08/01/2026
It's not too late to pull your animal from transport...until transport drives away!
If something's amiss, if there's something you don't agree with, if you don't like the answers to your questions or even if you just have a bad feeling...pull your animal off the trailer. Regroup, and work out another plan for another day.
You're trusting that transporter with the life of your animals. Make sure they're treating them the way you know they need to be treated and providing for them adequately.
Accidents happen and can't be avoided. But certain things must happen to keep an animal safe and healthy on any trip. Make sure those minimums are met, at least. The life of your animals depend on it.
Please Learn From Our Heartbreak: A Conversation About Livestock Transport. Long post but please read and share.
This is a difficult post to make, but we are sharing our experience because we hope it helps another livestock owner ask a few more questions before putting an animal in someone else's care.
Yesterday afternoon, our new five-year-old boar was picked up in North Carolina for transport to his new home in North Alabama. We hired a transporter who is known and commonly used within the livestock community. The transport cost was $450, and we specifically discussed him having a similar setup as the pigs she delivered to us a few years ago.
He was picked up around 1–2 PM and arrived around 8:30 AM this morning after approximately 18 hours in transport. She did stop to sleep which we had discussed.
When he arrived, the windows beneath the topper were closed.
Our boar was lying down and would not get up. He was not bright, alert and only mildly responsive. We were told he had been given ice cubes a couple of times during the trip, but had not been provided drinking water or food.
Getting a full-grown boar who cannot stand out of a vehicle is no easy task. We used a ramp that we had previously built and my husband and son were able to lift and slide him slowly down the ramp to our driveway that is mostly grassy, sand and gravel. Once we got him unloaded, he remained down, although we were briefly able to get him to sit upright. That involved my daughter and myself lifting him into that position. He did not remain upright for long.
At that point, our attention was entirely on him. We immediately provided shade, water in very small amounts and supportive care and tried to help him recover. The transporter needed to continue on to Texas and left shortly after he was unloaded.
Within approximately 45 minutes to an hour of arriving at his new home, he was dead.
We immediately contacted the transporter and told her he had died. She expressed that it was horrible and that she was sorry, but there was no further discussion about what happened during transport or the condition in which he arrived.
We want to be very clear: we do not know the definitive medical cause of his death, and we aren't claiming that we do. Nor are we asking for opinions.
What we do know is that a living five-year-old boar left North Carolina yesterday afternoon and arrived approximately 18 hours later unable to stand. The ventilation arrangement was not the same as the previous trip. The camper shell was different. We were told he had received ice cubes but not drinking water. Approximately 45 minutes - 1 hour later, he was dead.
Hindsight is 20/20. There are things we would do differently today.
And that's why we're sharing this.
Livestock transportation isn't just transportation. It's animal care.
When you hand an animal over to someone else, that person becomes its caretaker until it reaches you. Long-distance transport means thinking about ventilation, temperature, water, travel time, delays, monitoring and what happens if an animal begins showing signs of distress.
There are limited livestock transport options in many areas, and budget matters. Not everyone can make a long-distance trip themselves or afford dedicated private transport. Hiring someone to transport your animal does not mean you care any less about it.
But please ask questions.
How will my animal be ventilated?
When and how will water be offered?
How often will you physically check the animal?
How long will the animal actually be on the vehicle?
Are there other stops along the route?
What happens if my animal becomes distressed?
And don't overlook the business side.
Agriculture still operates on a lot of handshakes and trust, and most of the time that works beautifully. Until it doesn't.
Cash itself isn't necessarily a red flag. But if the entire transaction involves cash payment with no invoice or receipt, no transport agreement, no written policies and nothing documenting responsibility for the animal while in transit, take that into consideration.
Ask whether the transporter is insured. Ask what happens if an animal becomes sick, injured or dies in their care. Get important promises about things like ventilation and watering in writing.
You don't need a complicated contract. But you should know what you're paying for and what standard of care your animal will receive.
We aren't sharing this to create a social media pile-on or point fingers. We're sharing it because today, instead of welcoming our new boar to his home, we're burying him.
Maybe we should have made the trip ourselves. Maybe we should have asked more questions. Maybe we should have chosen differently.
We can't change yesterday.
But we can tell other livestock owners what we learned from it.
They're not cargo. They're livestock. For every mile of that journey, they are completely dependent on the person behind the wheel.
