Cure for Mad Mama Pig?

I can't believe the birds haven't started to eat this yet!

Little Black Bean

It has not rained in two months here in El Dorado County, a depressing fact for farmers and pigs alike. The ground is dry and dusty with almost no green stuff growing. I bet if you took an aerial view of the area, it would look as brown as straw. However! It grew much, much colder today, with a hard freeze warning tonight and rain in the forecast for later this week. With this in mind, I am here to report that last week something broke in our sow. She is usually very mild mannered, so much so that I trust her with small children in the pen, but for a few days there, she was a terror.

First, she broke through her electric-net fence at dinnertime because she just could not wait a second longer for the grain to come to her. She was trained on this fence as a piglet and should know better, but the electric net does not have a strong charge right now, possibly because the solar charged battery is getting run down, possibly because there just isn't a good enough electrical ground with it being so dry. Either way, she put her stomach over her training and bust through with two piglets in tow. And then she did it again at breakfast the next morning.

 The solution was to put her inside the 16' by 16' hard wire pen that her house is in, with no free range of the electric fence area. But then she started getting out of that too. There is a T-post in the ground on the outside of each of the panels to prevent big pigs from pushing the panels and escaping. This is what Bean does: she takes a corner of the pen, preferably the one where I would come to feed her, pushes the bottom of the panel up with her snout and simultaneously sneaks the rest of her head under it as a place holder to squeeze the rest of her body through. It's quite a sight. Her piglets do not know what to make of it either.

What to do? She would not stay in her enclosure and if she did, she would pace back and forth frantically squealing and crying for food, not just at feeding times, but any time she heard someone near.

At this point in the story I should share with you a few facts about our sow and her particular situation:
1) Bean's pen is in the front yard, making monitoring her easy enough, but I was finding myself tip-toeing around so that she wouldn't detect me.
2) I love this pig. She set herself apart by being the smallest, most bat-like, and friendliest pig ever. Belly scratches are her favorite thing in all the world. She is somewhat doted on.
3) Her mom was exactly the same way. Loved belly-scratches, but turned mad for food.

So I got to thinking: could she be mineral deficient? I thought maybe all she needed was a day pen on green grass. So I set it up, made a leash out of red ribbon, and began walking her over there. We got three quarters of the way to the grassy day pen (her house is not portable at this time) and she stopped, turned around and started voraciously munching on a Dandelion-looking plant. I could not get her to leave it. Not with grain, not by pushing her, she just wouldn't move. So I let her eat the plant as she liked, until I could distract her enough to lure her up into the pen. It was another hard wire pen with T-posts for reinforcement and all the green grass she could have wanted, but she still went crazy and got out of it at dinner-time.

The next morning I opened the front door with the intent to walk Bean up to her grassy pen again even though she had gotten out it. But she beat me to it! In the time it took to step off the porch, she was out of her hard wire pen and through the electric net with all five piglets streaming behind her. And guess where she went? Straight to the Dandelion cousin! (In reality, it is probably not a cousin of Dandelion because it has no tap root and does not taste bitter.)

After a solid hour of cursing and corralling her around, I got Bean back into her pen with her month old piglets and slammed the door for good. No more trying to parade her in a red ribbon up the grassy knoll so that she can get her mineral deficiency in check; I bring the plants to her now that she's shown me the one she wants. I fed her an armful of the mystery plant yesterday and she devoured it with gusto (her babies did too!) This morning she did not make a racket at breakfast, nor did she break through her pen, and I harvested some more of this plant for her. It seems like she may be getting back to her mild-mannered self.
But as a neighbor always says, "We will see what we see..."

P.S. I'll let you know what the plant is when I figure it out.

This is what the oyster mushrooms look like now.