Nature red in tooth and boar
Ithink we can all agree that, what with a global pandemic, the Middle East imploding and Trump still inexplicably at large, the thing the world needs most right now is entertaining and instructive stories about wild boar. I have two.
Wild boar are common in Europe and popular because they’re edible. From Lisbon to Bucharest, men like to wander into the mountains with a rifle and return with a backpack of pork sausages. But of late there’s been a shift in the balance of nature. Climate change has improved survival rates for baby boar. And coronavirus has brought a ban on hunting that has improved survival rates for adult boar. So boar numbers have soared, and boar have become emboldened. They’ve encroached into territory that people think of as their own.
Teufelssee is a popular lake and forest area in West Berlin and had you been relaxing there one warm afternoon last northern summer you might have seen a wild boar dash from the undergrowth with a yellow bag in its mouth. It was followed in short order by an angry man. The bag held the man’s laptop, though it is the consensus of experts that the boar had mistaken it for a pizza box. But what gives the story its savour is that the man was a nudist.
No nation on Earth is as dedicated as the Germans to the pursuit of nudism. Freiko¨ rperkultur is their typically snappy word for it, which they abbreviate to FKK. I have seen German FKKists on a beach in Croatia and they were mostly fat old men. Each spent an age anointing himself with oil to the extent that he could, and then had a friend do the rest. Once oiled they lay down en masse and became a landscape feature. I was slimmish back then and I remember feeling like David Attenborough among the elephant seals.
The boar chaser would have fitted nicely onto that beach. Nevertheless he was not giving up his laptop without a fight. He shouted and banged a stick and the fleeing boar, understandably alarmed by the nudist’s bulk and aggression, eventually dropped the bag. So all was well for Herr Fleisch.
But now let us fly south to the town of Le Rughe, outside Rome, where a woman is carrying groceries to her car. Suddenly a gang of six wild boar appear from behind a parked Fiat. They bear down on the woman. ‘‘Povera signora,’’ (poor lady), says the unseen narrator, who is videoing the incident but who does nothing to help.
It’s a heist, a stick-up. The woman backs away but the boar keep coming. They say nothing but neither do they have to. The woman looks around, sees no prospect of help, gives a little scream, drops her groceries and runs. The boar make off with the proceeds.
So there you have it, a brace of boar stories. But what do they signify?
Well, first to mind comes the poet Horace, a contemporary of Julius Caesar. ‘‘You can turf nature out with a pitchfork,’’ wrote dear old Horace, ‘‘but from all sides it will come running back.’’
Second, the stories remind us that we as a species compete with every other species. However sentimental we may be about them, they are never sentimental about us. Thirdly, the stories suggest that there may be some truth to racial stereotypes. The German, after all, reacted with unhesitating belligerence. The Italian capitulated.
But the main message is of my own maturity and restraint. For I now realise that I have managed to write 600 words on this subject without using the phrase boar war.