Pregnant or faking it?

[ameliadanielle]

Ok, so our pot belly pig has been playing the, "I'm pregnant, feed me all I want and pamper me," card for a while. She's been acting completely miserable. She has been making a nest for over a week. She won't stand up to eat, even though she will RUN to the food bowl, once she gets there she is just dying of pregnant misery. Her poor boobies are dragging the ground but she does manage to come up the stairs and knock on the back door when she's hungry and then go back out and down the stairs when she gets enough belly rubs and I yell at her for starting to try and rearrange the living room.

She was housed with a male for months, and he was butchered two weeks ago before he turned a year old. The earliest she could have given birth would have been the end of January IF she had gotten pregnant right away. I figured she probably did not get pregnant right away, but the way she has been acting just has me wondering if she is pregnant or just fat and bossy and spoiled rotten. We were seeing a lot of movement in her stomach, the past couple of days we haven't seen much movement at all. I also thought pigs were supposed to be territorial of their nests, she isn't. Her great Pyrenees has begun to sleep in the nest with her instead of sitting out in the yard barking at mouse farts two miles away. So I think the dog is worried about her too.

She doesn't have a fever, no discharge or odd smells, she just seems selectively miserable. I'm wondering if she is just doing this because she has noticed we are suckers and we are babying her and hand feeding her grapes (literally, this is her favorite treat in the world) and letting her be a little bossy. From everything I have read and looked at, she doesn't look far enough along to be THIS miserable to be making a nest already and have no babies yet. We have not been able to check and see if she has milk. She allows us to rub her belly but if we try to check a nipple she will jump up faster than you think she can move. She doesn't want us touching her nipples at all.


She chose their summer sun shade with all only one side as a windbreak, and she has piled hay up around the sides of the entire shade. So we put a heat lamp in there for her. She doesn't mind when we pet her while she's in there and her doggy best friend sleeps with her in here.


Laying in the nest.


Flopped over to get belly rubs after eating.










Sitting while eating because standing is just too much like work.




Is she pregnant? Is she just fat? Is she even going to have them any time soon if she is?

 

[ameliadanielle]

 

[ameliadanielle]

She was most definitely pregnant. But also overweight, which made it hard to tell when she was going to have them. We checked on her around 1am, no babies. Checked on her again at 3am, all 8 babies were already born and she passed the placenta soon after we discovered the piggies. So I guess she was pretty fast about it. Hopefully she will have no complications.

 

[Stacykins]

She was most definitely pregnant. But also overweight, which made it hard to tell when she was going to have them. We checked on her around 1am, no babies. Checked on her again at 3am, all 8 babies were already born and she passed the placenta soon after we discovered the piggies. So I guess she was pretty fast about it. Hopefully she will have no complications.

Congrats! Because she is so overweight you need to be active to get her to a healthy weight and maintain that weight. Just like with people, it is not healthy for animals to be overweight. She was lucky, overweight animals are very prone to having complications when they are pregnant.

Some people find giving pigs foraging activities, so they need to work for their food helps give them something to do and keeps them from snarfing their food then looking for more immediately. Don't give treats unless necessary, and carefully measure out her food. If she is getting food elsewhere (stealing from other animals) then you need to stop that.

Cut cut the amount of calories in her diet slowly. Suddenly putting animals on a severe diet puts them en route to ketosis. Plus, she is nursing piglets. The piglets might actually help slim her down a bit, because of the energy it takes to produce milk.

 

[ameliadanielle]

Yeah, we've never had a pig before and we didn't know how much to feed her. Because we just didn't know how big she was going to get. The male that was older than her that we butchered was half her size. So we overfed her, then we thought she was pregnant so we didn't want to put her on a diet. So we're not upping her food amount for nursing, we're going to just feed her as we were. Hopefully the piglets nursing will help slim her down a little and when they're weaned we can cut her food down.

We are keeping one of her female piglets to keep her company. With the male, she never really got attached to him much and she preferred to sit at the back door and wait until we came outside to hang out and socialize with us. We're hoping she'll be more attached to her own baby and they will spend more time running around the yard doing pig things together rather than her current attitude of waiting by the backdoor for us like a dog.

Maybe she is just fat and it's not that she isn't finished giving birth. I thought she passed the placenta, she passed something after all 8 piglets were born around 4am and at 9am she still just had the 8. So hopefully she is done and doesn't have more piglets in there. I know she's overweight, but she doesn't have any blinding issues like I've read that pot belly pigs get. I do think we can get her back in shape without too much trouble. We have started feeding the dog in the garage. Because she was getting into the dog food and was refusing to eat her pig food. Which possibly contributed to her weight issues? Also, our Great Pyrenees not only guards the chickens and her pig best friend, but also the food bowl so they were constantly bickering whenever the pig tried to get into the dog bowl. Luckily the dog doesn't eat much and she doesn't mind getting her meals separately in the garage twice a day.

 

[ameliadanielle]

Well, she seems to have started cutting down her food on her own. She didn't eat before giving birth, we fed her less afterwards because I didn't want it just sitting and going to waste. Now she's still eating and drinking and using the bathroom normally, but we feed her twice a day and usually she eats it ALL. Now today she still had food left from this morning when we got home this afternoon. Not much, a few mouthfuls, but less. I think because she is just constantly either walking around the yard trying to keep her piglets from nursing 24/7 or she's nursing. Sometimes when she heads to her food bowl the babies follow her so she makes a big circle, rounds them up into the nest, makes angry grunting noises and then leaves to go get food. It takes her a few times before they get the hint and stop following her. Then she gets to eat. I think they're going to run the weight off of her just following her around more than they will nursing. Lol.

They are just the most adorable tiny things. The runt would fit in a hotdog bun. It's like they are just too tiny and cute to be real and running around the yard already. They look like toys. We haven't touched them much. Just to help her round them up when they are running everywhere. She doesn't mind us petting her or touching and handling the babies, as long as they don't squeal. If they squeal she starts cussing us out like she does to them when they won't leave her alone.

We were going to keep the red one, but she is the most feisty one of the bunch. Some of them are practically tame just holding them the first time. Not her. She seems a little wild. Maybe she'll calm down, if not we'll keep the runt instead.

 

[melindaotter]

I have a pot belly pig don't know if pregnant or not. What dose it mean when you squeeze on her nipples clear stuff comes out? Dose this mean a for sure thing she's pregnant or not?

 

[ameliadanielle]

My pig never had milk before she had her babies. Some pigs you can get milk if you gently squeeze a nipple hours before they give birth. I don't know what it looks like, as I never saw it in my pig. If you are expressing colostrum, she should be giving birth any time. At that point you would be able to see the piglets moving in her belly. If she isn't about to give birth, I don't know what it could be.