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Needless to say, I am HORRIFIED.

‘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…

And pigs will definitely eat people.

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.

I admittedly get a kick outta here posts cause even though I grew up in the city, I have close family who were pig farmers and spent a good deal of times as an Animal Science student through our College of Ag, so I’ve worked with livestock close up and forget so many people just don’t know.