If you were one of ‘sow’ many asking for an update after our Queen’s College pigs after they made their TV debut in front of 6.8 million viewers on BBC1 this summer, then you’ve ‘pigged’ the right place to find out more.
The whole educational experience has been a wonderful collab-boar-ation between Queen’s College and a local farm just down the road where two of our pupils Ben in Year 7 from Senior school and Isabelle in Year 5 from Prep have been put in charge of the day-to-day business of rearing our piglets.
When BBC Countryfile presenter Adam Henson came to visit the school in June, the names ‘pigged’ by our pupils for our two new piglets where ‘Percy’ and ‘George’. Since filming, both Percy and George are now 25 weeks old and sow-prizingly now weigh over 70 kilograms!
As they have grown they have developed their own porcine-alities with Percy, the pig with the whiter tail, being the friendliest and George being a little more reserved. The exception to this is food time when George can often be seen stub-boar-nly stood actually inside the feeding trough to try and get the most to eat! When it comes to meal times they love to ‘swine’ and dine on pig nuts but for special treats, they have potato peelings, vegetable peelings, and fruit, with the favourite food is melon skin.
“They both hear the latch go on the gate and race to the feed trough as they know this means food time. We play a game with them to see how far we can get before they hear us. They have an amazing hearing”, says Isabelle.
“They also snore so loudly”, added Ben, “they will be laid in the sun, deep in sleep, with their tails twitching and the snoring can be heard from the house!”
They are also amazing escape artists, with one act of insu-boar-dination seeing them both escape into the cow yard and try and eat all the cattle feed, other times making an almighty mess in the pig ark with all the straw pushed to a corner and digging giant holes.
Mr Mann said he was, “delighted with the success of the growing and rearing programme of teaching and learning at Queen’s College as part of a whole school approach to food and understanding more about where our food comes from. I must pass on a massive thanks to Queen’s College parents John and Vicki Wattam for all their generous help and support in making this happen, and I am delighted to announce that we will be building on this success with the addition of two calves and two lambs in the coming year”.
If you missed our Queen’s College pigs on TV you can watch it again on BBC iPlayer by clicking the link below. Our segment starts at 38:00. https://www.bbc.co.uk/…/m0019n5f/countryfile-jersey-2
