My husband arrived home one day with a tiny speckled wild pig, its legs taped together with electrical tape. He was released into the house yard and a couple of days later, when Ian tried to catch him, he had other ideas.
All of six inches tall, as Ian closed in on him in the corner of the yard, the pig charged at him, teeth bared and snarling viciously. Ian jumped in the air, all 193cm of him and let the pig go. After he’d been caught, de-loused, put in a small cage and fed for a few days, he was easy to handle. We called him Smedley and he became a family pet.
He thought he was a dog and spent time sitting on the back step, waiting for me to come out so he could follow me to the fowl yard to help the chooks eat their tucker, or down the back yard to the long drop toilet. The day I walked into the laundry to find him, for the second time that day, rolling around in a basket of what had been clean wet nappies, he could consider himself a very lucky pig because all I did was yell at him.
As a full-grown pig he was great company and no risk to anyone, but he presented a problem when we were to leave that place. We couldn’t release him into the wild as he wouldn’t have survived, so we took him to Sydney as hams and bacon, much to the disgust of our children. I didn’t know what else to do, and once he was dead he was just meat, wasn’t he? The hams and bacon surely stood us in good stead through some tough times and no-one complained.
By Margaret Irwin