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NW IA | I read the biography of a farmer who fed dead horses to his hogs as a protein source, maybe in the early 1930's time frame. He would buy a worn out horse for a couple of dollars, shoot it next to the hog lot and chop parts of it off with an ax when it was frozen solid and throw it to the hogs.
I also read another account where the farmer just led the horse into the pen and shot it there leaving the hogs to "process" it.
Different story. When I was a teenager I did chores for a neighbor who went south for a couple of weeks and my instructions were not to feed a shelled corn and pellet mix to the bred sows unless snow covered the fields where they were browsing. They had access to a quarter that was 1/2 each corn stalks and bean stubble. After just a couple of days there was a foot of snow on the ground and the daytime high temps stopped before reaching zero. The sows were in the hog house when I did chores the morning after the heavy snow and I cleared a spot on the concrete and gave them 2 pails of the corn mix. In the ten or so days following when I checked on them they didn't eat a kernal of the corn from the bin, they walked right through it every morning and headed out to the field. You couldn't see their heads as they plowed through the snow hunting for an ear or a kernal of corn. The "fresh" stuff out in the field had something about it that they preferred and was worth the effort. Maybe it was weathered a bit and they liked that. They could also be seen out looking for shattered beans to balance their ration.
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