Reckon any gotta away? Selling the plants that process them to China was shear genius, when I was a kid we all had smoke houses and root sellars but I was just a kid then too.
FEW, I suspect, escaped, as “the men on the donkeys” were getting paid in cash “by the head” for every hog/shoat that they brought in at the last muster.
(Groups of stockmen like our family was for 3 centuries, in those long-ago days, were called “Ass Nomads”, as they herded swine into the mountains in the Summer to graze & then drove them into the river bottoms for each Winter, while mounted on donkeys/mules.)
Note: IF you have seen the move, OPEN RANGE, “Ass Nomads” were a very similar sort of mobile operation.= Only the kind of livestock was different.
Donkeys are cheaper to buy & more long-lived than horses, seldom get sick, do FINE on a diet without oats/expensive hay, are very surefooted, don’t “run off” at the first sign of trouble, usually need NO shoes (unless being ridden in rocky terrain) & are “plenty fast enough” to handle swine efficiently.
Yours, TMN78247