Wild Boar Encounters and Human Values: Sus humanissima and the Art of Running a Country
Several years ago, I sought refuge on countryside roads as my dog was terrified of traffic, and there are still more cars in this town than, it sometimes seems, functional brains (apologies). We set off on pre-dawn walks to return home before ‘the cars woke up’. That was when our encounters with the wild boar began. I had never met wild boar before. I had, however, heard tales of horrors. According to these urban myths, wild boars came across as vicious but reliable instruments for producing evenly-flattened and uniformly unlumpy human pancakes. All one had to do was position the minceable individual between a sow and her piglets. In many stories, wild boar were portrayed as rampaging, indiscriminate (I choose the word deliberately) devastators. I mistrusted these fables because wild boar used to be worshipped by the Prussians, a group of ancient Baltic tribes, who were described by nobody other than the highly judgmental Christians, as homines humanissimi. I doubted that the Prussians, exceedingly charitable towards everyone (except towards Christians) and as agriculturally-crazed as the rest of the Balts, would have pinned to their chests, as representation of their gods, imagery of beasts of destruction. Further, I equipped myself with a couple of curious scientific facts, such as
