Friday, 15 December 2017

Perfidious Porkers

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.

Acorn Pannage Is An Old Custom
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.

The Usual Suspects Were Rounded Up
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.

2 comments:

All comments are welcomed, or even just thanks if you enjoyed the post. But please make any comment relevant to the post it appears under. Off topic comments will be blocked or removed.

Moderation is on for older posts to stop spamming and comments that are off topic or inappropriate from being posted .... comments are reviewed within 48 hours. I don't block normal comments that are on topic and not inappropriate. Vexatious comments that may cause upset to other commentators, or that are attempting to espouse a particular wider political view, are reviewed before acceptance. But a certain amount of debate around a post topic is accepted, as long as it remains generally on topic and is not an attempt to become sounding board for some other cause.

Final decision on all comments is held by the blog author and is final.

Comments are always monitored for bad or abusive language, and or illegal statements i.e. overtly racist or sexist content. Spam is not tolerated and is removed.

Commentaires ne sont surveillés que pour le mauvais ou abusif langue ou déclarations illégales ie contenu ouvertement raciste ou sexiste. Spam ne est pas toléré et est éliminé.