Veterinarians and Swine

A Coyote's View of the Growers' Market,
30 x 40 inches, Acrylic on Canvas, $2028.00

Several years ago our horse doc told us you could get a free ride to vet school if you agreed to serve a Midwest swine farming community for five years.  Sort of "Northern Exposure" meets "All Creatures Great and Small."  Seems most veterinarian students these days want to go into small animal or equine medicine.

Some friends of ours just had kids. the four legged kind, cloven hooves and cud chewing.  Small ruminates in veterinarian parlance.  Can't get a vet out to see them and check on them; risking a future source of homemade goat cheese.

Most small farms don't have hogs anymore.  When I was a child, a sow and some piglets were as common as chickens and fresh farm eggs.  My uncle once raised the FFA grand champion hog in Texas.   My house covenants prohibit pigs, I can have anything else, my neighbor has a camel, but not pigs!   If that wasn't the case I think I would have a hog to fatten.  Of course my kids would name it and not want me to butcher it and then they'd miss the experience of slinging chitlins.

Gone are the days when restaurants used to sort their wet garbage for the local hog farmers.  Hog slop.  We feed our chickens our vegetable scraps, they love it.  Chicken slop.

When I was about eight, we were out at Bill Sheppard's place near Llano.  His sow had just had a litter of pigs.  I picked up one of the piglets.  It squealed and here comes mama around the corner, teeth flared out ready to bite my chubby little ass.  I dropped that piglet and ran to the fence, jumping up just in time to miss being swine behind.

Speaking of camels, our horse doc fixed that camel next door.  I am curious, what question would you ask a vet who just castrated a camel?  I await your answers.

The Old Church at Dawn
30 inch by 24 inch
Acrylic on Canvas, $1,216.00

The Old Church at Dusk
30 inch by 24 inch
Acrylic on Canvas, $1,216.00

Above is my newest painting.  It is from a series I have been doing, "Places of Corrales."  Here are two more from that series.  Don't forget to go to Hiram Ditty and see more of my work.  Feel free to buy one too.

Speaking of balls, my wife used to work with a real "caballo culo" who liked to toss his testes on the table.  I bought her the biggest pair of pink truck balls I could find so she could show him she had balls too.  They now proudly hang in my bar b q shack.  The truck balls that is...  she keeps his in her purse as a souvenir.

So the moral of this story is...  don't throw your balls on the table with my wife, you just might lose them, if you want to be a veterinarian consider Iowa, after all it's only five years and you'll have no student loans to pay back, don't pick up piglets when mama sow is around and we need more goat vets.  God Bless.