Does anyone have a scale in their barn? I’m trying to find one to buy as I need to weigh my hog in order to sedate for medical procedures (hoof trims, tusk trims, etc) as sedating can be dangerous without knowing exact weights. I figured I might as well get one that can hold a horse but I’m getting prices all over the place and mixed reviews with each.
I’ve spoken to vets which have been no help. 
Is this a full sized pig or a mini type? You might check with your Vet College to see what brand scale they use. Maybe a trucking company could advise you for a pallet size scale, like they use for customer shipment weighing. They charge by poundage for shipping cost. And with big scales, figure to have the Weights and Measure folks out once a year to check for accuracy. You can’t store anything on the scale, can mess up springs and balances if they use those to build it.
Personally, I have found weight tapes pretty accurate on horses and cattle who got weighed at livestock scales shortly afterward. Maybe a 10 pound difference on such large animals.
My hog is expected to be about 1,000 pounds full grown. His dad was 1,200 and mom was 850 but he’s only 10 months old now. More than 2 more years of growing to do and he’s already 4-5’ long.
Local vet college (Cornell Ruffian) hates their scale as it never works.
Ive been finding the tapes aren’t accurate. My 32 year old was taped by my vet at 1050 and went to the hospital where he weighed in at 840! My other OTTB was taped at 1,000 and weighed in around 1,200. I’ve tried the mathematical formula and that was way off too.
If you have a truck and trailer you can go somewhere with a truck scale and weigh the truck and trailer alone and then with the hog. That might be cheaper and easier if he loads?
You’ve had awfully good luck, then, with weight tapes. A former colleague of mine published a study back in 2011 in which she discovered that weight tapes, on average, underestimate horse weight by about 145 pounds. That’s not an insignificant difference, especially when it comes to nutrition and drug dosages. The mathematical formula - (heart girth in inches x heart girth in inches x length in inches) / 330 = body weight in pounds - is typically much more accurate, as long as you measure length from the point of the shoulder to the point of the buttock. In my colleague’s study, that method still underestimated weight, but only by about 38 pounds, which is a much more reasonable margin of error.
We have a (relatively) cheap scale from an Amazon seller, bought last summer because my husband was stressed about getting accurate weights for dosing his llamas against meningeal worm. I will admit, it has been really nice getting precise weights on his horse as we track the weight loss. Plus it’s handy to toss the hay on it to ration it out for said dieting horse. (It will weigh to the 1/2 pound.)
We loved it until recently - but now it doesn’t seem to lock onto a number, and the reported weight will even will drift as it sits with the hay on it. If this is it, that’s a pretty short lifespan! I’ll try to update if we figure out how to correct it, or if it dies completely.
We have a (relatively) cheap scale from an Amazon seller, bought last summer because my husband was stressed about getting accurate weights for dosing his llamas against meningeal worm. I will admit, it has been really nice getting precise weights on his horse as we track the weight loss. Plus it’s handy to toss the hay on it to ration it out for said dieting horse. (It will weigh to the 1/2 pound.)
https://www.amazon.com/Livestock-Weighing-Equipment-Determine-Function/dp/B078VNBF2K
We loved it until recently - but now it doesn’t seem to lock onto a number, and the reported weight will even will drift as it sits with the hay on it. If this is it, that’s a pretty short lifespan! I’ll try to update if we figure out how to correct it, or if it dies completely.
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