Livestock guardian pig

Tuesday morning I glanced out the window and saw my sow had gotten out.   She is generally well behaved, so I was in no hurry.  I downed my coffee and went outside. As I let her back into her pen, I noticed her piglets from last fall huddled in a corner as if there was danger.  I looked around and saw her foot prints in the snow going to the chickens.   Inside the chicken pen was the story:  A hen was gutted.  A rooster was crippled but alive. I ended his suffering.  And there was  a dead raccoon looking as if it had been run over by a Mack Truck.

I went back to the pigs and thanked Sassafras for her work.  I told her children they were safe …momma is a badass.

That's excellent John, another animal to add to the protectors list.  I'm familiar with Maremma dogs and alpacas being used as guardians of sheep flocks, but a pig is a new one!

That's pretty awesome. It takes a pretty big predator to take on an angry adult pig. Go get 'em Sass!

Edit: Sad about the chooks though.

Give Sassafras a treat from me! She may not have saved two of the chickens, but she may well have saved the rest of the flock. Coons are not as bad as mink for "killing everything moving", but they are very prone to returning over and over.

At least you can be fairly sure the rest of the chickens are safe... unless the coon was tag-teaming and there's a second one who's too hungry to have learned its lesson?

Wow....she 'Mama-bear'd' that unsuspecting racoon!  Yeah, mama pigs don't mess around.  Our first exposure to that was partitioning a pot-bellied sow in a stall with some food as we hurriedly collected her piglets.  We were in a different building altogether giving them shots when the door flung open and mama was there, eyes ablaze, wondering what the &%$# we were doing with her young'uns.  We finished quickly, then went back to see how the heck she had gotton out of that stall.   Turns out that little pot had lifted the rather heavy gate right off of its hinges, leaving the locked portion to dangle on the lock-chain!

Good PIGGIE!! Nice going Sassafrass!!