I tend to agree. I was raised on a small farm in an area of small farms. Everyone had pigs. When they weren’t being eaten, they a were treated as pets. In the winter the pigs would burrow into a straw pile and my brothers and I would burrow in with them. They kept us warm. BTW, pigs are really clean. They reserve one special area as a latrine, unlike cattle who shit where they stand.
Yes you can hunt them, and lots of people do.
I believe Carol posted a long thread a while back about the pig trap on her property and her native neighbor who killed and roasted the pigs that were trapped in it.
Shoot yeah, you can hunt them. Texas is full of them. Arkansas has it’s share. There’s a rasher(heh) of them living on our 90 acres. They haven’t got to the point of ruining stuff yet. When they do it’s bye-bye porky-pig. Mr.Wrekker won’t stand for it.
The problem is getting rid of the meat. Nobody wants wild hog. Mr.Wrekker says they are wormy as heck. In Texas some exotic animal farms buy the carcasses to feed their big cats.
That scene at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz movie where Dorothy snags her foot and tumbles into the hog pen to everyone’s consternation? It wasn’t the hard ground they were concerned about.
There are wild boar where we used to live in the Shomron (a/k/a Samaria). They’d come out of the olive groves at night (they’re nocturnal) and dig up back yards and make lots of noise. Residents were told that if we were ever chased by a boar, zig-zag while running, since a boar’s eyesight isn’t that good. Also, even those with rifles were told not to shoot at the boars - the ammunition in their rifles wasn’t big enough to damage the boars.
Every once in a while, the local council would bring in professional boar hunters. That’s when we’d get text messages saying things like, “If you hear any gunshots in the wadi tonight between 22:00 and 02:00, it’s only the boar hunters.”
In the old legends, folks were terrified of cows (bulls), pigs (boars), sheep (rams), and deer (stags). just going into the wildnerness risked getting fucked up by animals that we now think of as domesticated.
Umm…
Alas poor post #11! I knew him, DesertDog: a post of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: it hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!
Ah. I overlooked that last part of post #11. Still, more than one farmer “got et by the hogs” when he was rendered helpless and when I saw the scene as a tot, I thought it was the tumble they were worried about, not where she’d landed.
There was a craze of having pot-bellied pigs and kunekune pigs as pets. They are pretty small and presumably less dangerous. My local children’s petting zoo has kunekune pigs, so they must be pretty safe.
Old Yeller is where I learned pigs are not to be trifled with. They’d just finished fucking up the dog and I turned and looked at Mom who (having been a farm-born Arkansas girl) confirmed they were dangerous precisely because they were absolutely hateful savages that don’t look particularly dangerous. Her mom had her leg gnawed pretty badly (this would have been in the late 40s-early 50s) and it was apparently a pretty impressive feat that she didn’t lose the leg. I always feel a sense of turnabout when I eat pork. Like “We won…this time.”
There was an episode of Criminal Minds that had the bad guys feeding their victims to the pigs.
https://www.videodetective.com/tv/criminal-minds-to-hell-and-back/457159
Animals were sometimes put on trial in the Middle Ages, but it was usually connected with local political intrigues.
Here is a very entertaining movie about it: ‘The Advocate’. The pig has a good lawyer played by Colin Firth. 