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Show HUNTING WILD HOGS. EXCITING TIMES AT "PIG-KILLINS" IN MOUNTAINS. These Wild Porkers of Tennessee Have Degenerated from Domesticated Sires of European Origin Animals Long and Lank Like the Hunters. ., Sportsmen are. not accustomed to think of wild hogs as game that may be hunted in the United States, but the fact remains that there are thousands thou-sands upon thousands of the animals wandering through certain sections of the South. They are as wild as deer and well nigh as formidable as the bear. For some reason the hunting of pigs has not yet come to be generally gener-ally classed as sport by Southern hunters, probably for the reason that for a good share of the year the flesh of the wild hog is not good for food. But such is the case likewise with the deer, the squirrel, and in fact every tort of game, and little by little hunters hunt-ers are coming to wait for the pig to grow fat on the mast of the forest and then to hunt him for both sport and food. Th home of the American wild hogs begins in the southern Appalachian Appala-chian Mountains and extends westward to what is known as the "Delta," the name locally applied to the low bottom lands of the Mississippi from Memphis to the Gulf. 1 One finds them in the forests and mountains of North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and in the lowland forests of Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Like the wild horse of the West the hog is a native of the American Continent, Con-tinent, but has degenerated - from domesticated do-mesticated sires of European origin. It is hard for us to remember this about the horse, yet It Is true that all the herds which roamed the plains of the West, set the American youth wild to handle the lasso, and demoralized .trainers when captured, were the off- spring of' ancestors introduced from Europe after the discovery of America. So with the hog. Its ancestor was, no doubt, fat and contented as any well-organized pig should be. It voyaged voy-aged across the ocean with the early 1 colonists and then raised a family "whose offspring has degenerated until the sire would never guess them to be his kin. It was in the mountain region that the hog first became wild. Settlers Set-tlers moved into the Southern mountains moun-tains from nearly all of the Atlantic settlements. There were two essentials essen-tials in the domestic economy of the mountaineer. These were pigs and porn. The former were killed and salted, to be eaten in the hot months. They made meat and fat and butter. With pork and corn meal a family could live out its natural life. So pig raising prospered in the mountains. I ' Sometimes the animals were penned ' up, but more often they were allowed to run wild and gather the mast which ia autumn covered the ground about mountain forests. Gradually they began be-gan to grow fearful of the pen and of man, and little by- little the broods which were born in the forests and ran wild during the summer months became be-came harder to round up when killing time came. Now and then one especially espe-cially wild would escape and never be caught. Pigs of this sort would naturally nat-urally be the wildest, and their fear of man would be contributed with double force to their offspring. So the wildness of the breed increased with each generation. They multiplied rapidly. Of course, some of the wild ones would be killed each year, but ! the numbers were not appreciably diminished di-minished in that way. And what a .change came over the pig as it dropped away from the ways of its cultured ancestors an-cestors ana became once more a savage! sav-age! Its short hair became long and coarse. Mountain climbing is a great reducer of obesity and affected the pig as the stout man hopes to be affected hy "anti-fat." His ribs became visible and he was long, lean and lank, like a mountaineer or a clay-eating "cracker." "crack-er." Running develops long legs, and the pig, whose ancestor had possessed legs which barely served to carry it around the limits of the pen, stood as high as a hound and ran like a frignt-ened frignt-ened deer. All this, of course, has fitted fit-ted the pig to exist in his new capacity capa-city as a wild animal. Philadelphia Times. |