Boar Taint from a Castrated Pig!!??

I don't know of a specific lab that tests but you could google for test labs. The two most common chemicals are Skatole and Adrostenone. Much less common is Indole.

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

RE: Adrostenone
I had to look these up, and if Wikipedea is reliable enough as a source, Adrostenone is found in boar saliva and celery cytoplasm.

Linnell, did you feed your pig a bunch of celery? Just wondering if that could make for a strong smell in the meat.

I recall reading somewhere not to feed celery to pigs. I could never figure that why until I read this. Interesting!

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Happy trails - Nancy:

That is an interesting thought. Sounds like we need a study...
I wonder if it's been done.

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

Wow, didn't know that! No celery here, but my chickens do occasionally get it from kitchen scraps.

This pig only ate grain,apples,pumpkins,whey and pasture grasses. The same as all my other pigs.

In post #4 you say this pig was 3 months slower to achieve slaughter weight than its contemporaries. I would be looking at why this occurred and what effect that it would have on smell and taste. It may not be a slaughter problem.

If all of them got the same feed that pretty much eliminates that as the problem.

-Walter

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SugarMtnFarm.com -- Pastured Pigs, Poultry, Sheep, Dogs and Kids

He was the smallest of that batch of piglets, I am assuming he was a runt? We can only fit a certain # of pigs in our livestock trailer so when the butcher date came we decided to keep him longer and let him get bigger, three months later, he was ALOT bigger. He ate the same exact diet as the rest even after the rest of the pigs went to butcher. The other pigs we sent (his litter mates) had no problems with their meat. He was on pasture with a gilt, but never mounted her. That's the only thing I can think of was being around a gilt. BUT, two of his litter mates were gilts and he had never showed ANY attempt to mount. I still haven't gotten a straight answer from the butcher of wether or not they found a testicle.

So have you and the buyer tasted it yet? How about the smell while it cooks?

I have cooked pork with a "taint" smell and it smelled so bad that I could not eat after cooking it. The dogs ate it.

No, haven't even picked the meat up from the butcher yet, which is 2 hours away. We're going to pick it up in a week or so when they have the rest our cured meats ready from a different batch of pigs.
They called us the day after killing the pig and told us it had boar taint. The butcher said they knew right away and that is smelled "like and old boar" and asked us if this pig had been castrated late in life.

You can get animals, including both pigs and people, with more than two testicles. It's not unheard of to have two or more testicles normally descended, and one or more still undescended. It is also possible for animals to be a "chimaera" - a mix of the cells from two siblings - sort of a much more intimate version of Siamese twins. Can also happen that an animal incorporates the remnants of an undeveloped sibling within itself. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if that happened with pigs, since they can frequently have undeveloped embryos born in with a litter of normal piglets. If that happened, then the animal would not be in perfect health. There was something wrong with your pig, or he wouldn't have been a runt.