Animal

Wild Boar
Dorothy Yamamoto

Tough, resourceful, and omnivorous, wild boar are the ancestors of domestic pigs. From earliest times, wild boar have presented humans with both opportunity and threat: they are a valuable food source, but also a formidable foe carrying tusks that can inflict terrible injuries. Today, boar are impinging on people's lives in new ways, scouting into cities such as Berlin and Tokyo, or establishing populations in areas such as the Forest of Dean in England.

Wild Boar traces the history of the interaction between humans and wild boar, from the iconic beasts of myth and legend, such as the Calydonian Boar, to the adoption of the boar as a heraldic device – most notably by the doomed king Richard III  – and the meticulous rules of engagement that grew up around the practice of hunting.