[Gpdd] HEALTH: Bladder sludge and shillintong

[Stephen Bradley]

I am far from an expert on the subject, but I haven't seen any other 
responses yet, so...

Shillintong, from what I know, is an herb.  It's not especially easy to 
find; I think we had to order it on line.

All of our pigs have been males, and almost all of them at one time or 
another have had some blood in the urine.  Niles was the first, and he had a 
small stone show up on an X-ray, and we gave him shillintong -- it came in 
hard tablets which we ground up, mixed with water, and fed him by syringe --  
for several weeks or maybe even as long as two months.  The blood, which was 
kind of intermittent anyway, seemed to stop, and when he went back to the 
vet, the stone was no longer visible on X-ray.

A couple of times since, one or the other of the boys has peed a little 
blood, and if it's just once, we won't worry about it, but if we notice it a 
few times in a short period, we'll give them shillintong for a while, and it 
seems to go away.  I have no idea whether it's really a good idea or what it 
does or how, but so far (knock wood) using this approach, we haven't had a 
stone problem get worse and become a major health issue for any of them.

Our current resident, Mr. Mike, on the other hand, doesn't seem to need 
it -- but he excretes something that we are guessing is the "sludge" we have 
heard about.  Basically, in the middle of his pee-spots, there will be a 
white, chaulky residue, which we usually don't notice when the pee is wet, 
and by the time the pee is mostly dried up, the spot is almost powdery. 
Sometimes the color borders on the fluorescent yellow-green!

I don't know whether being a sludge pig makes him more or less likely to get 
stones, but we try to keep down the amount of parsley and other mineral-rich 
things we feed him...

Steve and Ginger, and Mr. Mike T. Pig
(Remembering Niles and Clover and Butterscotch)