I started at the Boar Stud unit this morning and will be there for the rest of the week. I'm sure many of you can guess where I'm going to go with this post already, but for many of you this will be a new adventure.
This morning I arrived at the boar stud at 5:30 and was expecting a typical day of feeding hogs, maybe doing some office work, and cleaning.. I was NOT expecting to get to "enjoy" the duties of the dirty work. I showered in this morning, introduced myself to everybody, and was shown the facility. There are boars on both sides of the barn, with a very large office area between them. The boar farm manager wanted me to "break me in" early and put me on the floor with two guys who were collecting semen. That is correct. Collection was my first duty of the day. Awesome.
For those of you who don't know, boars are collected 100% naturally... This facility has separate pens that are used for collection, only one boar is allowed in a pen at a time, three pens right next to each other. The boars are not stimulated, teased, nothing at all. They know exactly what their job is.... to "jack off". We use these tables that the boars mount called dummies, the ones we have look very similar to the picture below, only ours are covered in a blue rubber to prevent them from sliding off....
We sit and wait until the boars are itching to go, and on their own terms, they mount the dummies. You have to wait for a few more minutes to start collection because otherwise they will urinate into the collection cup. When they are done peeing you need to grab onto their sheath (which is made up of the skin on the outside) and you have to squeeze it to make sure all of the urine is out of the sheath. If it isn't emptied, the urine is too acidic for semen and it kills what you collect (the smell alone was enough to make me gag this morning... what is it with stinky males and their urine!!??!) When a boar is mounted he stands just like the one in the picture below....
When he is "ready to go", using a paper towel, you grab onto the end of his penis. Boars have corkscrew penis heads (see picture below) because the cervix of a sow has the ridges of a corkscrew, this enables to penis to lock into the cervix during ejaculation.
You have to grab onto the corkscrew and hold as tight as you can to stimulate the rest of the penis to exit the sheath. When it is all of the way out, the boar locks into his position for breeding the female. The only part of the male that moves during this time is the penis. While you hold onto the head of the penis you can feel the semen being ejaculated and the heart beat of the boar. We collect the ejaculate into styrofoam cups that have filter paper banded to the top. Boars also produce a waxy "plug" when they ejaculate. This plugs the rest of the cervix up to prevent both back flow (when the sow contracts her cervix this prevents the semen from escaping the canal) as well as preventing the next boar from being able to breed this sow. The Plug is essentially what it's named for... a plug.
I was able to lock up, collect, and release 3 boars this morning. The guys were giving me a hard time saying that I was a "natural" at this. I wouldn't say I was a natural, but I did pay attention when they taught me what I had to do. The later part of the morning I helped in the lab. I learned how to mark down what boars were collected, how many "doses" of semen were collected, as well as how to mix up the extender solution. The picture below would be what you would see me doing if I was showing you how to collect a boar... The boar is locked up on the dummy, you hold onto the head of the penis while he ejaculates into an insulated cup.
Tomorrow we start collection at 3:30 AM... I am going to be getting to bed early tonight!
Very informative
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