UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

I don't need to give you the details of who, what, where, when and how of the above picture on this blog. But just in case you've spelunking or were on your Honey Moon for the past week you can read about it here:http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3213852&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

But I find that this is a fine example of the concept of unintended consequences. Now the fact that the hog might have actually been raised on a "Game Plantation" doesn't take too much away from the point.

So 400 years ago the English dudes settling Jamestown brought along piglets to raise for meat. Eventually some escaped. Over the years others escaped, this happens over and over again. Not to worry every body lives close to everybody everywhere and they all have guns and wild hog is good to eat. So the population is kept in check. But now we all start moving to the cities, and lands are sold to corporations and people live further apart and there are State Forest, and National Forest, and Corporate Forest and next thing you know wild things are back. Not just any wild things mind you but wild things that once weren't wild at all, but that in just four or five generations out in the woods revert back to the Wild Boars of Europe. Nope not the Wild Boars of Europe actually because they are fricking larger than the Wild Boars of Europe.

In fact they are damn big.

Now my son reminded me of a movie "Lock , Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" an English black comedy where one of the characters says, "Never trust a man who has more than four pigs." Crimey mate, this pig is four pigs, or five or six pigs even. Of course what he means is that like in the HBO series "Deadwood" pigs are good at disposing of people. ( My dad told me once to never trust a man who wore both a belt and suspenders, but that's another story)

Now if a man owned four of these hogs he could be Governor of the State could he not.

But I digress. Who would guess that a Hog gone wild could grow this big? How big could one eventually get? Is there an upper limit? I wonder what the death squeal of this Hog sounded like. Probably one of the most heart wrenching sounds at hog scalding time was the squeal of the beast as it was hoisted up and its throat was cut. Upton Sinclair gives us a literary version of this horror in the slaughter houses of Chicago in "The Jungle". Grown men were sometimes over-wrought by the sound.

Jokes and puns aside pigs aren't that far from us after all. We use their parts to replace our own often in surgery even. They eat everything we eat, and we both eat each other. Some theorist believe that the prohibition against eating swine in many of the near eastern based religions has more to do with their human like sounds at death and the fact that eating them, you may inadvertently be eating something that has eaten a human. They are after all smarter than humans. No, then how do you explain why the herd of pigs that Jesus transferred the demon Legion to, when he cured the madman, jumped off the cliff and kill themselves rather live with that torment. Now that's smart in my book.

So how smart is a hog that is four times normal size? Ever consider what those brains maybe doing at that size relative to the body weight? Maybe the kids in the "Lord of the Flies" weren't too far off. Maybe we are killing.....naw, what am I thinking, Hogs as Gods? Silly.

Hey honey we got any more ice for my whiskey, and could you rustle me up a ham sandwich, please?