This little piggy went to market
Let’s start with the essentials: how can you tell if a pig is healthy and happy? “Well, it’s important that the pig has a curl in its tail and looks happy generally. You have to understand the pig to know how it feels,” grins pig farmer Ismo Eerola as his pigs mill around him.
The pigs at Heikkola farm are so full of life that the photographer has his work cut out trying to catch even one curly tail on film. However, there’s not a chewed tail in sight, and that should prove that the pigs on this farm really are happy.Chewed tails are a sign of stress in pigs. Even at Heikkola, the pigs are not entirely stress-free: there is always considerable tension involved when the pigs are transferred from where they were reared as piglets to an entirely new herd. “Pigs live in herds naturally. They have their own ways of deciding who’s nice and who’s not,” explains Ismo Eerola.
At the same moment, some unlucky pig has managed to tunnel through into the next pen, where it is immediately punished for its efforts. The lot of such a renegade pig is a hard one, because even if it goes back to the safety of its own herd, it will be something of an outcast since some of the new smells will have rubbed off on it. Some timely help from the farmer and an individual pen of its own are the solution in such cases.
RIITTA MUSTONEN
PHOTO SEPPO SAMULI
