t successful pigman is he who succeeds
in so feeding his charges that they daily eat and thoroughly digest the
greatest amount of food possible. In pig fattening, as in many other
things, time is money. Further it is just as much a mistake for fatting
pigs as for human beings to be continually eating, or at irregular
intervals, small quantities of food. The two most certain indications
that a lot of fatting pigs are thriving is to find that they are asleep
and that their feeding troughs are empty. When pigs are fed a greater
quantity of food than they can eat at once they will be frequently
getting up to eat a little more of the surplus, and each time they rise
from their bed they will evacuate their bowels, and in most cases before
the major portion of the nutriment has been extracted.

Still another of the fallacies of our forbears was that the fatting pig
made the greatest increase from a given quantity of food when it was at
least approaching maturity and ripeness, or complete fatness. It was
useless to argue with them, since anyone could see that it was so. If
you suggested the use of the scales, the idea was scouted, since a
person of any experience in pig fatting must be able to notice the
increase in bulk of the pig. It is true that apparently the pig would be
making a greater increase of weight as it approached the completion of
its fatting process, since the addition to its weight and bulk would be
almost entirely composed of fat which could only be deposited on the
outside of the carcase. All the vacant space in the interior of the pig
would have been occupied, the pig would have stored fat away in its
muscles, around its kidneys, on its stomach, its bowels, and wherever it
was possible to stow it away, but these additions to the weight of the
carcase which had been proceeding in the early stages of the fatting
could not be observed, nevertheless they were proceeding, and in this
was the pig enabled in its early stage of fatting to make a profitable
return for the food consumed.

Fortunately we are not left on this point to mere conjecture; many
experiments have clearly proved that in the early stages of the life of
a pig it is enabled to manufacture pork at a far less cost than in its
later stages of life. The young pig also possesses over its older
companion the great advantage of being able to eat and utilise a greater
quantity of food in proportion to its weight or, in other words, the
young pig can conv