Chris was passionate about reviving rare breeds of livestock. His first challenge was with a little-known breed of cattle called Whitebred Shorthorns. According to Chris, these cattle were more rare than the giant panda (I thought this might have been because they lived on a diet of white bread – but apparently not!). The breed was a distant relative of the Beef Shorthorn, which ironically was enjoying a surge in popularity, in part because of the beautiful marbled beef it produced. The Whitebred version was few in number, but Chris was doing his bit to keep the breed alive. I had dealt with them on a couple of occasions, pregnancy testing the cows and carrying out their routine TB test, but on none of my visits to his new smallholding had I spotted the pig in a pen, in the corner of the cattle shed. Her name was Elsie.
Elsie was an Oxford Sandy and Black – another rare breed, sadly in decline. She had previously been mated with a Gloucester Old Spot boar and the litter of piglets that were asleep next to her lengthy udder looked as delicious as they were cute. They were, indeed, destined to make the finest sausages in North Yorkshire. But Chris had bigger plans for Elsie. She was soon to be mated with a boar of the same breed. The piglets would be retained within the herd, allowing the breed to increase in number. No more babies would end up as sausages. The problem was that finding a suitable boar of the same breed to mate with Elsie was not easy. Oxford Sandy and Blacks were few and far between. So, Chris decided to use the alternative method of getting a sow pregnant, namely artificial insemination. Whilst Chris had done some work with pigs in this area before, he wanted some professional assistance and my inseminating skills were called into action.
Inseminating a sow is not as difficult as it sounds. My first experience of this process was while I was a veterinary student, working on a large pig unit quite close to my home. The days were long and it was hard work, but I learnt a huge amount about pigs, including how to inseminate a sow. I also learnt quite a lot about power-washing pig sheds.
Throughout my time there, I was closely supervised by the pigman. Pigmen are quite different to other stockmen. They communicate in their own special way, sometimes more at one with their pigs than their fellow humans. The pigman from whom I learnt my pig husbandry skills, spoke in a mixture of words and grunts. Were it not for the jauntily angled flat cap that never left his head, in the dim light of a fattening shed I think he could have been mistaken for one of the stock to which he attended. I have the greatest of admiration for pigmen. My own grandfather was one himself and he truly loved his pigs. It was his influence that first set me on the path towards veterinary medicine. Every time I see a pig (which is not as often as it used to be), I think of my grandfather and inwardly thank him for steering me towards the career that I now love so much.
So, some twenty-two years later, the skills I learnt from the grunting pigman from Leeds would be put to use. Chris had organized for the delivery of some semen from an Oxford Sandy and Black Boar, along with all the accoutrements that I would need for the procedure. As I unpacked everything when I arrived at his farm, he related how perplexed the postman had been when he had delivered the parcel. There was a large label on the outside of the box proclaiming ‘LIVE SEMEN’. As if this didn’t make the parcel unusual enough, there were two corkscrew-shaped catheters taped to the outside.
‘Elsie is mad on heat,’ Chris said, almost beside himself with excitement. ‘I’ve been sitting on her back and she is not budging an inch! Not even making any noises.’
We both knew that this meant that the timing was exactly right for artificial insemination. The two cardinal signs of a sow being in heat are swelling of the vulva and standing still when the pigman sits on her back. At any other time during the pig’s oestrus cycle, she will squeal and make a great commotion if a person (or, more usually, a boar) tries to sit on her back and will immediately run away. Elsie was perfectly happy when Chris put his full weight on her rump. In fact they both looked as if they were quite enjoying it. Elsie made small, contented grunting noises and Chris, for his part, sat astride his favourite sow in a similar way to a cowboy trying to tame a bucking bronco. Most pigmen would sit ‘side saddle’ to test a sow, but Chris tackled all his tasks with a greater enthusiasm than most. He just needed a cowboy hat and a lasso to complete the rather unusual image.
Meanwhile, I was rifling through the box and reading all the instructions. It was straightforward enough. I just needed to remember if a sow’s cervix had a left-handed or a right-handed thread.
Elsie stood quite still, happy with Chris on top. I lubricated the foot-long catheter with the corkscrew end and inserted it as gently as I could. As the screw-shaped end reached her cervix, I twisted the catheter in an anticlockwise direction. All was going smoothly. Elsie was content and Chris was comfortable, although Pete, the Gloucester Old Spot boar, watching from the neighbouring pen was confused and disappointed that he was not being called into action today. I held the catheter in place with one hand, and had the bottle of semen in the other. The only way I could remove the sealed cap from the bottle was to snap it off with my teeth. I’ve done this many times before when I haven’t had enough hands, but never with a bottle of pig semen. I had not appreciated that the bottle was slightly pressurized. As I twisted the top off, a squirt of watery semen shot out of the bottle, straight into my face. It then dribbled down onto my waterproof trousers, covering me in precious Oxford Sandy and Black pig semen. There was, thankfully, plenty left in the bottle for Elsie. Chris and his wife, who had also come along to watch the spectacle, could not contain their mirth. I, however, dared not laugh, or even speak, for fear of the stuff trickling into my mouth.
Apart from this minor spillage, most of the contents of the bottle went into the correct place and, after unscrewing the catheter, we sat back and waited for nature to do its thing.
Three months, three weeks and three days later, we had the result that we wanted. Elsie had a litter of beautiful piglets. When they were a week old, I called at the farm to check them over. It was a cold and crisp autumn day, but the piglets were snuggled cosily under a heat lamp beside Elsie. They were a rich ginger colour with black spots, all healthy and strong, destined to perpetuate the breed line and fly the flag for the Oxford Sandy and Black breed. They looked beautifully content and, as I checked each piglet in turn, I felt like a proud father.
Chris was bitten by the breeding bug and had bigger plans afoot. He managed to buy an Oxford Sandy and Black boar from a fellow enthusiast in the south. He phoned to tell me all about it. Donald the boar would be arriving (with his gilt friend Ivana) in a few weeks’ time. I was slightly disappointed that I would not be fathering another litter in the same way, but I felt sure that the new Oxford Sandy and Black boar would do just as good a job as me, with my catheter and a plastic bottle from Ireland. I met Donald soon after his arrival and my involvement in the ensuing love triangle continued in a rather peculiar way.
Donald was a handsome but belligerent boar when he first arrived on the farm, throwing his weight around as if issuing the pig equivalent of presidential decrees on a daily basis. Chris’s trousers were testament to this, as Donald’s sharp and dangerous tusks had made several large holes. Fearing for everyone’s safety, Chris arranged for me to call and remove the offending tusks. This is a simple job, although it requires some sedation to keep the patient still whilst the lower tusks are sawn off neatly, using special wire. The procedure is painless, as there are no nerves in the tusks, and the result is a boar who cannot damage the sows when he mates and does not injure the pigman or his trousers.
All went surprisingly smoothly, with much less commotion from Donald than either Chris or I expected. Usually, any job involving injecting a pig includes lots of squealing and charging about, but not so today. Donald trundled off into the corner of his pen to sleep off the rest of his sedative, and I happily drove back to the surgery, ready to regale my colleagues with how successful and straightforward the procedure had been.
So I was not expecting the anxious email that arrived from Chris, two weeks later. Donald had lost his libido. Ever since the tusks had been removed, he had simply laid around, not interested in the seasons of either Ivana or Elsie or any other sow in heat. It was as if the removal of his tusks had emasculated him. At first I thought Chris was joking – his comments about trying soft music and a romantic meal suggested the problem was a minor inconvenience – but the photos that followed showed a pair of shrunken, prune-like testicles and confirmed that the loss of libido was genuine. I was baffled. But, whilst I was as concerned as Chris about this latest turn of events, it did at least mean that maybe I would get another chance to be surrogate father to a litter of Elsie’s lovely piglets!