One of the best things about Kunekunes is their simplicity. They’re grass-fed, extremely docile, they don’t damage your fencing, and they even wean their own piglets if allowed to.I mean, there’s just not a whole lot you have to do for them, which is absolute music to my ears! Probably the most complicated part of owning registered Kunekune pigs is the process and paperwork of registering them…which, after you’ve had a quick tutorial, is actually very simple. So that’s what this post is for: to get a solid understanding of how to read and understand a registration paper, as assigned by the AKKPS.
The picture at the top of this post is an example of what a registration paper looks like. This is actually the paperwork for one of our herd sires, George. The first thing we are going to look at is the very top line of the paper, where it gives the official name of the pig. Once you understand this part, you’ll basically understand most everything on the page. Here’s a picture showing exactly where we will be looking: 
You’ll notice I have the official name underlined in four different colors. This is because every name is actually a four-part name. It will be this way on any registration paper you receive.
The first part of the name, underlined here in red, is called the “Herd Name Prefix” or “Farm Name Prefix.” This is simply the name of the farm where the pig was born. If the name of the farm is short, like the one here, it will say the whole farm name. If it is a longer farm name, like ours (“Home Away From Home Farms”), then a prefix will be used instead. Sometimes the prefix is a word (like our farm prefix is HOME), and sometimes it will be made up of the primary letters of the farm name (for example, the farm name “Kune Kune Preserve” uses the prefix KKP). Whether or not your farm name is used in its entirety, or a prefix is used will be determined by the AKKPS and assigned to you.
The second part of a pigs official name, underlined here in blue, indicates the pig’s bloodline. Bloodlines are best understood if you look at them kind of like ‘last names.’ With Kunekunes, boy piglets (boars) take the last name of their fathers, and girl piglets (gilts) take the last name of their mothers. So George is a Boris bloodline, because his father was a Boris bloodline. The name does not tell what bloodline his mother was. (If this was paperwork for a gilt, the name would only indicate the bloodline of the pig’s mother, not her father.) Here is a little bit further explanation through an example breeding:
Let’s say I have a Boris boar, and a Rona sow, and I breed them together. Let’s say they produce a litter of 6 piglets, 3 boars and 3 gilts. Then from that litter, I would say that I have 3 Boris boars and 3 Rona gilts.
The third part of the official name, underlined in green, is going to be a number that tells you which # piglet of that bloodline this was, that was born on this particular farm. So here, I see that George was the 3rd Boris bloodline pig to be born on De Colores Farm. The older the farm, or the more breeding pairs a farm has, the higher numbers you will see for their pigs, even up into several hundreds!
The fourth and final part of the official name of the pig, underlined here in white, is simply the name given to the pig when it was born. So the people at De Colores farm named this pig ‘George’ when he was born.
And there you have it…the first step to understanding the AKKPS registration paperwork. Once you get this part down, the rest is very easy. Check out the post covering Part 2 to better understand the next section of information!
Here’s a video that explains everything we just covered: