Is my (not so) minipig pregnant or just a fatass

[Galinidus]

I got 2 mini pigs in sept or October. They were about 3 months old when they got here. A male and a female. Now obviously they had sexy time together and the lady pig started getting fatter.. The boy piggy unfortunately dissapeared and never came back . It was at a time, when girl piggy was getting a lot fatter and no longer was letting him Have any sexy time. Now im not sure if it was because she was no longer attracted to him (joke) or if she was already pregnant. But what happened is the male one bust his way out of his pen and never came back, hopefully went to find himself a wild boar, but also around the same time a dead pig was found by a road nearby and collected by the council (very sad). This happened on the 26th of feb. And now im left with a super fat pig(in the nicest way possible), and i really hope she is pregnant and not just super fat. Hopefully boy piggy has spread his genes and we should get baby piggies soon. Can anyone tell me by the photos if this pig is pregnant? Sometimes i can feel stuff inside her belly, but im not sure if its a baby pig, or just food her boobs sseem to b a bit bigger at the Back, but front ones arent too big(ive included pics of ger boobs too) thank you xxx

 

[RiverOtter]

Dude, no. You know what isn't found in nature?
Mini pigs.
I don't know what "research" you did, but I've been breeding mini pigs for 9 years and since humans - not nature - bred them small, humans are responsible for their safety. Mini pigs have potbellies because a lot of their internal organs didn't shrink with their bone structure (similar to dwarfism) and there's just not enough room in there. Adding pregnancy to that in a young pig who's still growing can cause permanent - and sometimes fatal - internal damage.

You know who doesn't care one tiny bit about that? Nature.
See, Nature's entire point of reproduction is to keep a stable population - to replace the parents. So, in order to keep 2 reproducing pigs, Nature pumps out a litter of 10 every 5 months .... because that's how many pigs Nature expects to die without successfully reproducing. Nature is perfectly content for your pregnant-way-to-young pig to suffer or die, because to Nature, heck, crows and maggots gotta eat too and there's other pigs.

That is NOT how ANYONE who keeps animals should think. But because there are too many people who want domestic animals to be "natural", instead of taking proper care of them or just not keeping them at all, decent, responsible people had to pass laws and create animal control officers to take care of domestic, unnatural animals after someone lets too many get hit in the road, go feral and reproduce unchecked.

 

[The Moonshiner]

Mini pigs start reproducing at 3 months. She is 7 months

And some girls start puberty at the age of 10 but that don't mean they should start having babies.
Mini pigs typically reach half their adult size by 1 year of age and can take up to 5 years to reach their maximum size.
Seems kinda cruel to make them start reproducing at 3, 4 or even 7 months of age.
Your pig, your choice though.

 

[The Moonshiner]

Well if you let an intact female live any amount of time with an intact male and they were having a "sexy time" then it's about 99% chance she's pregnant.
Congrats on your preteen piggy being knocked up.

 

[RiverOtter]

What age is best for them to breed at?

A mini pig gilt should be at least 80# and 15 months to breed safely. You get them smaller than that by breeding females that size to the tiniest possible male. The resulting piglets will be every size in between. So any breeder who pre-sells week-old piglets or claims that they'll ALL be tiny is either lying or is totally (horrifically, unethically) ok with losing poor young gilts on a regular basis.

Tiny females are in high demand as pets - make sure they get spayed, not for all the scare-tactic nonsense on mini-pig websites, but because you don't want the poor thing to die horribly if someone looks at her with eyes like $_$ in the future.
Tiny males have a lower demand as pets - and such a small one as future breeders that it's not worth bothering with and so all males are best neutered at a few days old same as farm pigs. Intact males are nasty, and not good pets. My Jack Boar is a total sweetie, but he reeks and humps everything that holds still for 10 seconds.
Large females have a decent demand as barnyard pets and future breeders.
Large males I sell to folks who want to raise backyard pork or sometimes to a large family who celebrates occasions with a whole, roast pig - they really love them.

 

[Folly's place]

x2! Thank you for posting, when I couldn't say anything as nice as you managed here.
Mary

 

[The Moonshiner]

So were they also siblings?

 

[NatJ]

The internet tells me a pig is pregnant for "3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days."

You can figure the earliest possible due date (based on when you got them) and the latest possible due date (based on when he went missing)--any piglets would be expected within that time window.

If there's no piglets by 4 months after he disappeared, then she probably was not pregnant

 

[Cecisflock]

I t's unfortunate that the Op hasn't been seen since Jun 20, 2020

 

[RiverOtter]

That’s interesting. I don’t know anything about pigs but wanted to see what IS the right age to breed.

Full size pigs can breed between 8 and 10 months and generally won't breed if they're too small/young. But "mini" used to mean "when compared to 600-1000# adult pigs", and so meant pigs who maxed out between 200-300# full grown. Those can and will bred at the same age and be fine.

Now, people think microscopic when they think of mini pigs and want 3yo pigs that weight 30#, That is a really, really recent development in pighood and we're going to have to be really careful breeding for that for at least the next 50 generations (roughly 75 years) while we work the kinks out of that.