Skin Problems in Show Pigs: Why It Is Usually Not Mange, and Why It Usually Starts at the Wash Rack

It is nine o’clock at night. You were putting him up and you saw it: a patch on his flank that was not like that last week. Flaky. A little red. Maybe some small bumps, maybe a scaly crust you can pick at with a fingernail. He has been rubbing on the gate.

So you got the flashlight, took three pictures, and posted them.

Eleven minutes later you have nineteen comments and seventeen of them say mange.

I want to give you the useful part before I explain anything.

In my experience, most of the skin lesions I see posted in those groups are not mange. A lot of them look like plain dermatitis, and a good share of that dermatitis is something we did to the pig ourselves, at the wash rack, with a hose and a bottle of shampoo.

So here is the whole article in one line, and it is the line worth carrying out to the barn.

Most show pig skin trouble is not made in the pen. It is made at the wash rack.

Two more things before the teaching starts, because one of them has a clock on it.

Call your veterinarian tonight, not tomorrow, if the skin problem comes with a sick pig. Fever, off feed, not wanting to get up or move, and especially raised, firm, red or purple patches that are shaped like diamonds or rectangles. That last one is a specific disease and I will get to it. A pig that is itchy and otherwise bright is a different conversation than a pig that is sick.

And: mange is diagnosed with a scraping, not with a photograph. Nobody in that comment thread can tell you what is on your pig’s skin. Neither can I, and I am a veterinarian looking at the same picture they are.

But you are not helpless here, and this is the part nobody tells show families. You can settle the mange question yourself tonight, and it starts with a ten second look at his ears. I will show you the whole thing in the next section, before anything else.

Everything below that is how to tell the difference, and what to actually do this week.

How to look for mange yourself, tonight

Stop diagnosing from photographs. Start looking at the actual pig. Three steps, in this order, and none of them cost you anything you do not already have.

Step one. Look at his ears.

Before you touch anything else, go look in and around both ears. Take a flashlight. Look, do not flush. Keep water out of his ears, tonight and every night. Water in a pig’s ear is not a good thing at all, and I will come back to that when we get to the wash rack, because it is one of the most important rules in this article.

If his ears look healthy and the trouble is somewhere else on him, his flank, his belly, his back, it is almost certainly not mange. You can quit reaching for a mange product and start working down the rest of this article instead.

Here is why that ten seconds is worth so much. Mange mites colonize the ears first. The lesions start on the head, and especially the ears, and only then spread back over the body and the tail and the legs. So a pig with a bad patch on his side and two clean ears has the sequence backward. The mite does not usually skip the place it starts and set up somewhere else.

Note the strength of that sentence, because I chose it carefully. Almost certainly not. Not never. If your pig is genuinely sick, or genuinely miserable, he gets a veterinarian regardless of what his ears look like.

One separate thing to notice while you are up there: is he carrying his head tilted to one side? That is a different question from the skin question and it does not belong to this ladder. It means look at the ear itself, and it is worth a call to your veterinarian. I explain what a tilt points at further down, in the wash rack section.

Step two. If the ears are involved, scrape inside the ear.

Clean ears and you are done, go to the look-alike list. Crusty, scaly, irritated ears and you keep going.

Scrape skin debris from the inside of the ear, because that is where you have the best chance of finding them. You want the crumbly waxy material down in there, not blood. Put the scraping on a black sheet of paper. A dark folder, the back of a feed tag, anything black and flat.

Dry only. Do not wet the ear to make this easier, and do not clean it out with water first. If you need the outside of the ear cleaned up before you can see anything, use a damp cloth, wipe it, and dry it afterward. No hose, no stream of water, nothing running down into the canal.

Step three. Gently blow the dry skin away, and watch.

Gently. You are clearing the flakes off to leave what is underneath.

Then look, and give it a minute. The mites show up as white or light gray specks against the black, and here is the part that makes it unmistakable:

Skin flakes sit there. Mites walk.

If you own a microscope, or your kid’s school does, a sample on low power is better still. But the black paper is a real diagnostic and it is the reason I wrote it into the facts about mange, where the whole method and the life cycle and the treatment protocol are laid out in full. If you find moving specks, go read that one. This article is about everything else.

One thing that is not mange but lives in the same ear

While you are in there with a flashlight you may find something much bigger, and I do not want you confusing the two.

Lice are insects you can see. Mange is a skin change you have to scrape for. A hog louse is about a quarter inch long, flat, gray brown, and it crawls. You find it by looking, not by scraping, and inside the ear is one of its favorite addresses. So: a visible bug in the ear is lice. Crusty, irritated ear skin with nothing visible crawling is the mange question, and that is what the black paper answers. More on lice below.

The honest limit on all three steps

I would rather you hear this from me than find it out the hard way. Not finding mites does not prove they are not there. Mites can be genuinely hard to turn up, especially in a light infestation, and that is true of a veterinarian’s scraping too. So clean ears and a clean sheet of black paper are good news, and they are not a verdict.

Which is exactly where your veterinarian comes in. Call if the pig is sick as well as itchy, call if you looked and found nothing and he is still tearing at himself, and call when you need something that requires a prescription. Your vet has a microscope, a trained eye, and other ways to get at it besides a scrape.

What these three steps buy you is this: you stop guessing from a picture, tonight, for free. And most families never get past step one, because most of the time the ears are fine.

Why everything gets called mange

It is not stupidity. There are three good reasons the word comes up first, and understanding them is how you stop being fooled by it.

One. Mange is the skin disease show pig people have heard of. It has a name, it has a villain, and it has a fix you can buy. Dry skin does not. When the only word you have is mange, everything gets called mange.

Two. Mange really does exist and really is out there. I am not telling you it is a myth. The mite is Sarcoptes scabiei var suis, and the Merck Veterinary Manual is blunt about how common it is: unless pigs came from a specific pathogen free herd or an eradication program, any herd has to be considered potentially infested. So the guess is not crazy. It is just a guess.

Three. Itch looks like itch. A pig rubbing on a gate looks exactly the same whether the cause is a mite, a sunburn, or shampoo that never came out of the skin behind his ear.

Now the piece of folklore I want to kill, because it circulates every single year. Somebody will tell you the mange came in on a bag of shavings from a certain farm store. That is hogwash. The mite lives on the pig. It does not survive long off the pig, and it is not sitting in a sealed bag of bedding at a retail store waiting on you.

But hold on to one half of that folklore, because there is something true buried in it. Your bedding is not giving your pig mange. Your bedding can absolutely be irritating his skin. Fine dusty shavings, bedding that has been sitting on a wet spot, a rubber mat that gets washed but never dries, a pen corner he lies in that stays damp. None of that is a mite. All of it is contact irritation, and all of it is fixable this afternoon.

Horses, not zebras

There is an old line they teach in medical school and veterinary school, and it is the single most useful idea I can hand you for reading your own pig. When you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras. It means check the common thing first. Both animals make the same sound. One of them is out in the pasture and one of them is not, so you do not go looking for the rare thing until the ordinary thing has been ruled out.

Those comment threads do it exactly backward. Mange is the zebra. Dermatitis is the horse. The hoofbeats are a flaky, irritated patch on a pig’s flank, which is a sound almost anything can make, and the group goes straight to the rarest animal in the barn.

So work in that order. Check his ears, because that is ten seconds and it settles the zebra question most of the time. Then look at the horses: what you have been washing him with, how well it came out, where he lies down, and what the sun has been doing to him. That is the order the rest of this article is written in.

Here is what it costs to get that order wrong, and it is worth knowing before you spend another dollar.

You chase the zebra. You buy the mange product, and then a different mange product, and you treat him for something he never had. Meanwhile the actual cause is still running, every evening, at the wash rack, because nobody told you to look there. So the skin keeps getting worse while you are busy treating it. Two months go by that way. That is a whole summer of hair you do not get back, on an animal whose skin and hair are a large part of what the judge is going to put his hands on, and every week of it was spent working hard on the wrong animal in the barn. The part that stings is not the money, although there is money in it. It is that the fix was free the entire time, and it was ten seconds and four minutes with a hose.

Get the order right and none of that happens. That is the whole reason this article is longer than a comment.

Keep this in your pocket. It will come up again at the bottom of the look-alike list, where it settles the one disease families ask me about most.

What we actually do to a show pig’s skin

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud, and I want to say the kind part first, because this next section is going to land on somebody who has been working very hard.

You were not being careless. You were being careful. Careful is what did it. Nobody strips a pig’s skin by neglecting him. You do it by washing him every single day because you want him to look right, which is the most understandable thing in the world and is also the mechanism. So read the rest of this as information, not as a scolding.

Pig skin is close enough to human skin that human medicine uses pig skin as a model for burn and wound research. So the easiest way to understand what is happening to your pig is to think about your own hands in February, after a winter of washing them twenty times a day. Red. Tight. Flaking at the knuckles. Itchy. Nothing is infecting your hands. You just took the oil off them faster than your skin could put it back.

That is most of what I see in those pictures.

Now understand what a show pig’s skin is actually up against, because it is not what a commercial pig deals with.

A pig does not sweat his way out of trouble. Pigs have very few functional sweat glands. The film of oil on the skin is doing most of the work of holding moisture in and keeping irritants out. Take that film off and the barrier is not there for a while.

And we take it off far more often than anything in nature would. A commercial hog may never be washed in his life. A show pig in July gets washed constantly, sometimes daily, with a soap engineered to strip oil, under water that is often hot, with a brush, by somebody who is trying hard to do a good job.

Then there is the part that finishes it, and it is the one I see most. If the shampoo does not come all the way out, dermatitis is almost certain. That is not a mystery. Shampoo is a surfactant. A surfactant is a molecule that grabs oil and lets water carry it away, which is exactly what you wanted while you were washing. Leave it behind on the skin and it does not switch off. It keeps working on the pig’s own oil after he is dry and back in the pen, all night, every night you do it.

Observation, mechanism, outcome. The observation is flaky, red, irritated skin on an otherwise healthy pig. The mechanism is a stripped oil layer plus a surfactant that never got rinsed away. The outcome is dermatitis that looks alarming in a photograph, spreads slowly, will not clear up no matter what you buy, and gets blamed on a mite.

The map on the pig is the tell

This is the single most useful diagnostic thing in the article and it costs nothing.

Rinse failure follows the places water cannot get to and does not run out of. So look at where the bad skin actually is.

• Behind the ears and around the base of the ear
• The folds of the neck
• The pocket behind the elbow and up under the front leg
• The flank fold, in front of the stifle
• Up between the back legs and under the belly
• Around the tail head and down the back of the hams

Every one of those is a place a running hose skates right over and a place soapy water sits after you quit. If your pig’s bad skin is in the folds and the low spots, and the rest of him looks fine, that is not a parasite pattern. That is a rinsing pattern.

One hard exception before you go rinse any of it, and I mean this one literally. The skin behind the ear and around the base of it needs rinsing like anywhere else. The inside of the ear does not. Keep water out of his ears. Not a stream, not a trickle, not a quick shot to get the soap out. Water in a pig’s ear is not a good thing at all. If the outside of the ear needs cleaning, use a damp cloth and dry it after. This rule does not bend for anything else in this article.

Compare that with where true sarcoptic mange starts. Merck puts it plainly: lesions from the pig mange mite usually start on the head, especially the ears, and then spread over the body, the tail and the legs.

Which is the same fact you used back in step one, read from the other end. The mite starts at the ears, so clean ears plus trouble somewhere else is almost certainly not mange. If you skipped that section, go look at his ears before you read another word of this one.

Neither the map nor the ear check is right every time. Both are right often enough to keep you from spending three weeks and two hundred dollars on the wrong problem.

The look-alike list, kept short on purpose

These are the ones that change what you do next. There is a longer list and I will get to it in one sentence at the end.

Sunburn and the tanning lamp. This one is seasonal and it is enormous, and families almost never suspect it because we do it on purpose. Sunburn in pigs shows up as reddened skin that can go on to blister and weep, and light skinned pigs are the ones that get hurt. If the red is on the top of him, the back, the top of the hams, the ears, the nose, the parts that face the sky, and it stops where his shade starts, you are looking at a burn, not a bug. Same goes for a heat lamp set too close or left on too long while you are building color. Back it off, add shade, and read our daily skin and hair care routine for show pigs, which covers tanning and sun protection properly.

Erysipelas, the diamond skin one. This is the emergency on the list. Erysipelas causes raised, firm, pink to purple patches that turn rhomboid, which is a fancy word for diamond shaped. Merck says diamond skin lesions are almost diagnostic of erysipelas when you see them. They come with a sick pig: a high fever, depression, off feed, and a pig who does not want to move. It is treatable, commonly with penicillin under your veterinarian’s direction, and it responds well when it is caught early. It is also the reason your pig should already be vaccinated for it. Our show pig vaccination protocol has erysipelas in it. If you see raised diamonds on a pig with a fever, stop reading and call your vet.

Lice, and you can spot these on the pig himself. The hog louse, Haematopinus suis, runs 5 to 6 millimeters. That is a quarter inch. It is big enough to find on the animal with a flashlight, which a mite is not. A mange mite you have to scrape off and look for on black paper. A louse is just there, crawling. And note that this is the one look-alike the clean ear rule does not cover, because lice live in the ear too. What you are looking for is different: a visible insect, not a skin change. Merck says to look on the inside of the ears and down in the ear canal, on the skin behind the ears, in the folds of the neck, and on the inside of the legs. Take a flashlight out at feeding tonight and look in those five places. If you find a large, flat, gray brown insect that moves, you have your answer and it is not mange. Lice cause serious itching and damaged, scabby skin, and they are handled in our show pig parasite control article.

Contact irritation from something you applied or something he lies on. Disinfectant that was not rinsed off a mat. A wash rack floor that gets a bleach solution and never gets flushed. A grooming product or an adhesive remover on skin already stripped. A new shampoo. A dirty mat. The tell is timing and shape: it appeared within a day or two of a change, and the pattern matches the contact rather than the animal. Take the new thing away, do nothing else, and give it two weeks.

Sarcoptic mange, the real thing. It is on this list because sometimes it is the answer. Intense itching, lesions starting at the head and ears and working back, usually both ears rather than one, and the rest of the pen scratching too. Run the three steps: look at his ears, and if they are clean and the trouble is elsewhere, it is almost certainly not this. If they are not clean, scrape inside the ear onto black paper and watch for specks that move. The treatment is not in this article on purpose, because it is already written: the facts about mange.

Fly and mosquito bites, which are very common and almost nobody counts them. This one deserves more room than the rest of the list, so it gets its own section below. The short version is that the tell here is not location, it is shape. A bite is a discrete spot. You get separate, countable marks, each one its own little red dot or raised bump, with normal skin in between them. Dermatitis is a continuous area of irritated skin that runs together. Mange spreads outward from the head and ears. Bites are punctuation. Dermatitis is a paragraph. Read the next section before you buy anything.

And the ones that belong on the list but do not usually change what you do tonight: dippity pig syndrome, which is its own sudden, painful, unmistakable thing and which we have already covered in full; swinepox, which mostly hits pigs under about four months, runs its course in roughly four weeks on its own, and is often carried in by lice; ringworm; parakeratosis from a zinc problem, which is rare on a modern show ration and notably is not itchy; and greasy pig disease.

Greasy pig deserves its own paragraph, because it comes up in every single thread, and because this is where the zebra comes back.

Greasy pig disease, properly called exudative epidermitis, is a nursery pig disease. It belongs in young pigs, generally under about 40 pounds, and Merck puts the usual window at 5 to 60 days old. The pig you brought home was past that window before he ever got on the trailer.

Now the honest part, because I would rather give you the whole truth than a tidy one. The bacteria behind it, Staphylococcus hyicus, is not obeying a birthday. It can overgrow a break in the skin in an older pig. That happens. It is rare.

So here is how to hold both of those at once. Looking for greasy pig in a 100 pound show pig is looking for a zebra. It is not impossible, it is just not what the hoofbeats usually are. Check the horses first: the washing, the rinsing, the sun, the bedding, and the mite on your black paper. If you have worked through all of that honestly and the pig is still wrong, then it is time to talk to your veterinarian about the uncommon answers, and that is a conversation with somebody who has hands on the animal.

Flies and mosquitoes, which are a bigger part of this than anybody admits

This is one of the most common things I see on show pig skin and one of the least often named. A pig standing in a barn in July is getting bitten, all day and most of the night, and nobody writes it down as a skin problem. Then a patch of spots shows up and it gets called mange.

How to tell. Go back to the shape. Bites are separate. You can pick out individual marks, a red dot or a small raised bump, with ordinary skin around each one. Run your hand over him and you feel scattered bumps rather than a rough sheet. Dermatitis from the wash rack is continuous and it runs together in the folds and low spots. Mange works outward from the head and ears.

One honest correction, because I would rather you have the accurate rule than the tidy one. It would be convenient to tell you bites only land where the pig is exposed and never in the places the other problems live. That is not true and I am not going to say it. Biting flies will absolutely work a pig’s legs, his belly and his ears, which are exactly the places the rest of this article sends you. So on this one, location will not settle it for you. Shape will. Separate countable spots with normal skin between them is a bite picture, wherever on him you find it.

The good news is that the fix is not a bottle of anything you put on the lesion. It is getting the insects off him, and there are four things that actually move the needle.

One. Fly spray, and read the label before you buy it. This is the one place families get in trouble. A great many of the fly sprays sitting in a barn are labeled for horses only. A horse product is not automatically a pig product, and your pig is a food animal with a withdrawal time attached to anything you put on him. Check that the label says swine or pigs, and if you cannot tell, ask your veterinarian before it goes on the animal. I am not going to name an on-animal product here, because the right one depends on your barn and your show calendar and that is a conversation with your vet.

Two. Turn the lights off in the barn at night. This one is free, almost nobody thinks of it, and it works. Lights pull flying insects in from a long way off, and a lit barn at night is an invitation. If you have been leaving a light on for your own convenience, or because it feels like you are keeping an eye on things, that light is bringing the mosquitoes to your pig. Turn it off.

Three and four. Treat the surfaces, not the pig. Two premise products I use are Agita, which is Elanco’s and carries thiamethoxam, and PT Alpine, which is BASF’s and carries dinotefuran. Both are fly products for the building: walls, ledges, windowsills, the places flies land and rest between meals. Knocking down the population in the barn does more for your pig’s skin than anything you will ever rub on it.

And now the part I want in bold, because getting this backward would be genuinely harmful.

Agita and PT Alpine are premise products. They go on surfaces. They do not go on your pig. Not on his skin, not in his pen where he can lick it, not mixed into anything that touches him. This is a different category of product from fly spray, and the two are not interchangeable in either direction. Read the label, follow it, and place them where the pig cannot reach them. If you are not certain where that is in your barn, ask your veterinarian or the person who sells it to you before you open it. I am deliberately not publishing rates or dilutions for either one, because the label is the instruction and mine is not.

A fly control article is coming. Flies and mosquitoes are a big enough subject in a show barn that they deserve their own piece rather than six paragraphs at the bottom of somebody else’s, and we are going to write one: the life cycle, where they actually breed on your place, premise control done properly, and what is safe on a pig. I am putting that in writing here so you can hold me to it.

What to actually do this week

If your pig is bright, eating, and the problem is skin rather than sickness, you have time to work this properly. Here is the order I would do it in.

One. Wash him less. I know. This feels backward, and it is the hardest sentence in this article for a family in July. But if you are washing daily, you are stripping oil faster than he can replace it, and every additional wash is making the thing you are trying to fix worse. Our own routine article says to limit shampooing to about once a week for exactly this reason. Rinsing him off with plain water to cool him down is a different activity and is fine, as long as you keep it off his head and out of his ears.

Two. Rinse twice as long as you washed. This is the single highest value change in the article and it costs you four minutes. Rinse until the water running off him is completely clear, and then keep going. Run a hand down him and feel for slick. Clean, rinsed hair squeaks a little between your fingers. Slippery means there is still soap on that pig. Everywhere except his ears. Keep water out of those.

Three. Rinse the folds by name, and keep water out of his ears. Do not trust a hose passing over the outside of him. Lift the front leg and rinse the pocket behind the elbow. Get down in the flank fold. Get behind the ears and around the base of them. Get up between the back legs. Those are the places a fast rinse misses and where this problem lives.

Now the exception, and it is the one instruction in this section that is a flat rule rather than a suggestion. Do not rinse in the ear. Water in a pig’s ear is not a good thing at all. I am telling you to rinse harder everywhere else on this animal, and I do not want that instruction carried into the one place on him where it causes a new problem instead of fixing an old one. Rinse everywhere else until he is truly clean, and stay out of the ear canal. If the outside of the ear has soap on it, wipe it with a damp cloth and dry it. That is the whole method for ears.

The tilted head, and why this rule matters more than it sounds

Here is the part that brings this whole article back around on itself, and I want you to see it coming.

First, something about pigs that most livestock books will not tell you correctly. Pigs do not shake their heads much, for anything. You read about head shaking in dogs and horses and it gets repeated into pig material, but it is not really what a pig does. What a pig does is tilt his head. He starts carrying it a little to one side and he keeps it there.

So when I see a pig holding his head over, there are three things on my list.

One. Mange. It is on the list and it is the least likely of the three, and the reason why is useful. Mange tends to be in both ears. A problem on both sides pulls evenly, so it does not usually make a pig lean one way. He is miserable and itchy on both sides instead. So a tilt is not a classic mange picture, and pigs do not tilt all that often with mange.

Two. Water in an ear.

Three. An ear infection.

Look at what those three have in common. A tilt points at a one-sided problem, and mange is usually a two-sided one. That is why a pig carrying his head over pushes me toward the ear itself, water or infection, rather than toward mites.

Now put that next to the rule I just gave you, because this is the whole thesis of this article proving itself on you.

You came here because your pig’s skin looked bad and nineteen people said mange. I told you a lot of this gets made at the wash rack. Then I told you to rinse harder, which is right, and to stay out of his ears, which is also right. Here is what happens if you carry the first instruction into his ear. You get water in there, he starts carrying his head to one side, and a tilted head is exactly the kind of thing that sends a family straight back to the group to ask whether it is mange.

So over-rinsing into an ear does not just risk an ear problem. It can manufacture a brand new symptom that gets misread as the very disease this whole article has been talking you out of. You would be back at the start, with a second problem you made yourself, chasing the same wrong answer.

Keep water out of his ears. Now you know what it costs.

And keep the two ear rules straight, because they do different jobs and they do not fight each other:

• Clean ears, with the skin trouble somewhere else on him. That is the rule-out. It is almost certainly not mange, and you go work on the wash rack.
• A tilted head. That is not about his skin at all. That says look at the ear itself, and it points at water or an infection before it points at mites. That one is a phone call to your veterinarian, not something to fix with a bottle.

Four. Cut your shampoo with water before it goes on. Dilute it in a bottle rather than pouring concentrate onto a pig. It spreads farther, it lathers the same, and it comes out much easier, which is the whole point.

Five. Get him dry, and give him somewhere dry to lie down. A damp pig in damp bedding is a skin problem waiting to happen no matter how well you rinsed. Strip the wet corner. Dry the mat. And if his ears got wet anyway, because it happens, dry them.

Six. Put oil back. A conditioner after washing is not a cosmetic step on a pig whose skin is already stripped. It is the step that gives the barrier something to work with.

Seven. Change one thing at a time, and give it two weeks. This is the one nobody does, and it is why so many families end up with nine products and no answer. Skin is slow. If you change the shampoo, the bedding, the conditioner and the schedule all on the same Saturday and he looks better in ten days, you have learned nothing and you will be back here next summer. Change one. Write down the date. Wait.

When to call, and exactly what to say

There is a real difference between something to manage and something to diagnose, and a photograph is not going to settle which is which. The three steps narrow it a long way: his ears, then a scraping onto black paper, then watching for something that moves. Here is where the line is after that.

Call tonight if:
– He has a fever, is off feed, or does not want to get up and move
– You see raised, firm, diamond or rectangle shaped red or purple patches
– The skin is broken open, weeping, or spreading fast
– He is in pain when you touch him

Call this week if:
– The itch is bad enough to interrupt his eating or his rest
– The lesions started at the head and ears
– He is carrying his head tilted to one side
– Other pigs in the pen have started doing the same thing
– His ears were clean, the paper was clean, and he is still tearing at himself
– You have made the management changes above and given them two full weeks with no improvement
– A show is coming and you need this settled rather than guessed at

And when you call, tell them what you already did. Say what his ears looked like, say whether you scraped and what was or was not moving on the paper, and say what the skin looks like and where it is on the pig. That is a far better phone call than “his skin looks bad,” and it will often change what your veterinarian reaches for first.

Then ask for this specifically: “Can we do a skin scraping?” Your vet is doing the same thing you did with better tools, a slide and a microscope, and a trained eye on it.

One honest limitation so you are not surprised at the clinic, and it is the same limitation your three steps have. A negative scraping does not always rule mange out. The mites can be genuinely hard to find, especially in a light infestation, and that is true in the clinic too. It is why Merck recommends pulling together several lines of evidence rather than leaning on a scrape alone: the scraping, the clinical picture, the history, whether the rest of the group is scratching, and in some cases a blood test. So do not treat clean ears and a clean sheet of paper as a final answer in a pig who is genuinely suffering. That is a real conversation with a real veterinarian.

Two more questions to ask out loud, at the time, while you are on the phone. What is the withdrawal time on anything you are given, and is there anything in it that is a problem under your show’s rules. Write both answers down with the date. They are much harder to sort out afterward.

What we sell for this, and what we do not

I will be straight with you.

True North does not make a product that treats mange, erysipelas, lice, sunburn, swinepox or any other disease in this article. We do not sell a miticide, we do not sell an antibiotic, and if you came here hoping the last section would tell you which of ours to buy for a diagnosis you do not have yet, that is not what this is.

What fixes the most common version of this problem is free. Wash him less. Rinse him twice as long. Rinse the folds. Keep water out of his ears. Dry him properly. Change one thing at a time. None of that is for sale here, and it is the majority of what I see.

Where we do fit is one specific thing, and it follows directly from what this whole article has been arguing.

Go back to the wash rack for a second. I told you that washing takes off the oil film, and that the oil film is most of the barrier. There is a second thing coming off with it. Healthy skin is not sterile and is not supposed to be. It carries its own resident community of organisms, the skin microbiome, and that community is part of what normal skin is. Every wash knocks it down along with the oil, and then it has to reestablish itself before the next bath knocks it down again. On a show pig in July, that is a race the skin is losing.

So that is the job. Provilli is esterified medium chain fatty acids in an emulsified liquid, and topically it supports healthy skin and a healthy balance of the skin’s own microflora, the skin microbiome. It is not treating anything. It is supporting the thing the wash rack keeps knocking down. The page rate is one ounce in a 32 ounce sprayer filled with water, or one ounce mixed into 32 ounces of your conditioner, which is where most families use it. Same rule as the hose: whatever you are putting on him, keep it out of his ears.

Now the fence, and I will hold it hard, because this is a differential diagnosis article and it would be easy to blur. Provilli is not a miticide. It does not treat mange, and it does not treat any other disease named in this article. It does not replace a diagnosis, and it is not a reason to skip the black paper. If your pig has mange, the answer is a scraping and your veterinarian’s product, and no amount of anything from us changes that.

That is the whole product conversation. If you want somebody to look at your program with you, call us. That is free and we do it for people who never buy a thing from us.

The short version

Most show pig skin problems that get posted online are not mange. A lot of them are plain dermatitis, and a good share of that is made at the wash rack, by stripping the skin’s own oil faster than the pig can replace it and by shampoo that never got fully rinsed out.

Before you guess, run three steps. They take five minutes and cost nothing.

1. Look at his ears. Mange starts there. Clean ears, with the trouble somewhere else on him, means it is almost certainly not mange.
2. If the ears are involved, scrape inside the ear onto a black sheet of paper and gently blow the dry skin away.
3. Watch. Skin flakes sit there. Mites walk.

Clean ears and a clean sheet of paper are good news and they are not a verdict. A pig who is genuinely sick or genuinely miserable gets a veterinarian either way.

The map on the pig is the tell. Bad skin in the folds and low spots, behind the ears, in the neck, behind the elbow, in the flank, between the back legs, with a clean head, is a rinsing problem.

The look-alikes that change what you do: sunburn and the tanning lamp, erysipelas diamonds on a feverish pig, lice which you can actually see with a flashlight because they are a quarter inch long, contact irritation from a mat or a product, fly and mosquito bites, and real sarcoptic mange.

On bites, the tell is shape, not location. Separate countable spots with normal skin between them is a bite picture. A continuous irritated area is dermatitis. Bites are punctuation, dermatitis is a paragraph. The fix is getting the insects off him: a fly spray whose label actually says swine, lights off in the barn at night, and premise products like Agita and PT Alpine on the surfaces. Those two go on the building, never on the pig.

And the rule that organizes all of it: when you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras. Check the common thing first. Mange is the zebra and dermatitis is the horse. Greasy pig disease is a nursery pig disease, generally under about 40 pounds, and while the staph behind it can rarely overgrow a break in the skin on an older pig, looking for greasy pig in a 100 pound show pig is looking for a zebra.

This week: wash less, rinse twice as long as you washed, rinse the folds by name, dilute your shampoo, get him dry, put oil back, and change one thing at a time and wait two weeks.

And one flat rule underneath all of that: keep water out of his ears. Rinse everywhere else until he is truly clean and stay out of the ear canal. Water in a pig’s ear is not a good thing at all. If the outside of the ear needs cleaning, damp cloth, then dry it.

Here is what that rule is protecting you from, and it is this article eating its own tail. Pigs do not shake their heads much for anything. What a pig does is tilt his head, and a tilted head has three things to rule out: mange, water in an ear, and an ear infection. Mange is the least likely of the three, because mange tends to be in both ears and a two-sided problem does not pull a pig to one side. So a tilt points at the ear itself. Which means if you rinse into his ear, you can produce a brand new symptom that gets read as mange, and you are right back where you started with a problem you made.

Call tonight for fever, for a pig that will not get up, or for raised diamond shaped lesions. Call this week if the itch is real, if it started at the head and ears, if the pen mates are doing it too, if his ears were clean and the paper was clean and he is still miserable, or if two weeks of management changes did nothing.

Mange is diagnosed with a scraping, not with a photograph. And you can run the first three steps yourself tonight, starting with a ten second look at his ears. That is the whole thing.

Frequently asked questions about show pig skin problems

How do I know if my show pig has mange or just dry skin?
Start with his ears, tonight, before anything else. Mange mites colonize the ears first and the lesions start on the head before spreading back. So if his ears look healthy and the trouble is on his flank or his belly or his back, it is almost certainly not mange. If the ears are crusty or irritated, or he is shaking his head, scrape inside the ear onto a black sheet of paper, gently blow the dry skin away, and watch for white or gray specks that move. The other half of the answer is the map: dermatitis from washing sits in the folds and low spots, behind the ears, in the neck folds, behind the elbow, in the flank fold and between the back legs, and it leaves the head fairly clean. None of this is right every time, so a pig who is genuinely sick or genuinely miserable gets a veterinarian regardless.

How do you check a pig for mange at home?
Three steps. One, look at his ears, because that is where mange starts; clean ears with trouble elsewhere on the body is almost certainly not mange. Two, if the ears are involved, scrape skin debris from inside the ear and put it on a black sheet of paper. Three, gently blow the dry flakes away and watch. Mange mites appear as white or light gray specks against the black, and unlike flakes of skin, they move. A microscope on low power is better if you have access to one. The full method, the life cycle and the treatment protocol are in our article on the facts about mange. One limit to know: not finding mites does not prove they are not there, because they can be hard to turn up in a light infestation, which is true of a veterinarian’s scraping as well.

My pig has a bad patch on his side but his ears look fine. Is it mange?
Almost certainly not. Sarcoptic mange starts on the head and especially the ears and spreads back from there, so a pig with clean ears and a lesion on his flank has the sequence backward. The mite does not usually skip the place it starts. That is a ten second check that saves a lot of families a lot of money, and it points you at the far more likely answers: dermatitis from washing and incomplete rinsing, sunburn, or contact irritation from bedding or a mat. The hedge is real though. If he is genuinely sick or genuinely miserable, call your veterinarian no matter what his ears look like.

My show pig has flaky, scaly skin and keeps rubbing. Is that mange?
It might be, and in my experience it more often is not. Go look at his ears first, before you buy anything, and then run the black paper if the ears are involved. Flaking, redness and rubbing on an otherwise bright, hungry pig is very commonly plain dermatitis, and the two biggest causes I see are washing too often, which strips the oil layer the skin uses as a barrier, and shampoo that was not completely rinsed out. If you did not find mites, wash him less, rinse him twice as long as you washed, rinse the folds specifically, and give it two weeks.

Can shampoo really cause a skin problem on a pig?
Yes, and it is one of the most common causes I see. Shampoo is a surfactant, a molecule that grabs oil so water can carry it off. That is what you want while you are washing. Left behind on the skin it does not stop working, so it keeps stripping the pig’s own oil after he is dry and back in the pen. Rinse until the runoff is completely clear and the hair squeaks between your fingers, and pay particular attention to behind the ears, the neck folds, behind the elbow, the flank fold and between the back legs, because those are the places a hose skates over. One exception to all of that: keep water out of his ears. See the next question.

Can I rinse or wash inside my pig’s ears?
No. Keep water out of his ears. This article tells you to rinse longer and get into the places a hose usually misses, and that instruction stops at the ear. Water in a pig’s ear is not a good thing at all. Rinse the skin behind the ear and around the base of it like anywhere else, and stay out of the ear canal: no stream, no trickle, not even a quick shot to chase soap out. If the outside of the ear needs cleaning, wipe it with a damp cloth and dry it afterward. If his ears get wet by accident, dry them. And when you are checking his ears for mange, you are looking and scraping dry, never flushing. Get water in there and he may start carrying his head to one side, which is a new problem and one that often gets misread as mange.

My show pig is holding his head to one side. What does that mean?
First, a correction to something you will read in a lot of livestock material: pigs do not shake their heads much for anything. What a pig does is tilt his head. So a tilt is the sign to pay attention to. Three things to rule out, and this is the order I think about them. Mange, which is the least likely of the three, because mange tends to be in both ears and a problem on both sides does not usually pull a pig to one side. Water in an ear. And an ear infection. The common thread is that a tilt points at a one-sided problem, and mange is usually a two-sided one, so a tilted head sends me to the ear itself rather than to mites. This one is a call to your veterinarian, not something to fix out of a bottle in the barn. And it is the best reason I can give you for keeping water out of his ears in the first place.

How often should I wash my show pig?
Less often than most families do in the summer. Our daily routine article puts shampooing at about once a week, because over washing strips natural oils and dries the hide. Rinsing him with plain water to cool him off is a different thing and is fine as often as you like.

Did my pig get mange from the bedding I bought at the farm store?
No. That story goes around every year and it is hogwash. The mange mite lives on the pig and does not survive long off the pig, so a sealed bag of retail bedding is not where it came from. What bedding absolutely can do is irritate skin directly: fine dusty shavings, damp bedding, or a wet corner he lies in. That is contact irritation, not a mite, and it is fixed by changing the bedding rather than by treating the pig.

What are the small red bumps and diamond shapes on my pig’s skin?
Raised, firm, pink to purple patches that turn into diamond or rectangle shapes are close to diagnostic for erysipelas, and they come with a sick pig: high fever, depression, off feed, and reluctance to move. That is a call your veterinarian tonight situation. It is treatable and it responds well when it is caught early, and it is also one of the diseases show pigs are routinely vaccinated against.

Can I see lice on a show pig?
Yes, and this is the parasite you can find on the pig himself without scraping anything. The hog louse is 5 to 6 millimeters, about a quarter inch, and is big enough to spot with a flashlight. A mange mite is not; for that one you scrape the ear onto black paper. Take a flashlight out at feeding and look on the inside of the ears and down in the ear canal, on the skin behind the ears, in the folds of the neck, and on the inside of the legs. If you find a large flat insect that moves, you have an answer.

Is greasy pig disease what my show pig has?
Probably not, and here is the honest version rather than the tidy one. Greasy pig disease, properly called exudative epidermitis, is a nursery pig disease. It belongs in young pigs, generally under about 40 pounds, and Merck puts the usual window at 5 to 60 days old. The pig you brought home was past that window before he got on the trailer. That said, the bacteria behind it, Staphylococcus hyicus, can overgrow a break in the skin in an older pig. It happens and it is rare. In veterinary school they teach you that when you hear hoofbeats you look for horses before you look for zebras, meaning check the common thing first. In a 100 pound show pig, greasy pig is a zebra. Work through the washing, the rinsing, the sun, the bedding and a scraping first, and if the pig is still wrong after all of that, talk to your veterinarian about the uncommon answers.

Could the spots on my show pig just be fly or mosquito bites?
Very possibly, and it is one of the most commonly missed answers. The tell is shape rather than where they are. Bites are separate, countable marks, each its own red dot or small raised bump, with normal skin in between. Dermatitis from washing is a continuous irritated area that runs together, and mange spreads outward from the head and ears. Do not try to settle it by location, because biting flies will work a pig’s legs, belly and ears too. The fix is getting the insects off him rather than treating the spots: a fly spray whose label actually says swine, turning the barn lights off at night so you stop drawing insects in, and premise products on the surfaces.

What can I spray for flies in a show pig barn?
Two things, and keeping them straight matters. On the pig, use only a fly spray whose label says swine or pigs. Many barn fly sprays are labeled for horses only, and your pig is a food animal with a withdrawal time on anything you apply, so check the label or ask your veterinarian. On the building, premise fly products such as Agita (Elanco, thiamethoxam) and PT Alpine (BASF, dinotefuran) go on walls, ledges and windowsills where flies land and rest. Those premise products are for surfaces and must never be applied to the pig or put where he can reach them. Follow the label for both, and ask your veterinarian if you are unsure. And turn the barn lights off at night, which costs nothing and pulls fewer insects in.

Why does my pig’s skin problem keep coming back every summer?
Because summer is when we wash the most, when the sun is hardest on a light skinned pig, and when a pen corner stays damp. If it is seasonal and it tracks with your wash schedule, that is a strong hint that the cause is the routine rather than a bug. Change one thing, write down the date, and give it two weeks before you change anything else.

Should I just give him a shot of ivermectin to be safe?
Look before you shoot. It takes ten seconds to check his ears, and if they are clean and the trouble is elsewhere it is almost certainly not mange and the shot is not the answer. If he has mange, a systemic product is part of the answer, the whole barn needs treating at once, and that is a conversation with your veterinarian. If he does not have mange, you have spent money, handled the pig, taken on a withdrawal time, and not touched the actual problem, which is still on him tomorrow.

Does True North sell something for show pig skin problems?
Not a treatment for any disease in this article. We do not make a miticide or an antibiotic. What Provilli does is narrower and it follows from the rest of this article: washing takes off the oil film, and it disturbs the skin’s own resident community of organisms along with it. Provilli is a topical grooming aid that supports healthy skin and a healthy balance of the skin’s own microflora, the skin microbiome. It is used at one ounce in a 32 ounce sprayer of water, or one ounce in 32 ounces of conditioner. It is not a treatment, it is not a miticide, and it does not replace a diagnosis or a scraping. Most of what fixes this problem is free and is in the list above.