Wild boar aggressiveness: Truth or fiction?

Discussion

November 4, 2009

By Karen Middleton The News Courier Wed Nov 04, 2009, 10:43 AM CST

ATHENS — “Scientists decode DNA of pigs,” stated a Monday headline. Good.

Maybe we’ll get the answer to a burning question troubling the local feral hog hunters’ community: Do wild pigs pose a danger to the public?

Since writing a story last week quoting a hog hunter as saying the creatures are shy by nature, I’ve had others weigh in to disagree, saying they are indeed aggressive.

There was even one guy who e-mailed to say a gang of these four-hoofed hoods chased him on his all-terrain vehicle and like to have torn the fenders off trying to get at him.

But upon inquiry of a third party, we learned that a neighbor of the man reporting the chase feeds this particular group of porkers — from an ATV. Mystery solved.

While a pig is considered to be one of the smarter members of the animal kingdom, it also has poor eyesight. Hearing the unsuspecting ATV rider, they naturally thought the chuck wagon had arrived and were probably perplexed that it was accelerating away from them at high speed.

So from where does this bad rap for wild boar aggressiveness originate?

Well, for one thing we could blame it on romance novels.

Remember a book of a generation ago, “The Thorn Birds”? Come on now, I know you read it and never missed an episode of the TV miniseries about randy cleric Father Ralph de Bricassart’s hanky-panky with the barely-legal daughter of a New Zealand sheep rancher.

So, you will remember when a marauding wild boar mowed down the unfortunate sheep rancher’s son, Stewie. But even then there were mitigating circumstances. The animal had gotten caught in an out-of-control range fire that singed his backside.

So with hams throbbing like a New Years Day hangover, the fictional pig charged poor Stewie. And even then, given a real-life situation, Stewie might have met his demise due to poor eyesight.

The pain-crazed hog could have been booking it to get away from the advancing flames. Being of single-minded purpose and also poor eyesight, the wild pig didn’t see Stewie in time to take evasive action.

Who knows? For author Colleen McCullough it adds to the melodrama to have a mean pig bolt from smoke and take out the sweet, gentle Stewie character unsuited to sheep droving in the first place and give us a good excuse to cry before we get back to the really good parts of the story.

So, our counsel to those who might meet up with a wild pig is that something like oral cancer due to prolonged exposure to a little pinch between the cheek and the gum is more a threat to one’s well-being than a charging hog.

But to get back to the Monday story about Chicago scientists studying pig DNA. A University of Champaign biomedical science professor is quoted as saying, “The pig is the ideal animal to look at lifestyle and health issues in the United States.”

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Karen Middleton

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