Buying a Show Pig

Video Transcript

"When buying a pig in our area we tend to have a local hog sale. Members are on the list ranging from in order in which they put their deposit down on the hog. Typically the first pick gets in all reality the pick of the best hog on the place, but when buying a hog you must know what you're looking for. A lot of younger students tend to think just because they're at the top of the list they're going to have the best hog, but they must know what they're looking for. When looking at a hog you want to make sure that the hog carries definition and muscling down the ham. The dimple of the tail head indicates this muscling and muscling up the loin. You also must insure that your hog has a wide top and is wide based. A lot of these heavier muscle hogs tend to be narrow at the bass meaning that they don't set up square on their haunches and angle in at their hock. You also want to insure that they're wide across their chest floor and carry good dimension and substance of bone and hold a heavy foot. These heavier muscled hogs need to have this capacity to hold on to this heavier carcass. It's a Burro. It's about four weeks old and it has good shoulders, a good butt, its dimple you want to look for it to be kind of deep. The dimple is kind of by the tail, the butt, where it starts to go down. Show hogs also tend to finish out at 150 days. The ideal weight of a market hog for meat market is ranging from 245 pounds to 300 pounds. Ideally you would like your hog to finish at 265 pounds."