Acorns poison ponies ... who apparently are too stupid to realise this fact, and persist in eating them every year .... I didn't know that! Anyway this means that the season when they drop and haven't rotted is called the pannage season. The answer to this problem (apart from simply not taking ponies into forests when acorns have fallen ... Doh!), is to let pigs forage for them.
The pigs have no problem eating them, and enjoy the bounty. However this can cause problems for walkers in the forests. For instance around 600 farm pigs are allowed to roam the New forest near Burley, Hants in the UK, to eat all the acorns, but they also get a little feral like their wild boar cousins.
So when four of them were disturbed by three ramblers, they attacked them, biting one rambler on the knee, and chasing two others into a stream.
The bitten man said afterwards that "The pigs seemed to be out for trouble, like a gang of teenagers". The bit that made me laugh was when a forest worker was quoted as saying "We aim to identify the pigs so this doesn't happen again". What they gonna do, question every pig? Maybe a Pig Identity Parade?
Of course these aren't the only perfidious porkers .... a runaway pig kept a woman penned in her car as it rooted through her front yard lawn in Fort Myers Florida. Rampaging Boars have forced conservationists to leave the Pan Tod Beacon beauty spot in the Forest of Dean, Glos, UK .... ingrate porkers.
A man in Bilbao, Spain, rescued a wild boar from a pond. However as boars are strong swimmers, it may not in fact have needed rescuing .... a supposition strengthened by the fact that boar then attacked him, and chased him round his van, until he managed to get in to the van and blare the car horn. The ungrateful porker then ran off.
While a road in Compton Abbas, Dorset, was closed for several hours after a lorry shed its load of pig carcasses .... that's how you deal with perfidious porkers.
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| Acorn Pannage Is An Old Custom |
The pigs have no problem eating them, and enjoy the bounty. However this can cause problems for walkers in the forests. For instance around 600 farm pigs are allowed to roam the New forest near Burley, Hants in the UK, to eat all the acorns, but they also get a little feral like their wild boar cousins.
So when four of them were disturbed by three ramblers, they attacked them, biting one rambler on the knee, and chasing two others into a stream.
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| The Usual Suspects Were Rounded Up .. |
The bitten man said afterwards that "The pigs seemed to be out for trouble, like a gang of teenagers". The bit that made me laugh was when a forest worker was quoted as saying "We aim to identify the pigs so this doesn't happen again". What they gonna do, question every pig? Maybe a Pig Identity Parade?
Of course these aren't the only perfidious porkers .... a runaway pig kept a woman penned in her car as it rooted through her front yard lawn in Fort Myers Florida. Rampaging Boars have forced conservationists to leave the Pan Tod Beacon beauty spot in the Forest of Dean, Glos, UK .... ingrate porkers.
A man in Bilbao, Spain, rescued a wild boar from a pond. However as boars are strong swimmers, it may not in fact have needed rescuing .... a supposition strengthened by the fact that boar then attacked him, and chased him round his van, until he managed to get in to the van and blare the car horn. The ungrateful porker then ran off.
While a road in Compton Abbas, Dorset, was closed for several hours after a lorry shed its load of pig carcasses .... that's how you deal with perfidious porkers.
It's the one at the top.
ReplyDeleteProbably. Thanks for the comment.
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