Possible porcine penalties

Has it really been almost a year since our last post about pigs? Don't let that fool you into believing the threat has diminished. Recently, a single wild boar on a rampage in Berlin sent three people to the hospital. And maybe he'd have gotten away with it if he'd stuck to the defenseless type of victim that he targeted to start: an elderly man and woman that he bit and knocked to the ground, and a woman whose only choice was to climb onto a car to get away.

But then the pig made the mistake of going after someone who was able to fight back: a police officer, who shot the swine dead.

As usual some minimize the danger. The news article concludes with the claim that wild boars in Berlin "rarely cause problems beyond digging up gardens." And on this side of the pond, problematic porkers actually have enablers. In the Boston area, authorities have finally incarcerated a pet pig that had been apprehended roaming loose in the neighborhood five separate times. The pig's owner acknowledged that he is basically a co-conspirator:

“The containment issue, it’s my negligence as far as being ­lazy some days and not penning him right, thinking he’s going to be all right,” Ruiz said. “But in three years, [there have been] 15 citations, half of them I paid because they’re only $15, but then I finally figured out they were looking to make a ­paper trail to pull a stunt.” So he stopped paying the penalties, he said.

But he's working to get the pig back - and he has supporters. During the recent hurricane, a woman in California had nothing better to worry about than calling the shelter to make sure Porkchop was OK.

Porkchop certainly is OK compared to some of the alternatives. This peripatetic piggy should contemplate what happened to his relative in Berlin, and be glad the penalty he's paying is so light... so far.