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The wild boar may not be on anyone’s list of favourite animals, but it is remarkable in its own right

The Indian wild boar is more lightly built than its European counterpart, but it still manages to pack in a punch

Wild boar live in matriarchal ‘sounders’, being led by a grand dame, along with spinsters, mothers with young and piglets. (Source: Pixabay)

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“Road hog!” , “Boar!”, “Pig!”, “Swine!”, “Sooar ka bachcha!” — these are some of the abuses we hurl at one another when our tempers run short, quite forgetting that pigs are actually very intelligent animals. Sure, wild boars will not be up there on the ‘favourites’ list of any farmer whose potato crop they have demolished overnight but they are remarkable creatures with a certain gorgeously ugly charisma.

Sixteen models are to be found throughout the world, from the one-of-a-kind babirusa from Indonesia (whose tusks may curl around into its forehead) to Africa’s wonderful warthog to the hefty Eurasian wild boar that has been hunted for millennia. In our own neck of the woods, the Indian wild boar is no less a formidable creature, built like an armoured car, standing three feet at the shoulder and capable of moving its 300 lb bulk – mainly muscle and fat – at 40 kmph – and leaping 5 feet.

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The Indian wild boar is more lightly built than its European counterpart, and sports a spiky ridge of hair along its spine. Its legs are relatively delicate looking, the head heavy, the neck and shoulders massive and padded like an American footballer, especially in the breeding season. The sharp upper canines grow first sideways out of their mouths and then curl upwards and are formidable slashing weapons.

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Some say wild boars are not normally aggressive, others say, stay out of their way at all costs because they can be belligerent and charge unprovoked. In India, several farmers have been killed by them while protecting their fields, and in some states, Kerala, for example, they can be shot by authorised personnel and seem to be on the verge of being declared ‘vermin’. The IUCN ranks them as being ‘of least concern’ in their Red List.

Wild boar live in matriarchal ‘sounders’, being led by a grand dame, along with spinsters, mothers with young and piglets. Males are encouraged to leave the group from age eight months onwards and may form loose bachelor groups. Macho males roam far and wide looking out for sounders. Of course, furious battles break out between rival studs, with much tusk slashing and flaying at each other with their front hooves. The victor will chase away all and sundry from the sounder before making out with up to 10 ladies. But, by the end of the game, he is pretty well beaten and bushed – his unmentionables given special treatment – and he would have lost up to 20 per cent of his body-weight.

The sow digs a ‘nest’ in the ground and gives birth on average to 4-6 delicious little striped piglets, who stay put in their nest for the first fortnight before jauntily trundling after their mom in a single file, tails held high like the antennae of VIP cars, a sight that cannot help but make you smile. If a mom dies, her sisters and the other ladies in the sounder will take over the raising of the orphaned piglets: kind hearts beat behind those hirsute, rough exteriors. But a mom can be truly ferocious in defence of her young, and there have been instances when wild boars have taken down even tigers. In the wild, they may live up to 10-14 years old, though four-five years is what most survive.

They are very vocal animals with a variety of calls, from low-down ‘keeping-in-touch’ grunts to high-pitched squeals when they are in trouble. They may be myopic but their hearing and sense of smell are excellent: trained boars are being used in Germany to sniff out drugs!

We think that wild boars (and pigs in general) are dirty because they love nothing better than to find a muddy waterhole and sink into it. But mud cools them and gets rid of nasty parasites. We find them even more reprehensible because of their eating habits. They are omnivorous, and won’t turn up their snuffling noses at anything: from excreta to tubers, roots, leaves, fruit, vegetables, standing crops, carrion to the extent of even cannibalism, and may even hunt small animals and baby deer. But, it is this (like dirty money in our world) that has made them the successful species that they are. Also, by cleaning up dead putrefying flesh they keep the forests free of bacteria that could spread disease. Their heavy-duty heads work like shovels and can turn up 50 kg of earth at a toss, so the damage they can do to fields is unimaginable. But then they need to take in 4,000-5,000 calories per day!

While they eat everything, tigers and leopards (and us) relish them, too. Tigers will go a long way to take down entire sounders one by one if they can. Our association with the wild boar has gone back millennia: they appear in Indian and Greek mythology and today massive Harley-Davidson motorbikes are known as Hogs! But, they have also been hunted the world over. In India, ‘pig-sticking’ was considered a very macho ‘sport’ (and used as a measure of a soldier’s courage), wherein a boar was chased down by men on horseback armed with spears. Not surprisingly, many of these encounters were not as one-sided as they might seem: though probably it was usually the poor horse that got disemboweled by the furious animal rather than the rider.