Feral Pig Update

My year in feral pigs, with cameos by Nini and rooster.

It’s been almost one year since my post “My Feral Pig Friends.” I have a new favorite feral pig. When I first saw her, half her head was very injured. She had a large hole in her ear, a bloody wound, and her left eye was swollen shut. Over time, her body healed itself. I fed her. She is nice. She is very calm. She lets me pet and scratch her head.

She is maybe half the size of the main feral pig in my previous post—a large sow, the largest that visits me, that was bony and famished but now looks like this:

When the sows have babies, they get bony due to giving the babies milk, it seems. The sow with the hole in the ear had babies when I first saw her. She has remained bony. When the big sow was bony, early in the year, she was so hungry that when I brought food outside she would shove me, overeagerly wanting food. Once, she bit my arm (lightly) when I was chewing salami and she smelled it.

I wrote about her in an essay titled “Hawaiian Fauna” that is going to be in my next book, a memoir titled Reasons to Live.

The new sow doesn’t shove or bite me even though she is very hungry and has kids to feed. Here are the two together (I’ve been thinking of them as “the two musketeers” sometimes—often when I go outside, they trot or run up to me to see if I have food for them; I have food for them only 5 to 10 percent of the time):

Recently, I saw a new sow with new babies. A tan sow. She had like six piglets. When I approached her, she ran away. Her piglets were so young that some of them didn’t run away; they just lay there. I brought one inside for around one minute, then put it back outside. Sows don’t seem to try to defend their kids.

Here’s the mother, being observed by Nini:

This rooster that I wrote about here disappeared in November:

Feral pigs rise up:

I’m not sure which feral pig this one is but I like this photo:

Here’s Nini with the pigs. Nini almost never backs away from the pigs. When the pigs near him, he hisses at them viciously. The pigs have never touched Nini. They always ignore him. They only pay attention to me. In this video, the one with the giant bump/cyst on her back is the largest sow, mentioned earlier. The cyst popped on its own. It was her body excreting a store of toxins, in my opinion:

A herd of feral piglets:

Some more observations:

-There are less ants since the pigs arrived. The pigs eat dead rodents and rotting fruit and other things, leaving less food for the “little red fire ants” that people here hate and seem to unsuccessfully try to eradicate with pesticides.

-They ate all the giant snails. People here are afraid of these snails because they fear “rat lungworm.”

-With the pigs around, my property is more lush, since they pee and poop in it. I move the poop to under trees occasionally.

-Often when I call my cats, the two musketeers come trotting up. I don’t care for the name “two musketeers” but it came to me unconsciously.

-The male feral pigs stay in the distance, shy and incurious. Out of some thirty feral pigs (most are piglets), only the two sows come up to me.