Expansion: pigs and driving.
Feb. 27th, 2020 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI've picked up skills since I've lived out here. One of those skills is driving. I couldn't drive at all when I came up north; my company pretty much taught me and I did my road test up here. There's a lot of snow and ice on the roads some days but very little traffic; I've learned. So now when I back down a steep snowy hillside to turn around in the silly little work truck and find myself going backwards instead of forwards when I go to pull out, I pop her into 4-lo and lock the diff and out I come. I wouldn't have known to do that three years ago and I'd be sitting beside the road, stuck, feeling embarrassed.
I was driving the work truck in the snow because I'd taken an evening away from the conference to go see someone (the only other someone in this half of the province?) with my breed of pigs. These folks happen to be related to my closest coworker so an original failed contact got renewed. I don't fully know how to convey the buoyancy in my belly and the way I want to tell this to everyone and maybe yell it a little, but: they have a line of Ossabaws that's related to mine years back but looks like it captured a distinct set of genetics. That is, the line was imported into Ontario, the guy imported "quite a few" and at the time swapped boars with my pig person. She got one of the boars he brought in, and he bred his others.
The pigs I found locally are from the other boars he imported. My current boar is 50% from that original boar swapped down here. And there's a clear phenotypic/visual difference: the local pigs are a little longer, much smaller, white with big black spots, very sleek. The local guy wants a boar and he'll get one; I'm trying to decide if I want a second boar in trade, or if I want a boar and a sow. IF I had a boar and sow I could sell breeding groups that would take any buyers for a couple generations.
But mostly it's... you know, mine are the only Ossabaws I've seen in person. It's such a thrill to see these, slightly different but similar. They're gorgeous animals, very wild-looking and competent, and diversity-but-familiarity is so viscerally pleasant. I was walking on air all the way back to the conference.
There was some more interpersonal stuff that came up this week too, some good and some bad, but I'll dig into that more in a different post.
I was driving the work truck in the snow because I'd taken an evening away from the conference to go see someone (the only other someone in this half of the province?) with my breed of pigs. These folks happen to be related to my closest coworker so an original failed contact got renewed. I don't fully know how to convey the buoyancy in my belly and the way I want to tell this to everyone and maybe yell it a little, but: they have a line of Ossabaws that's related to mine years back but looks like it captured a distinct set of genetics. That is, the line was imported into Ontario, the guy imported "quite a few" and at the time swapped boars with my pig person. She got one of the boars he brought in, and he bred his others.
The pigs I found locally are from the other boars he imported. My current boar is 50% from that original boar swapped down here. And there's a clear phenotypic/visual difference: the local pigs are a little longer, much smaller, white with big black spots, very sleek. The local guy wants a boar and he'll get one; I'm trying to decide if I want a second boar in trade, or if I want a boar and a sow. IF I had a boar and sow I could sell breeding groups that would take any buyers for a couple generations.
But mostly it's... you know, mine are the only Ossabaws I've seen in person. It's such a thrill to see these, slightly different but similar. They're gorgeous animals, very wild-looking and competent, and diversity-but-familiarity is so viscerally pleasant. I was walking on air all the way back to the conference.
There was some more interpersonal stuff that came up this week too, some good and some bad, but I'll dig into that more in a different post.
