Who doesn't love bacon?!

I've been asking Danny for goats for as long as I remember. I'm pretty sure on our first date I told him I wanted a goat. He told me that he wanted to live on a sailboat. Shockingly we went on a second date! Trials and tribulations of our courtship aside, a few years later and we think we're Mr. and Mrs. Old McDonald. Danny's friend, we'll call him, the "Chicken Dealer" somehow seems to have an endless supply of the perfect homesteading animals. He called a few weeks ago and asked if we wanted goats, Danny declined...again. However, they did have a brief chat about pigs. Danny is all for "free" bacon and has been talking about pigs since we've moved in. (Side note: there is no such thing as a free animal).

Fast forward a few weeks later and here we are masked up, hand sanitizer packed, in the middle of the pandemic, taking a really necessary trip to go pick up two pigs. Don't judge us! The Chicken Dealer is moving out of state and has to re-home all of his animals, so this was kind of an emergency. We arrive at the pick up site and after a few hours of loading both cars (yes, we had to take two cars) full of homesteading contraband, we were on the road back to Virginia, 11 ducks and 2 pigs heavier. All while wondering what on God's green Earth we would tell the police if we got pulled over for transporting livestock across state lines in the middle of a pandemic. We get the pigs, Bert and Ernie, home, unload them and Danny builds a very okayish electric fence. They survive their first few nights. I only have to chase one of them around with a bowl of dog food when he escapes the pen. And Bonus neither of us get mauled! We're thinking "We've got this! Everything is under control!"

Surprise, surprise, guess what shows up on Craigslist a few days later, a girl pig! Of course the boys need a girlfriend, lets add another pig to the mix since we already have no freaking clue what we're doing. Bert has half of his testicles, it will be a great science experiment, he probably can't be bred anyway. Naturally, we bring Pinky, the girl pig home, along with 3 "free" roosters and 4 chickens. Pinky goes into the pen and tensions are high. She and Bert exchange aggressively weird butt bumps while she runs around then pen squealing like a maniac as she realizes the fence is electric. Meanwhile, I'm googling on our non existent internet how to properly introduce pigs to each other because Danny and I both though the other researched beforehand. Clearly, we are horrible pig owners already. As we sit thereon the tailgate of Danny's 1987 Dodge Ram, drinking Coors light, wondering what in the world we were thinking, Bert less than gracefully mounts Pinky! Looks like I've got three months, three weeks, and three days to get it together. That's how long pig gestation takes.

So here we are 3 pigs, 11 ducks, and 4 chickens, and 3 roosters later and Danny says to me, "I guess we're pig people now."

Disclaimer: We did do a significant amount of research on pigs, specifically Kune Kune x Juliana pigs over the past year or so before even considering bringing the pigs home. We would never purposefully put any of our animals in danger.