keg, Those red stripes are very typical of feral offspring... I know our barn operation which was in the business of making "feeder pigs" (sold at -30#), we never had a striped red piggy... We had pink yorkshire and belted hamps with a few black pigs and a couple with heavy duroc influence red sows... Our boar was nothin special... Maxed out at about, iirc, 240#... We tried, at minimum, to have a p-up and single axle trailer load per month to auction.
This was in the thumb of Mi. in about 1982... We bought 3 smaller gilts/sows in auction to fill the spot opened by the death of a 350# super brood sow... She got sick and the herd owner couldn't have so much of his "eggs" in one basket.
These 3 sows were all spotted up which was not uncommon in the domestic swine scene... Specially for non-discerning small time feeder pig operations such as ours...
Now here is where this went south...
Auctioneer says "Here we have a lot of 3 fine *Texas* young gals..." Well we got them bought right... They were "spirited" from the moment we went to load them in our now empty trailer...
We got all 3 bred at first heat and 2 of 3 ate the entire litter within an hour or 2 of birth... BAD SIGN RIGHT THERE!!! The 3rd chomped a couple but did not eat 'em... So we grabbed the rest and put them on a pink sow who lost several to freeze.
We decided the whole batch were "sour sows" and just bad motherly brood sows so we got ready to auction them off but fairly as "butcher" pigs so as not to spread the losses to our fellow farmers...
Since we lost 25 pigs to their poor mothering, we loaded the truck with pigs and put these 3 very ornery sows in the trailer...
We arrived at the auction to find the top "half door" of the trailer ajar... NO SOWS!!!
Well we put our "lot" of piggys in a pen and balled the jack back tracking...
We found our 3 sows about 5 miles from our barn... Seems one managed to jump up and bust the top door open and all 3 were out in a hundred feet stretch in front of a fellow farmer's house... He said 2 were dead instantly and one needed shot and he slid them off on the shoulder knowing we would be lookin'...
To this day I am more than 50% sure we bought feral trapped swine that was unscrupulously entered into the ag scene in Mi. cuz we wouldn't suspect it up there...
This was just a couple years before the pork market collapse that, IMHO, caused the latest rash of domestic swine entering the feral world...
The last auction I attended saw pork pigs bringing only$.08#.... YES... after investing 90 days of husbandry and feed into a pig it brought EIGHT CENTS PER POUND!!! Many farmers cut their losses and cut the herds loose... as well as not torturing them with dwindling feed rations, I might add...
Brent