Pigs Gone Wild

An American friend I was dining with last week was talking about her life in Mechanicsville, VA. Her neighbour is a wild hog hunter. Maybe he has a boring day job, like being a mechanic or something. But hunting wild hogs is what he really does.

That brought back to life this marvellous story. Wild hogs, feral swine, the offspring of escaped farm pigs which copulated with wild boar imported from Europe as game, are thriving across the vast American wilderness. And with them is thriving a culture of guys who hunt wild hogs, accompanied by packs of dogs, armed with knives, shotguns or even bows and arrows, with the Confederate flag emblazoned on everything they wear.

In America, people hunt hogs. In Britain, hogs hunt people.

Ms. Carla Edmonds, a landowner in Gloucestershire, first encountered wild boar when she and her two dogs were riding along a path in the Forest of Dean, about 100 yards or so from the main road. “I saw a group of 20 or more. I couldn’t make out quite what they were, but then I could see they looked like pigs.” Ms. Edmonds’ dogs started barking and her horse became agitated. The herd of boar gave chase. “I could see them charging at huge pace” she said. Her horse was seriously agitated by the experience, and took a long while to calm down, and a less experienced rider might even have been thrown off her horse.

Subsequently, the wild boar dug up about 100 square feet of the Edmonds’ grounds. But despite these intrusions, Ms. Edmonds and her partner think the boar are “brilliant” and that “it was amazing...would love to see them again”. She may well have an opportunity to do so. After having been hunted to extinction 300 years ago, wild boar have reintroduced themselves to Britain spontaneously and now also live in Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and Devon.

What makes wild boar, Sus Scrofa, so successful? The same factor that makes Homo Sapiens so successful?

The thought was triggered by a book I read back in the 80s, Omnivore by Lyall Watson, a zoologist who observed that our evolutionary resilience owes a lot to our omnivorous diet. Boars (and bears) are omnivorous higher mammals, like us.