Waxing Poetic About American Guinea Hogs

[haecklers]

We butchered Bullwinkle, an uncut Guinea Hog Boar who had been breeding within the week on Saturday. I got really worried because there was a strong odor. I think it was pig farts, because when I cooked some of the fat/meat, it only smelled delicious.

He had a lot of fat in the body cavity. I was literally pulling out handfuls to try to get to the liver, etc. that I wanted to save. But he'd been having mostly corn, due to the pasture being dormant, and corn is fattening. He also had around 1.5 inches of fat at the thickest part. We trimmed the bacon so it was more meaty and would be easier to slice down to a more normal thickness but cutting off some of the extra fat.

This morning I cut up the extra bits for sausage (including a nice slice off the hams to make them small enough to fit in the bags/smoker). The meat was deep, dark red, marbled throughout, and cut like filet mignon. I've never seen pork cut so easily! It also didn't seem to have as much of that tough connective tissue that's always a pain with the sausage scraps.

I have to say, one thing I like about boars is that they become total jerks at around 1 year old, so I don't get too sad about butchering time. Snowy, our sweet sow, was ready to wean her babies so I put her with the two Guinea Hog boars again in the pasture. They got really obnoxious. She wasn't in heat but they wouldn't stop chasing her around trying to breed her. She's smaller than them and they were knocking her down, pressing her into the mud, even rolling her around when she refused to stand for them, so she was covered in mud and filthy. I had to pull them into a separate pasture because I was afraid they were going to really hurt her. She was scraped up and bruised but ok. Their paddock was around 3000 square feet and in 3 days they had reduced about half the winter cover crop to mud.

OK so not so thrilled about that, but the babies they were the fathers of are really friendly and have all the good Guinea Hog characteristics, tho from their pot belly mother they're leaner than full Guinea Hog babies. I can't wait to see how they grow out.

We have never given those Guinea Hogs any dewormer, and he had no worms. The liver was also clean and very healthy looking. I'm not sure why worms pop up occasionally in our pigs when for the most part they don't have any and we only deworm them if they seem to need it. Usually if the sows don't get fat again after weaning the babies is when I'll treat them. I did have a vet test the manure and it came back free of parasites that they could detect.

[eljay]

Renate, are you sensitive to boar taint? I would prefer to not castrate my males if I can get away with it. I'm pretty sensitive to boar taint though, and was thinking perhaps they would end up being dog food, which is one of the reasons I'm growing these pigs anyway. If the taint is really bad I could see myself needing a separate freezer for the meat.

[haecklers]

The one boar we had that had taint, I was the one most sensitive to it. I was able to trick the kids into eating the meat with seasoning/sauce but I couldn't force it down. Oddly, the hams were pretty good once cured and smoked, tho I could still detect it. Bacon and sausage? BLECH! It was really mostly in the fat.

When it's cold you can't smell it, the warmer it is the stronger the odor, so you would probably not need a separate freezer. Just be sure to label the packages well - don't want to accidentally cook the wrong thing!

The tamworth pig we butchered smelled really good even while I was gutting him. He's the only one that was that appealing - it was like I almost wanted to just cut off a slice and eat it right there. Never had that reaction to raw meat before. Usually I'm kind of put off by the whole internal organ smell and don't want any of the meat for a few days after.