AFRICAN WILD SWINE 
My own experience with wart hogs was gained in South Africa, and after 
a long experience with these animals in that part of the continent, I have 
never been able to consider them as savage or dangerous. I may say that 
I galloped down one old wart hog boar on the Gwas N’gishu plateau, in 
British East Africa, and that particular animal acted exactly as I had 
always found wart hogs do in South Africa. I rode it down, and when it 
broke from a gallop to a trot, passed it, and pulled in my horse in front of 
it right in its path. It came trotting on, and when close to me commenced 
to grunt and came at my horse’s legs. I spurred to one side, and the old 
boar never came round after the horse, but just passed behind it and kept 
on its course. 
When pursued on horseback, wart hogs usually make for some aard 
vark hole, with the position of which they are well acquainted. But, no 
matter how hard they may be pressed, wart hogs will never bolt head- 
foremost down one of these holes. They invariably turn round and slowly 
and deliberately go down the hole backwards. No doubt they adopt this 
plan because aard vark holes being only just large enough to admit them, 
they fear that if they entered them head -foremost they might never be able 
to get out again. But this habit often costs them dear, for, although a 
wart hog may reach its earth some distance ahead of a mounted man, it 
can only back down the hole so slowly that there is often time to gallop up, 
dismount and put a bullet into its brain before it has got well into the 
hole. In South Africa wart hogs used to get into very good condition 
towards the end of the dry season by eating various kinds of roots, which 
they dug up in the damp ground on the margins of lagoons and swamps, 
and the flesh of a fat sow was looked upon as the best meat procurable at 
that time of year, when all other animals were in low condition. The 
meat is white like that of the domestic pig. We used to think sucking 
wart hogs, scalded and scraped, and then baked in a large iron pot, quite 
a delicacy, and the head of an old animal roasted whole in its skin in a 
hole in the ground or in an antheap was also in great favour. But in East 
Africa there is a prejudice against the flesh of the wart hog, and but few 
Europeans will eat it. 
On the average, I think the wart hogs of East Africa have finer tusks 
than those found south of the Zambesi, though the longest known, I think, 
come from the latter country. The longest pair I ever shot myself measured 
thirteen inches over the curve outside the jaw. 
It was not until 1904 that the first specimen of the great forest hog 
33 
F 
