HOG HUNTING FOREVER
What About Hogs
EDITOR'S
NOTE: The Chickasawhay River swamp in Greene County,
Mississippi, may have one of the oldest populations
of feral pigs in the nation. The area has no record
of a time when this river-bottom swamp hasn't homed
hogs. Fences and property lines never have bound the
free spirits of these feral hogs like the wild boars
of old. They roam at will, foraging for food, hiding
out in the big cane thickets and briar patches along
the edges of the river bank and wreaking havoc on croplands
by night. Hunters with packs of hounds and live traps
and sportsmen with rifles and bows never have eliminated
these free-roaming pigs. They have become as much a
part of the land as the earth itself.
About 40-million years ago, the pig-like mammals became
two families, the Old World pigs, which lived in Eurasia
and Africa, and the New World pigs, the pecarries, which
did and still do live from the southwestern U.S. to
southern South America. Tales abound of the danger of
both families of pigs. In India alone in one year's
time, wild boars killed 50 people. Ancient mythology
commemorated
boar hunting. Homer wrote the world's first account
of a boar hunt centuries before the birth of Christ.
Hercules and King Arthur both hunted boars. Throughout
the Renaissance, hunting wild pigs remained a popular
sport of royalty.
Civilizations of many lands have considered the wild
boar with its slashing tusks a trophy for hunters to
take. The old hunting guides of India considered the
wild boar rugged enough to, "drink at a river between
two tigers." Records exist in India of boars destroying
tigers in fair fights. In the U.S. when the early settlers
first came to America, they brought domestic swine from
Europe with them and released the animals into the American
wilderness to either root hog or die. The earliest wild
hogs were believed to have been brought into the South
in 1539 along the Gulf Coast by the explorer, Ferdinand
DeSoto. Later man named George Moore also aided the
huge populations of hogs in the southeastern U.S. by
establishing a game preserve on approximately 1600 acres
of timbered land surrounding Hooper's Bald, a mountain
peak in the Snowbird Mountain Range of western North
Carolina. The Whiting Manufacturing Company gave Moore
the property for his advice and financial expertise.
Moore had dreamed of having a large tract of land under
fence where he could release all types of wild and exotic
animals and invite potential clients for his financial
dealings to hunt. In 1912 the first shipment of animals
to arrive consisted of four buffaloes and 14 European
wild boars. However, the boar reproduced and went in
and out of the enclosures on the game ranch at will
as Moore lost interest in the area after about 10 years.
Now everything I had felt on the day of my hog hunt
made sense. Apparently, my family came from an ancient
lineage of Welshmen who hunted hogs with swift bows
and sharp broadheads for centuries. The Phillips' family
immortalized this form of food gathering on their coat
of arms for all to see and for future generations to
understand the importance to the family's of taking
wild swine with swift shafts. I believe when I drew
my bow on that young black boar, I relived the hunt
of another Phillips in a time and place when his family's
survival depended on successful boar hunting with a
bow and arrow. When I released the arrow to take the
hog, my spirit rode the shaft with my kinsman's whose
very existence depended on his taking a wild boar. Bowhunting
wild hogs now is more than a sport to me. It provides
a link for me with my ancestors and a re-association
with a family tradition and way of hunting so important
to my family that my Welsh forefathers preserved it
forever on our coat of arms. I was born to hunt hogs
with a bow. When hunters finally hunted the boar, according
to an eyewitness account, "some of the hunters
were forced to take refuge in trees to escape the charging
beasts. Overly excited by the baying of the dogs and
the shouts of the hunters, the European boar simply
tore their way through the fences and escaped into the
nearby mountains -- after killing or maiming at least
a dozen dogs."
Because
domestic and wild razorback hogs already ran loose in
much of this section of the country, crossbreeding occurred
freely with the wild boar. Today these European wild
boars as well as wild pigs that have crossbred with
these boars are well-established in this region, which
is now a part of the Nantahala National Forest, the
Great Smoky Mountains and the Cherokee National Forest
in eastern Tennessee. You also can find European wild
boar living in the wilderness in New Hampshire, the
offspring of hogs imported from the Black Forest of
Germany by Austin Corbin in the early 1890s and released
on his game park in Sullivan County, New Hampshire.
Other European wild boar live in California in the Los
Padres National Forest in the vicinity of Carmel and
the Santa Lucia Mountains of Monterey and San Luis Obispo
County of California. These California wild boar are
the descendants of European wild boar that George Moore
transplanted from North Carolina to his California ranch
in 1924. Eventually wild boar hunting became so popular
that many hunting preserves throughout the nation began
to stock them. Today sportsmen also enjoy hunting feral
pigs in many regions of the country.
TOMORROW: MORE ABOUT HOGS
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