Wild Boar

Description

Tough, resourceful, and omnivorous, wild boar are the ancestors of domestic pigs. From earliest times, wild boar have presented humans with both opportunity and threat: they are a valuable food source, but also a formidable foe carrying tusks that can inflict terrible injuries. Today, boar are impinging on people's lives in new ways, scouting into cities such as Berlin and Tokyo, or establishing populations in areas such as the Forest of Dean in England. Wild Boar traces the history of the interaction between humans and wild boar, from the iconic beasts of myth and legend, such as the Calydonian Boar, to the adoption of the boar as a heraldic device - most notably by the doomed king Richard III - and the meticulous rules of engagement that grew up around the practice of hunting.

Dorothy Yamamoto is the author of Guinea Pig (Reaktion, 2015) and The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (2000). She is based in Oxford.

"Wild boar are despised for what is seen as their incredible destructive powers when they range over lands claimed by humans. Yamamoto's summary could apply to other animals too . . .: 'Wild boar have been described as many things, but they are always characterized in the light of human concerns and priorities.' If we have a human nature, it seems to involve subjugation of other animals' lives to our own."--Barbara J. King "Times Literary Supplement" "Wild boar, as Yamamoto observes in her new book on the beasts, are shy and nocturnal creatures--and though omnivores, are not very likely to leap your backyard fence and attack your pets. . . . Yamamoto does not underplay the damage that razorbacks can do. . . . But she looks skeptically at the divisive wild-boar wars that wrack Britain at the moment (hunters, farmers, and animal advocates warring over the mostly-reclusive pigs). And she comments wryly on the American tendency to make the boar into 'Hogzilla, ' a crypto-pig that has become the Sasquatch of the South. . . . Wild Boar is lovingly illustrated."--Tim Morris "lection"