My piggies finally trust me enough for me to pick them up and weigh them, but their difference in weight is worrying to me.
Crumb weighed in at 558g, where Fudge weighed in at 669g. They're about 14/15 weeks old.
Are either of them underweight? Should I be concerned with the difference? They have a bowl each and i dish their veggies into two separate piles.
Fudge is more dominant, but I've seen Crumb eat plenty too. He loves his hay and he loves peppers! So I know he's eating!
I read the weight thread but I didn't get if the numbers are okay or not.
Thanks in advance.
Hi!
Yours are a perfectly acceptable weight for their age.
As long as your piggies are healthy and well in themselves, and as long as their 'heft' around the ribs (or if you want, their BMI) is fine, then there is no reason to worry. Babies at that age tend to be a tick bonier because at their age all their energy is still going towards growth and not into building up fat reserves yet. This is going to gradually change over the next few weeks once they have reached about two thirds of their very own individual optimal adult weight/size (that is genetically determined) and their growth rate is happening more in occasional spurts from then on in. When exactly this growth pattern switch happens depends on when they reach this point, but usually anytime between 4-6 months or even later.
We do NOT have any weight charts because of the huge variation in birth weights (40-120g for new-borns opening up to 800-1800g in adults). This runs through their whole lives with the gaps getting usually bigger and not smaller when you are watching siblings or same age piggies growing up together.
You just can't compare piggy weights with each other or you create a very misleading set of values. We get so many threads with members who have been wrongly told by their vets that their piggies are overweight or underweight or who worry themselves sick if their piggy is not in the 50% range of average weights - not to mention that weights in vet literature tend to be on the lower side compared to well kept (but not overfed!) pet piggies.
And we used to be swamped by people having anxiety attacks wanting advice on 'feeding up' their piggies, just because theirs were below the narrow average 50% band but perfectly fine in themselves because they had made the mistake at looking at US weight charts.
Absolute weight is no indication for long term health and longevity; it is only useful for monitoring changes so you can address developing health problems early on when they have a greater chance of being addressed or when seeing a vet promptly in an emergency can make the difference between life and death.
It is the heft/BMI checking that is actually by far the better tool for monitoring whether your piggies are a good weight in themselves at whatever age and whatever size - irrespective of whatever they bring on the scales.
If you want to take my Nerys, who was a whopping fat 1500g in the prime of her life (she couldn't run because a twisted thighbone), and my Hedydd, who was just creeping into 900g in her own prime - they have both lived to celebrate their 8th birthday even though they were at the upper and the lower average 80% weight range for adults.
By the way, it was gracileHedydd who successfully led a group of sows for over 6 years, not Nerys who just concentrated on stuffing herself and letting her much smaller litter sister Nia run an outfit of up to 13 sows with a husboar - one of the sows was a young Hedydd.
Even a piggy outside that range has every chance of a normal good life as long as it is healthy in itself.
Nerys (who was never pregnant) - Hedydd
Or if you want look at my Pioden and his wife Helygen: both are perfectly healthy in themselves. Tiny Helygen is only 700g despite being on the same diet because that is her genetic makeup while huge Pioden is 1400g but not at all overweight - he could easily be 1800g if he was spoilt!
I hope that this answers your question?
My boar is a tiny 1050g where as my youngest sow is 1200g and my eldest sow 1068g
