Pigs

A loose patio pig and a penned one:

are raised so differently that they suit different homes. The patio pig of the eastern villages lives on maize, leftover maize dough and whatever the kitchen throws out, grows slowly and lays on fat, and is often a native Creole pig or a cross with one. Scraps with meat in them should be boiled first, because raw meat waste is how some of the worst pig diseases move between farms. A pig in a pen with a concrete floor eats measured concentrate from animal feed and reaches slaughter weight in months rather than the best part of a year. Weaners go to fattening pens. Gilts and sows go to someone who wants litters, and a boar makes sense only where there are sows enough to keep him working and a person who can handle him.

Weaners raised with the Christmas tamales in mind:

are why many Guatemalan families take on a pig partway through the year, since pork is wanted everywhere for the holiday tamales. The plan works only if the pig gets there in time. On concentrate, a weaner that arrives around midyear is a finished pig by the holidays; on maize and scraps alone it may still be growing after them. Male weaners going to a fattening pen should already be castrated, ideally as piglets: meat from an entire boar can smell strongly when it cooks. Check rather than take it on trust.

Pig pen kit, from the trough to the farrowing pen:

starts with a pen that keeps the pigs in and the lane out: a concrete floor with a slight fall to a drain, a trough the pig cannot flip, and water it can always reach. A nipple drinker on a pipe wastes less than a basin and stays clean, and a hopper feeder holds the weaners’ ration where they cannot stand in it. A farrowing pen with guard rails along the walls gives piglets somewhere to slip out of the way when the sow lies down, which is how many are lost in their first days. A weigh tape round the chest gives a working weight without a scale. Trailers for moving pigs are under livestock trailers.

A pig’s tongue, legs and breathing:

tell you most of what you need before it leaves its pen. In the east, where some pigs still roam near latrines, people have long held a pig still and looked under its tongue for small white cysts, the sign of pork tapeworm; a pig that shows them should not end up on anyone’s table. Watch it walk on hard ground, moving freely, with no dragging hind leg and no swollen joints. Listen for a cough, look for scours stuck to the tail and hind legs, crusted skin that points to mange, and bitten tails from a crowded pen. Ask which vaccinations it has had and whether it was wormed, and see the card. A used feeder, drinker or farrowing crate is only as clean as the farm it comes from. If pigs died on that farm, scrub and disinfect it before your own pigs touch it. Look for cracks in concrete troughs where stale feed collects, and for nipple valves that drip.

A weaner, a sow or a fattening pig in a listing:

needs the facts a photo cannot show: age, sex, whether a male is castrated, breed or cross, what it eats, its weight by tape or scale, and for a sow how many litters she has had and how many piglets she raised. Photograph it side-on, standing on clean ground, and add a short video of it walking. Say whether it was raised loose or penned. For kit, give the dimensions and the material and show where any rust sits. Whoever drives over from Cobán to collect a fattening pig needs to know before setting out whether you have a ramp or a bank to back the pickup against, because a heavy pig does not get lifted into a truck bed by two people without someone getting hurt.