Rearing and Fattening of Pigs. 



13 



but even in this apparently simple process a loss or a profit may- 

 result from the various methods followed or from the want of 

 any method. In the good old times of some fifty years ago the 

 killing of a pig at a village farm house was quite an event ; the 

 huge carcase and the many savoury dishes manufactured from 

 the offal were the admiration of the youthful portion of the 

 small community. At this period, well-nigh all the pigs gave 

 up their lives to furnish huge flitches of bacon to adorn the 

 ceilings of the farm houses within a radius of a few miles of 

 the sty where they first saw light. This was prior to the many 

 railways and to the introduction of the mild curing system now 

 in vogue, which renders possible the manufacture of bacon all 

 the year round. In the olden times the pigs were obliged 

 to be very fat, or it would not have been possible to eat the 

 heavily salted bacon which had to be made during four or five 

 months for the whole year's consumption. This also deter- 

 mined to a considerable extent the portion of the year when 

 most of the pigs were fattened. As a rule, the store pigs 

 would be shut up soon after harvest and fed night and morning 

 with as much barley meal as they would eat — no variation of 

 food, and no addition of coal-cinders, earth, roots, being given 

 for some months — the same simple and satisfying fare being 

 given day after day, and continued weeks, if not months, beyond 

 the period when the pig would give anything approaching a 

 fair increase in weight for the food consumed ; but this was 

 a matter which did not appear to trouble our forefathers, who 

 simply followed in the footsteps of their predecessors perhaps 

 for generations in the same farm or on the same estate. 



Railways, the mild-curing system, the American hog-raisers, 

 and the vastly more luxurious tastes and habits of the people 

 in the British Isles have changed or are changing all this. 

 We now feed or should feed our pigs all the year round, and 

 from their birth, the early maturing properties of our pigs are 

 being slowly, mayhap too slowly, improved. We study our 

 markets, in which the buyers now require quite a different 

 style and size of fat pig from that of fifty years ago, and we are 

 becoming alive to the fact that a variety of food is even beneficial 

 to a pig. Many pig-feeders have so advanced that they believe 

 in feeding the fatting pigs three times a day, and actually save 



