‘All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.’
–Boar and Apples, T. Kingfisher
fuck OFF
Note that pigs are also HUGE. So, yes, they ARE slightly larger pigs.
So I grew up in the city and have never seen a pig in real life and I just googled it and WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS
I thought they were like labrador sized, like, fat labradors, not mini-cows.
every time I see this post there are more people discovering how fuck off huge pigs actually are and I love it I thought this was a thing everyone knew but clearly not and I’m laughing
This is me with our Tamworth boar, a heritage breed closer to their wild cousins than the Yorkshire above. I am a fully grown, average sized human. He was a gentle sweetie who, sadly, is no longer with us. His name was Mr. Big.
FUCK OFF
Forever laffin’ at people who don’t understand how enormous, terrifying, and tenacious wild boar are.
They’re like if bears had knives protruding from their closed mouths and Didn’t Know When To Quit. Their survival instincts when they’re wounded aren’t “run away and minimize injury” it’s “take the thing that hurt you down with you” They also make sounds like someone crossed a pig with an alligator.
Their head and neck alone can be like the size of an entire human torso.
Also forever laffin’ at people who think pigs are tiny, ‘cause we designed those things can get in the neighbourhood of a thousand pounds in ideal circumstances.
It’s like when people assume Tuna must be small because they’ve only ever experienced them in hockey puck form.
Like seriously why the fuck y’all think everyone FREAKED THE HELL OUT when Dorothy fell into the pig pen in Wizard of Oz? It’s because pigs are HUGE and weigh a shitton and would crush her in an instant.
also dont they eat like, basically anything?
YUP. Pigs will eat people, if given the chance. They dgaf.
That’s why boar hunters use a team of very tenacious dogs to hold the boar so they can be speared without fucking you up. The dogs wear body armour.
I’ve heard stories of people shooting boars, and if it didn’t kill them, it just pissed them off.
how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?
…“how the hell did we ever domesticate these things?”
Very carefully, I would imagine.
WIld boar babies are rather cute, like living humbugs…
…but the adults and their ferocity have been associated with warriors for thousands of years, from Mycenaean Greece (a helmet made from sections of boar tusk)…
…through Celtic Europe (reconstructed carnyx war-horns and standards)…
…Ancient Rome (the crest of Legion 20 “Valeria Victrix”). A couple more legions also used a boar as their crest – I wonder did they squabble over which was the “right” one the way a couple of Swiss cantons had a little war over whose bear was best…?
…then Anglo-Saxon and pre-Viking helmet crests…
…right up to the late Middle Ages (here the white boar badge of Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III of England)…
…and the blue boar badge of the Earl of Oxford,
more usually represented by the De Vere arms, quarterly gules and or, in
the first a molet argent.
After Richard was defeated at Bosworth in 1485, there was a run on blue
paint as inn-signs were changed to reflect new loyalties since Oxford
was on the winning side…
It gets mentioned in the movie “Snatch”, the book/movie “Hannibal” and the webcomic “Lackadaisy Cats”, among numerous other fictional sources, and IRL it’s suspected to be the reason why numerous missing persons have stayed missing.
More here (another comment to this same OP) and here (slightly different).
Here’s some boar-hunting armour for dogs, ancient…
…and modern…
…and the modern one looks very like a simple style of ancient…
So when Odysseus’s old nurse recognizes him by the scar he got from the boar-tusk slash that almost killed him… now you get the resonance.
This post…it just really went places on me.
I hope you read this entire post, and that it made your entire day so much better, even if just for a few moments, like it did mine.
giant fuckoff alligator wolves
While in Sweden I was warned by the family I stayed with to be careful about not touching any fences, because apparently they’re all electrified to TRY keeping boars off properties. I was also walking the family dog each morning through the forest and was warned to turn the fuck around and walk back speedily if the dog ever stopped and just… wouldn’t budge. At all. Unless it was in the opposite direction.
Fastforward a few months to when I’m back home and hearing about the boar problem a family friend is having. I recommend electric fences, since that obviously works for Swedes. The guy tells me that won’t work for him since it’s a herd of boars, so the boars will just charge the fence enmasse, sacrifice the first few, trample over them and enter orchard to feast.
Welp.
Regarding how humans tamed wild pigs, I have a hypothesis that it’s not unlike how humans tamed dogs. Human garbage dumps are a reliable source of food, which encouraged pigs to interact with humans. The wolves that evolved into dogs did the same thing.
Another factor that pigs have in common with those wolves is that they’re very social animals. While older wild boar tend to be more solitary and territorial, wild boar sows and piglets are more social, organizing themselves into groups called sounders. These groups can include several generations of sows and their piglets, and even sows from outside the sounder’s original family group, provided they find a place within the sounder’s pecking order through duels with the other pigs.
Members of a sounder cooperate with each other to survive. Other sows can help watch over the babies, and they can defend themselves and their herdmates from predators. Male boar are also still pretty social, even though fully-matured intact boar tend to be more aggressive due to hormones. Young males live in the sounder as piglets, then split off into their own social groups of males before they’re old enough to strike out on their own and establish their territory. And even though boars don’t like other males in their territory, they don’t stray too far from where sounders are, sometimes going miles to find eligible bachelorettes. Neutered pigs, or barrows, being less hormonal, act more like young males in that they integrate into a sounder and socialize with other pigs without being overly territorial and aggressive.
Being social animals means that pigs are very quick on the uptake in order to figure out how to communicate with their herdmates and other animals. Pigs have passed the “mirror test” and can recognize themselves in reflections (at least, in experiments where knowing what a reflection is allows them to access food), although the merits of the mirror test as a measure of consciousness have been debated by scientists. They have complex social structures within their herds where hierarchy is determined by “duels” where they test each other to see who backs down first.
Pigs have a scent-based language that helps them track down food and know what their herdmates are feeling, and they also have a spoken language of grunts, squeals, huffs, and other noises that they use to signal their herdmates. What’s really remarkable about them is that they can develop an ear for human language, too. There are many examples of pigs raised by and socialized to be around humans learning simple vocal commands to do tricks and recognizing the names humans give them.
Here’s an example of a trained wild boar from a (now sadly closed) theme park in Izu, Japan:
Domesticated pigs, large and small, can also be trained to do tricks and follow commands.
So, what does this all mean? What pigs have in common with dogs is that they’re willing to accept humans as herdmates with a place within the sounder’s social hierarchy. If a human proves themself through accepting challenges and defeating the more aggressive pigs in the herd (usually by stonewalling them with a sorting board or other protective gear while the pig tries to charge and bite them), the other pigs become less aggressive towards them, at least when they aren’t provoked. Farm pigs that are spayed or neutered and used to humans also tend to be friendly and curious about people, often going up to the fence to investigate strangers, as long as they aren’t frightened or provoked. There’s even an exotic pet trade for the smaller breeds of pig, like the Vietnamese Potbellied pig and Kune Kune pigs, although they’re also one of the most likely pets to be given up by owners that don’t understand their pig’s needs.
There’s also a certain other thing that humans can give pigs that they can’t get anywhere else: belly rubs.
That’s not to say that pigs won’t hurt humans, or that pigs only
associate with humans out of the goodness of their hearts. Pigs are prey
animals of the variety that gets aggressive when scared. Wild boar that
aren’t used to humans tend to attack because they judge humans as
potential threats, and fighting off a threat can be the difference
between life and death. Pet pigs also tend to be abandoned or placed in
sanctuaries when they reach the age where they start challenging the
other members of their “herd.” If humans respond to their challenges by
running away, then the pig thinks they have to be aggressive to get what
they want and responds to any attempt to change this as a challenge to a duel.
Being clever, they’re also opportunistic little jerks who can be very
manipulative in order to sneak food regardless of where they stand in
the social hierarchy, much like human toddlers.
However, they deserve better than to be characterized as mindlessly aggressive. Every animal does what they do for a reason, and sometimes they can be negotiated with, as we did when we domesticated pigs.
Also, pigs are omnivorous, and tend to scavenge carcasses. They might go out of their way to kill and eat smaller mammals like ducks for their meat, but they only eat larger animals when they come across them after they’ve died. They only “eat people” in the same way that wild dogs do, by scavenging corpses. Cases of farm pigs actually eating a live human being are extremely rare.
