Piglets everywhere

 The Flowers are everywhere. They were a bit slow leaving Truffle when they first started to wander but they have certainly made up for it since.
They soon got used to eating in the yard away from their mum. But actually, they don't mind where they have to go for food. The yard, other pig's pens, empty buckets or not so empty bins.The other morning Pilot woke me up barking; nothing unusual there but when I looked to see what was worrying him I saw - piglets outside the kitchen window eating the birdseed that had fallen to the ground from  the bird table.
We have a plague of moles at the moment; different methods have been tried to get rid of them. They don't work.

I've put bottles on sticks around the place to deter them. That doesn't work either. It especially doesn't work if the piglets remove the sticks and bottles. Which they do. Because they are all over the garden.The particularly like begonias.
The Flowers know that buckets hold food. If buckets are left lying around, they often end up with piglet snouts in them. The little ones also know that food lives in dustbins and they know that the combined weight of 7 of them will knock over a dustbin - which is a great game.
It particularly annoys the other pigs because they
see the little ones eating food just outside their pen and that leads to a great deal of noise. Nothing gets to a pig more than seeing another pig eating ...               

They are up the woods and down the fields; they are in the vegetable garden and outside the back door. When you least expect to see them, there they are - suddenly staring up at you. They stop what they are doing, look, assess..... then scoot off in the opposite direction with a lot of grunting and snorting. It's very entertaining - not funny when they are jumping out of the flower beds, but entertaining. They wander down the field to see the horses - who are very patient with them. The piglets snuffle their nostrils and their legs, chew their tails and wander between their hooves. The horses just ignore them - in a studied way. All this running around builds healthy minds and strong skeletons. When they are weaned, which will be soon, they amazingly adapt happily to being in the stalls for a few weeks. When they go out to their pens again they are content to stay there without, seemingly, wanting to wander off any more. Exploring everywhere when they are little and meeting all the other pigs in the herd seems to provide them with a context within which they are then content to just 'be' and grow up gracefully. Wierd really.