Rights of Passage

Some of the photographs you are about to see were taken by me, others were borrowed to use as visual aids.


It only seems fitting that we should once again have evidence that spring is here by having wild boar show up on our property again !   The year since our falling out with a good friend who used to come and shoot them and the pigs have figured out that we don't have hunting here anymore and have moved back onto our territory. I won't get into why our so called good friend is no longer a friend, let's just say it was about crossing boundaries and leave it at that.

We used to have sightings of over 50 wild boar at a time on our land and then we met Rick and he would come and shoot them, he must have killed and ate over 2 dozen, but they multiply like rabbits, with three litters of between 6-14 little ones, per year.  Rick had thinned them down to just a handful over the space of about 4 years...but since the break-up, the boar have slowly creeping back onto our place.

Don't be deceived by how cute the babies are, they only stay like that for a couple of months

and then they look like this

The males can weight up to 300 lb. but average is about 200.  The females slightly lighter. 3 litters a year: March, july and Nov, or there abouts. They just find a bunch of tall grass in the bush burrow down and the little ones live in there, they are very tough. Both male and female have the tusks at the sides of thier mouths, they use them for ripping the bark off trees and scoring the ground...then they use thier noses to dig and boy can they dig. When they find a soft spot in the field away from prying eyes they just have a hay day...this is what they did to a first year hay field for us back in 2005.

Back in the late 1990's the government encouraged farmers to diversify, some got into raising bison, elk, fallow deer, ostrich and some into wild boar.  The reason behind that move was to derive our income from more than one product and the gov. would have to subsidize less, or so the theory went.  The government made money available (in the form of grants) to farmers wanting to diversify in this way and lots of us jumped at it...the old "Carrot on a String" trick... The gov. shut the program down after only two years...too much money going out of gov. coffers. The big problem began when after buying the breeding stock to produce these diverse farm projects there was no one else to sell to and they had not had the foresight to build a market for thier product...Elk got the chronic wasting disease and were dropping dead like flies. Enough of the elk guys were big wigs or relatives of big wigs in gov...and got compensated for thier losses when the gov stepped in and destroyed 90 % of the farm elk population.  The bison guys lost thier shirts and then some, with no one to bail them out...the ostrich guys, well you can only sell so many giant eggs to craft stores and then they were just turning the birds loose... the wild boar guys were the only ones who had actually created a market for thier product....wild game hunting facilities, where some macho redneck texas gorilla type hunter pays $500. for the chance to hunt and bag a wild boar, guaranteed...if you can't get one on your own we will corner one in the pen for you to shoot....ahahahha   so you can mount him on your wall

 There is only one problem with that, someone forgot to tell them that you can't fence in a wild boar...they will rip the wire apart, crash through the fence or dig thier way out...

So we have non native wild boar running around loose here, fouling our dugouts, ripping up our fields and wrecking grain crops and no one wants to do anything... Alberta put a bounty on thier heads...$50 for a pair of ears. We had every tom dick and harry out here shooting pigs or trying to.... the problem is they are very tricky, sneaky beasts...and nocturnal. Let's not forget they have been hunting these things in Europe for hundreds of years. Horses, dogs and men have been killed in the process because they don't just run away...if they feel threatened they will turn and fight....I have the dent in my truck door to prove it...

I was cutting willow sapplings to built a willow fence in my yard...I had cut several dozen sapplings and when I was done cutting I bent down to start gathering them up...and that is when I saw, under the tree canopy about 100 feet away a sow nursing about 10 piglets...she was sniffing the air...and grunting...(they don't see all that well at a distance but they hear and smell remarkably well). I think I shreeked and just like that she was on her feet and coming straight towards me....dragging some of the piglets with her since they hadn't let go of her teats....I didn't stick around to see what happened to them...I dropped the willows and ran to the truck...lucky for me I had left the door open, so I had just jumped in and slammed it shut when she thumped against the door...I started the truck and as I was driving out of there she hit the door of my truck twice more....she left a dent low down on the door....but I was safe....shit....I was scared.  Since then I take the dogs with me when I go in the bush....for all the good it does.   Last fall we were just out for  a nature walk and they were running ahead of me on the trail of some poor easter bunny, when all of a sudden they came running back down the trail towards me...thier ears pinned back. They didn't even stop to think about defending me...oh no....the chicken shits just kept running the mile home...even after the pig ran off...that's right...there was a pig chasing them back down the trail...but when he came bursting through the trees and saw me...(he wasn't a very big one only a 100 lb.) he veered off the trail and went crashing through the bush.  I had to finish my walk by myself. Ingrate dogs.... I carry my gun now...but it is a bother...hard to walk through the bush with a rifle strapped to your back. I used to go cranberry picking  in the muskeg but that stopped the first year they came to our neck of the woods...since that is thier favorite habitat...they eat all the berries...bloody bastards.

So in my books the only good wild boar is a dead one, on a barbeque preferably.