see if he just wasn’t fertile.

Turns out we didn’t even need the sample.

Emmaus could only extend about two inches. (If you don't know about pig anatomy, I'm not going to explain it here but there are lots of great resources on the internet if you want to dive in.)

Officially termed short penis syndrome, it’s a hereditary trait. So even if we used him for AI, there’s a chance that the babies would carry on the gene. I won’t do that to someone who buys pigs from me.

On the farm boars have one job. If they can’t do that, we can’t keep them.

So when I walked into the barn on Sunday and saw the pen door only half latched, I knew he had left.

Farming isn’t always fun and we can’t put Bubba in charge of breeding all the girls so just after Thanksgiving we did some AI with The Witches. I’ll ultrasound them at Christmas (cause that’s what all the cool families do on Christmas, right?) and see if they have any embryos.

Definitely not the outcome we wanted but it’s what we got.