My Feral Pig Friends

A post about my relationship with local wild pigs.

Nini observing pig.

I’ve noticed wild pigs on the Big Island ever since moving here in 2021. They’re black, smoothish, and don’t have tusks. They come in groups of one or more adults and many more babies; this configuration reminds me of the wild chickens that are everywhere in Hawaii (or at least on Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island): The chickens often appear in groups of one mom and many children, ranging from babies to teenagers.

The wild pigs usually stayed out of view. I somewhat rarely saw them, while driving, or while biking. One morning, I saw a dead medium-sized one in the street while biking. I dragged it into the grass.

I’ve read that pigs are smarter than both cats and dogs.

My neighbor has a non-wild pig. It seems obese, ultra-slow, and extremely low energy. I’ve rarely seen it even standing. The wild pigs, however, are fast and alert. They look and move kind of like horses. When startled, they make pig noises and flee.

The wild pigs never came into my yard until I buried cheese in my yard last year. My post about this on Twitter/X was surprisingly popular:

Wild pig activity went down as I stopped burying food. I was burying food that I didn’t want. I had accumulated much food that I didn’t want to eat anymore—dairy, animal organs—because I didn’t think they were healthy anymore. I got my first video of one of the pigs on June 29:

Looking through my photos and videos, I see that pig activity went up considerably in November, probably because I began to feed them more.

I got this video of the mother pig—it seems that it’s just one mother pig that comes around, along with her babies and two or three smaller adult-seeming males—on November 12 with her babies:

On November 24, I got this video of the babies drinking milk out of their mother (through a screened window—going outside would have disturbed them because my front door was very squeaky back then):

One reason I started feeding them more was because I saw the babies. The mother seemed famished. Here’s a video of the mother four days later:

I started leaving out the remains of chicken (after I made broth with it and ate most of the meat), and the mother ate all of it, all of the bones, crunching the bones with her teeth. I fed her apple peels (I peel most of my apples before eating them), dates, and raw butter (her favorite—maybe due to its caloric density). Her appreciation of the food encouraged me to feed her more. By feeding her, I was feeding her and all her babies. Here we see her eating an apple:

They visited near daily. I noticed their physiognomy more. The babies look like obese cats or dogs. The adults have heads that look horselike. The mother has the body of a skinny cow. They have small beady eyes.

Here I feed the mother a coconut date roll on January 5:

My cat Lali often watched the pigs. She seemed curious in them, and unafraid. She watched them silently and intently.

The wild mother pig became bold over time. It sniffed my leg once. It goes up to me now, unafraid. I throw pieces of beef at it while I eat at my computer at my low table outside. It smells the food and stands nearby.

I brought out cow kidney wrapped in plastic one day. I cut open the bag and the bag fell and the mother pig ate the plastic wrapping, which had some blood in it. Then it carried the kidney away. It enjoys raw meat and organs.

Recently, I finally saw my cat Nini see the pigs for the first time. He also seemed curious and unafraid. One day, he hissed at them (this was the first time I’d heard him hiss in maybe more than a year—he rarely hisses) from five feet away (hiss begins at around three seconds, is kind of hard to hear):

I traded in my iPhone 6 for an iPhone 16 earlier this month in order to [irrelevant to this post]. The video quality was much better. I got this video on January 13:

And this on January 19:

The photo quality was better too:

One day I saw Lali hiss at the pigs, too.

When Nini went missing earlier this month, I wondered if the pigs had eaten him. ChatGPT told me that wild pigs will sometimes eat vulnerable cats.

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Some scattered facts about wild pigs that I haven’t mentioned:

—They eat grass and plants and leaves. The babies seem to almost exclusively eat grass and plants. They’ve “mown” my lawn in this manner.

—They made trails throughout my overgrown property. I like this.

—They have strong jaws. I fed the mother pig fermented dried plums and it crunched the seeds, eating them with the plums. And I’ve mentioned the chicken bones.

—They’re cautious. I used to see them every day, but since my parents arrived three days ago for a 6.5 week visit, I haven’t seen them in the daytime at all. They still come at night to eat leftovers that we leave out in a glass bowl for them.

—In the event of a global catastrophe where I was starving to death, I’d be open to hunting one or more of the pigs to feed me and my cats, in part since they, the pigs, would also be starving to death. I have a bow and arrow for this. I could also make a trap by digging a hole. Maybe I would just starve to death myself, though—since I don’t fear death anymore but look forward to it (in a positive, non-suicidal manner).