You can get your meds from a variety of sources. Non prescription meds you can get from various companies via internet or mail order. Prescription drugs can be obtained from your vet. READ AND FOLLOW your label directions. There are various warnings regarding slaughter on most meds.

Medicines are usually given three ways. IV-intravenously, IM-intramuscular and SC-Subcutaneous. I'm mostly familiar with giving shots to horses and cows so I can't help you much on pigs. I do know that in meat animals you want to always try to give the shots in the less expensive cuts if you're giving your shots IM. This decreases the chance of damaging the muscle tissue.

You do need some sort of animal handling facilities. Your pigs are not going to remain at 50 lbs forever. Handling a 50 lb. shoat is a picnic compared to dealing with an angry 400 lb. sow or even a 230 lb. market ready feeder.

You might want to get your neighbor to show you how to give shots. It's not that hard and with many vet calls starting at $70 and going up you don't want to call them at every drop of the hat.

Janet

It will be helpful to you to build some sort of chute or squeeze gate for confining pigs for treatment. Perhaps you can find plans on the internet. Purdue University used to have very good information and there are sites for sustainable ag swine practices. Giving shots takes coordination, practice, and a good sense of humor. You might want to practice giving "shots" to oranges. Most shots are given in the neck area behind the ear to avoid damaging muscle tissue. Always use a clean, sharp, needle of the appropriate length and gauge to avoid injection site infection. One method I used was to insert the needle into the neck first. After the pig quit reacting to the pinch of the needle, I could then insert the syringe part onto the needle and administer the medication. Mostly, the pigs are reacting to that first sensation. This works well for small amounts of vaccineÂlike 1 cc. If you have to inject a larger amount of antibiotics to a "pig on the run", using injection syringe tubing is helpful. In this case, a length of clean, clear, plastic tubing (a couple of feet) is placed between the needle and the medication syringe. The tubing, as well as the syringe, needs to have medication in it. You can walk up to the pig, (hopefully a pig distracted by eating), slip the needle into the neck area, and squeeze the medication in. If the pig takes off, it does not matter as long as you can squeeze the syringe before the needle is pulled out. If you run out of hose length, your medication will spray all over instead of going into the pig. I found it helpful to stand on the left side of the pig and inject the medication into the right side of neck. This would confuse the pig and it would not know which way to run, giving you an extra nano-second. If you are using a sterile syringe, you can re-draw excess medication into your syringe to use later (the tubing will take extra medication to load). Practice with water in the tube first. As a matter of personal philosophy: 1. Do not use antibiotics indiscriminatelyÂyou will build up bacterial resistance. 2. Feed grade antibiotics have little therapeutic benefit. 3. Vaccinate and practice good herd health procedures to prevent sickness. 4. You probably do not have to treat every little "cold"Âget a thermometer and learn to take temps and observe animals to see if they are off feed or other odd behavior. You can get meds and syringe supplies through vet catalogs (Iowa Vet) or at feed and farm stores. Be careful not to lose the needle--you don't want to be looking for a needle in a haystack (or worse).

Thanks for the great advice--I'm in awe of your experience. Last year one of our 3 pigs had a mild pneumonia when in its last week or two before slaughter. We didn't treat. but I wish we had caught it and was worried that if these new pigs started out sick it would lead to problems.
They're fine now.

A lot of people used to "pooh-pooh" my personal policy of having all stock given a shot of broad spectrum antibiotics, a wormer, and breed specific vaccinations. I never had problems with animals I brought home from the sale coming down ill a few days after buying them. As most stock was on my place for several months to a year or more the extra expense at the sale barn was cheaper than paying for a vet to visit the farm. We always used to keep antibiotics in the fridge for the cattle/hogs, but only gave medications whenever there were signs of illness or as preventatives (hoof and mouth, blackleg, etc.).

If you don't have room to set up a permeanant squeeze chute see if you can find a noose at the farm store. Basically it is a piece of metal bar with a plastic covered cable on the end. The cable is attached to a handle with a stop lever. The way it works is you make a loop in the cable, hold it by the handle on the cable, then slide the loop over piggy's snout. When he trys to move away you jerk the handle and tighten the loop around his snout. My vet and lots of other farmers I've known have used these to catch and hold hogs. (When the noose is tight around thier snout, that is just about the only thing they will concentrate on, and the injection can be done with minimumal struggling.)

Kevin