joanneswift813
New Born Pup
Hi all, if you've been following my other thread about bonding boars, you'll know that we lost dear Desmond almost 2 weeks ago now, leaving 3 and a bit year old Terrence on his own. In his best interests, we came home with 11 week old Patch a week ago on Saturday!
Patch still has a lot of growing to do, and I'm concerned about feeding. Terrence is a bit sludgy (Desmond didn't recover from a bladder stone operation, they were on a similar diet which at the time we didn't realise was high in calcium). So we've reduced pellets to 1tbsp per day, switched to filtered water and are following the recommended diet on this forum.
I've heard a few different things about what you should feed younger piggies - different pellets, alfalfa hay and 2tbsp of pellets because they are growing so much. I can't do that with Terrence in the cage because he eats at the same speed as Patch and will just have half of whatever is put in the cage! I also can't feed them separately because the bond has only just started to settle down in the last 48 hours (we are about 1 week and 3 days in) and the last thing I want to do is upset the apple cart by separating them for feeding.
So my questions are:
Patch still has a lot of growing to do, and I'm concerned about feeding. Terrence is a bit sludgy (Desmond didn't recover from a bladder stone operation, they were on a similar diet which at the time we didn't realise was high in calcium). So we've reduced pellets to 1tbsp per day, switched to filtered water and are following the recommended diet on this forum.
I've heard a few different things about what you should feed younger piggies - different pellets, alfalfa hay and 2tbsp of pellets because they are growing so much. I can't do that with Terrence in the cage because he eats at the same speed as Patch and will just have half of whatever is put in the cage! I also can't feed them separately because the bond has only just started to settle down in the last 48 hours (we are about 1 week and 3 days in) and the last thing I want to do is upset the apple cart by separating them for feeding.
So my questions are:
- Does Patch actually need different food/different quantities of food? Or will he be ok on the same stuff as Terrence?
- If the answer to that is yes, what is critical? And any suggestions on how I can go about doing that, without separating them and without Terrence eating any of it?!