Practical@Pig Farm, Bagan Serai

Date: 07 May to 19 May 2007
Venue: Bagan Serai, Perak.

This is not considered a very pig farm, but it is very productive with hundreds of pigs sold to various places included local wet markets, Ipoh, Penang, Taiping and etc. They have about 230 sows that continuously giving birth to piglets which will then be grown up and are the source of pork!

This is the picture that we three gals took with all the staff and boss in the pig farm.

From left to right: Ah Yong (Siamese), Kanzo (Myanmar), Syaid (Myanmar), The boss - Uncle Yi Xin, Anonymous(Vietnamese), Aung (Myanmar).

All the workers in the farm are foreigner who knows nothing about Malaysia before they came here. They don't know how to speak Malays and English. Communication with them and even among themselves have been quite difficult. However, after some period of time being with each other, they have created a special language which help them alot to communicate among themselve. The language they spoke was combination of many languages-- Malays, English, TeoChew, Mandarin, Hokkien and etc. I couldn't really understand what they were speaking so most of the time we were communicating with sign language, hahaha.

These workers were there to make money and to send money back to their home countries which are less developed and poor. Their minds are just very simple, don't have entertainment but able to make fun among themselves.

Here is video of a newborn piglet. It was still wet and hardly caught its first breath. Compare with human baby, isn't the baby of animals stronger and smarter? They manage to stand on their feet within the first hour after born, and seek for milk from sow's teats themselves without assistance. This is the survival rule.

For sow which is having dystocia (difficulty in labouring), we have this, an equipment used for holding and graping onto piglet's head and drag the piglet out of its mother's womb.

Most of the times, dystocia can be solved by using gloved hand..... 'I've tried once by inserting my hand into the sow's womb. It was like a vacuum chamber full of mucosa and some fluid. Of course I can't see anything inside, all I have to do is to feel and search with bare hand moving inside, until I felt that I've reached a piglet's body then I will try to pull it out. It has to be done by a strong hand because the vacuum and constantly contracting muscles inside kept sucking my hand and made it harder to move. It's really an energy consuming task.

This is one of the newborns. Right after born, we always pour some special powder onto their bodies to keep them from cold and absorb moist.

This was a congenital abnormal front limb of a newborn. This is destined to die young..... with a non-functionable leg. Hard to survive then after.

This was a fetus died before being born. Quite a number of factors can lead to stillbirth, such as delayed labour, dead fetus, infection, and etc.

Rows of sows taking nap in the afternoon. All they do in the farm is just sleep, eat, sleep and eat and then give birth to newborns.

Day-old piglets must be de-teethed. They have 4 pairs of needle teeth which can hurt the sow's teats during suckling, and the tip of the teeth must be cut off. For both the sake of the piglets and the sows.

Cauterizing the tail of a piglet that had just been cut off. A very useful method to stop bleeding from tail. Piglets'tails are being docked at around 5 to 7 days old to prevent them from biting each other's tails. Piglets usually display the behaviour of biting tails among themselves whenever they are bored due to their playfulness and curiousity. Biting tails can lead to blood loss, infections, anemia, loss of life, etc.

The boss, Uncle Yi Wan, was collecting the semen from a boar. The collected semen will be diluted and packed to be used in artificial insemination.

This is how the process of artificial insemination was carried out. Mounting on the back of the sow while inserting the packet of diluted chill-stored semen into the cervix of the sow. Riding or stepping or massaging the back of the sow can simulate the mounting of a boar which stimulate the sow to be more receptive to the semen deposited and hence increase the rate of fertility.

This is a young boar with black eye-ring around its eyes. haha.... Staring innocently and curiously at the camera.

The 2 siamese mama were cutting the mother's day cake that we bought for them. It was a simple celebration on the mother's day. Wish them happy being mama!!!

The family that we stayed with during the practical at pig farm. This is the house of the boss's brother (left in white),Uncle Yi Guang.

This was the last nite we stayed at the house and so the family prepared a farewell dinner for us. There were all the sumptious siamese local dishes. Hot and spicy and sour are typical tastes of the siamese food.