Yeah lemme tell yall a little something about pigs.
You see a pig and you think, “Aww. It’s small and low to the ground and the legs are so tiny and their bodies look so round.”
Oh my god no. You ever see a swole dude’s arm? You THINK, relative to humans, that bicep is huge. It is not. That bicep is small. You want to know what a really huge and thick muscle feels like? Touch the back of a pig’s neck. They are living bulldozers. A 200 pound adolescent/grown pig (we’re not even TALKING uncastrated boars here) could flip you off your feet like a sumo wrestler.
My father raised pigs when I was a teenager. His girlfriend had a dog named Darby that would hop in the pen and play with the piglets, mostly by terrorizing them. Well when those piggies got big enough and Darby climbed in to nip their ears and tails and tip them over with his nose, an adolescent pig turned around, stuck their snout under Darby’s belly and LITERALLY FUCKING THREW THAT DOG BACK OVER THE FENCE. CLEAR over it. I am not kidding. Darby was so mortified by that they kept their tail between their legs for three days and never fucked with the piglets of that or any other season again. That boi was all, “Fuck off I’m eating, it’s feeding time now.”
As muscly as a big dude is, a big pig is more muscular. Pigs also have considerably thick skin, armor-like hair gristle (they used to use it for bristles in brushes to degrease skillets and shit) and they are not strangers to blunt forces. So punching them or kicking them means shit. They are more bone than you’d imagine and heavy bones at that.
And that said, I want you to imagine what it feels like to be smashed by a 250 pound man’s shoulder. A professional football player. Now, I want you to realize that pigs are effectively four legged football players where the area of contact is the size of a fist. If that pig decides to have an argument with your legs about right of way, you’re either going up and over the pig as it bowls through you, or your femurs will break in half, or you’re getting trampled.
Now I want you to imagine that football player isn’t 250 pounds, but can be as much as 600-800 pounds. If you’re incredibly unlucky, maybe you’ll get one of those in your yard.
You might lookat this thing and think, “Ah, it’s all fat.” NOPE. NOPE.
Boars have what’s called ‘cartilge armor’. The Boar Shield layer. You try and hunt a full grown wild hog, after mating season, they grow these thick armor plates under the skin that can be up to 4 inches thick. For reference, if you nocked a longbow with a 300 grain arrow, you might get 3 inches.
I repeat, European hogs/boars. Three inches of biological armor plating beneath what’s already thick and durable skin, covering vital points. Three inches.
Hog spears aren’t for holding, either. Hog spears are to plant the butt in the dirt so you can angle it, so the pig can charge you and stick itself down the shaft. The little cross section there is just to impede progress as it berserker rages on its way to try and take you out as it’s dying. That’s not colorful exaggeration, that’s the purpose of the flange.
So if you shoot at one of these very aggressive, very destructive, very numerous creatures, there’s a chance you hit, but it doesn’t hit deep enough to kill it. Meaning you may just have to empty the clip or magazine unloading on it at some sort of semi-automatic rate of fire. Even 170-200 pound regular boiz are bullet sponges if you aren’t experienced, careful, accurate and have them by surprise.
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
germansingergirl
