Well the birthing is done and now Little Bugger and Unigoat both have a single male offspring. Unigoat's birthing was easy and required no intervention from us. Little Bugger had a small amount of difficulty, her kid's head was trying to come out at the same time as his feet and he got stuck. In the wild this may have resulted in death for the kid as well as the dam but here on the homestead I just pulled his feet a little and he was freed up enough to slide right out. It has been a couple of days and every one seems to be doing well. Out temps have dropped below freezing a few nights and I was a little worried about the ability of the kids to survive that low of a temp so soon after birth but every one was up and playing this morning so all is well.
Also we have used up the last of the Macaroon meat (to make room for the next pig) and while Macaroon was not much in life she was a pretty good lard pig. Modern pig breeds are intended to produce large amounts of meat with very small amounts of fat owing to our current culture of lower fat cooking and the cheap cost of corn oil. In the past certain pigs breeds where used as "larders", pigs grown for lard production. Macaroon was certinly a larder and we are still cooking with the lard we rendered on that slaughter day and we still have a shopping bag full of fat that still needs to be rendered down into lard. Our next pig will certainly have some fat on him but nowhere near the ratio that Macaroon was carrying.
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