We thought that because the pig and chickens had been perfectly happy living in the same paddock together for 5 months they would be fine.
We thought wrong.
We started noticing that the pig was playfully snapping at the chooks every now and then. That was fine until I was up in the paddock and saw that a couple of the chooks had slightly damaged wings. It looked as though our pig was helping himself to an all you can eat chicken buffet.
As much as I loved having the animals in the same paddock we decided that our little egg laying machines needed to be taken care of so we built a fence, but unfortunately not before pig took a chunk out of one of our poor chooks as we were laying out the fence. It was a wee bit stressful to say the least - I'm not sure who was more traumatised, me or the chicken!
We opted for a simple fence made from waratahs, a couple of hot wires and chicken netting - hot wire to keep the pigs in and netting to keep the chickens out - as much as I love them they're not particularly smart and are still not afraid of the pig!
Since then the animals have all been living very happily on opposite sides of the fence. Luckily the chickens are pretty tough and the 2 that had been injured survived - they're not laying at the moment - no surprises there - but they're looking much happier a couple of weeks on!
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