Amber was one of the original 159 pigs surrendered to OMI when we moved to Tennessee and took over the herd in 2021. She lived with a little family of Pot Bellied pigs who all needed extensive help with basic grooming, medical care, weight loss, and socialization. In Amber’s case, she was very obese and elderly when we met her, but the more catastrophic problem was that she, along with most of the other females on the property, had never been spayed.
Female pigs who are left unspayed will almost always develop uterine masses and tumors of varying degrees of invasiveness and severity, which causes them bleeding and pain as they age. That was the case with Amber. She was a very poor candidate for surgery based on her age, but her clinical signs of discomfort forced us to try and fix that for her. The surgery successfully removed a very large tumor from her uterus, but the postop recovery was complicated, and Amber only survived a short while longer after the hysterectomy.
Amber lived the last few years of her life with us in a comfortable little house surrounded by her best little pig friends. She had private meals and a warm bed. She had all her appropriate medical care, and her hooves were trimmed neatly. She was valued and respected and honored for the quirky little individual she was.