After some advice please.
we have a family funeral to attend on Friday and need to travel from the midlands to Cumbria. I was hoping a friend could come in and see to them but Nobody is available. We have only had our piggies a short while: it will be 3 weeks for our little one and just over a week with his new companion.
I know it isn’t ideal or advisable to leave them alone over night but I’m worried how they might fare if I have to board them so soon. Boarding would need to be for 2 days or they would be at home from Friday morning to Saturday afternoon and I would leave plenty of hay and a pile of veggies but really not sure how I feel about that. What would you do?
If you cannot find another solution in a hurry, then you can leave them for that length of time as an emergency one-off as long as none of them is on medication or requires you to keep a closer eye on them.
Life can unfortunately throw you curve balls without warning and no preparation time. You run the same risk of losing a piggy each time you go to bed; when the chips are down, you have to take a leap of faith every time to go out for work or even leave the room shortly - and a piggy can die on you from a stroke or heart attack straight out of the blue while you are in the same room.
I prefer to not leave my own healthy piggies for more than 24 hours and try my best to find knowledgeable accommodation for any medical piggies where they are regularly checked on and have quick vet access (which has on occasion saved lives but not always), but on one extreme occasion I have had to leave my own piggies for even longer when my mother-in-law was suddenly put on terminal care with my hub leaving for Wales straight away that same evening while I had travel by train up and down from the Midland to Wales in order to spell my exhausted husband by sitting with my mother-in-law every second night in order to allow him to catch whatever sleep he could get and then return home to look after our small business and my piggies, get some crash-out sleep, prepare the piggies for another long haul and support my very upset husband and my dying mother-in-law back in Wales for another night session.
It was not what I wanted but the best I could to in an absolute emergency. Of course, the piggies were always the first and the last thing I tended to upon my arrival back home and before having to leave again.
Unfortunately none of the local pet care agencies, neighbours or more local friends (and I rang/asked them all, as many as I could get hold hold of!) was available or willing to come and feed and check on the pigs once a day in my absence. I am proud that I did still manage to feed them and look after them once a day despite a daily several hours train journey, the hugely stressful circumstances and the increasing lack of sleep.
I would however draw the line at leaving piggies to fend for themselves without once daily fresh water and hay if at all possible.
We then had to do it all over again for my MIL's funeral as hub didn't feel fit to drive home in the evening, so we would come back only in the morning. But at least my feeding neighbour was back home from looking after her own ill mother by then, so she could pop over in the evening and the morning to give the already chopped up veg waiting for her in the fridge, and refill the bottles and hay trays.
Even if you have a good support network, you can't always count on it working at all times, especially without notice - and emergencies usually don't happen with an advance notice or at convenient times.
There are times when you just have to try your utmost and hope for the best when you can't plan and - with conflicting priorities - have to muddle through as best as you can. You can never choose what life is throwing at you. It doesn't make you a bad owner but you learn to put things into more of a perspective and become more understanding towards people who struggle with finding support for themselves and having to somehow square the circle with very limited options.
I hope that you get through it fine. If you are really worried about leaving your piggies for any length of time, I would recommend buying a camera that you can set up. I am doing this whenever I go to Switzerland for a family visit so I can check in daily on my piggies, especially when I have a new carer coming to look after them. But in the end, however long or short you leave your piggies alone, it is always a leap of faith that you have to take. Thankfully, on the whole, piggies are more resilient than we tend to think.
PS: Have you googled for licensed local pet services? With the number of piggies I have, I boarding is unaffordable and on the whole I have found that having somebody coming in is a lot less stressful for the piggies as they are left in their comfortable surroundings.
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