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The Secret Lives of Words: Hercules and the U.S. wild hog invasion

Rick LaFleur More Content Now
Feral Hog Dewclaw Chicken Critter, Alice Tipton LaFleur. [John and Pamela Jo Keane, John Keane Studios, Athens, Georgia]

Not long ago, while walking our French bulldog Ipsa along the north shore of St. George Island, Florida, my wife Alice and I were startled to come upon the carcass of a recently deceased feral hog. Alice had me pluck the dewclaws from the poor boar’s feet for a tiny found-objects chicken sculpture she was crafting: a sweetgum burl from our yard had provided the body and the dewclaws gave her clucker the perfect beak.

We wondered how the hog, thus immortalized by Alice’s art, had met his demise and landed there on the beach. Our best guess was that some hunter on the mainland had wounded the critter, which then fled toward the water, drowned, and later washed up on the island. It turns out that there are wild swine, possibly introduced to the New World by Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto, in every county of Florida and in more than 30 states. Their rapidly expanding and destructive population has been spreading steadily northward over the past three decades or more, and many areas now have practically open season on hunting them.

Sus scrofa (from which we get SCROFulous, meaning "ugly," "morally corrupt," or, literally, "tubercular") is the animal’s Latin scientific name. The word sus is connected to SOW, likely source of our Southern pig-call "SOOie" - which I gleefully shouted as a kid back in the 1950s, while helping "slop the hogs" raised by tenant-farmer friends we often visited in North Carolina. Arkansas Razorback football fans started "calling the hogs" with the cheer "Woo, Pig! Sooie" way back in the 1920s. Another Latin word for "pig" was porcus, source of our words PORK and PORCine; the PORCupine was imaginatively named from porcus + spina, "spine pig," and PORpoise literally means "pig-fish," from porcus + piscis (as in the astrological sign PISCES and the word PISCiVORe, from vorare, to deVOUR VORaciously).

A day-to-day concern with wild hogs is their penchant for rooting up crops such as soybeans and corn, as well as lawns, tree seedlings, and other vegetation, and contributing to the erosion of fields, ponds, and river banks with their wallowing. Add to that the fact that feral pigs kill and consume the young of other wildlife and domestic animals like chickens and goats, eat sea turtle eggs, and carry such diseases as hog cholera, tuberculosis, and anthrax, and it’s not surprising that the beasts have become porci non grati in much of the country.

Beyond all that, the critters can be dangerous, with their razor-sharp tusks and a proclivity to charge man or beast at a high rate of speed when threatened. While adults average 150-200 pounds, some are much larger. A 400-pounder was trapped near a school bus stop in Palm Bay, Florida, in December 2018, an 800-pounder with two-foot long tusks dubbed "Hogzilla" was felled in Alapaha, Georgia, in 2004, and in 2007 a hunter in Fayetteville, Georgia, brought down a monstrous hog weighing 1,100 pounds.

The devastation wrought by these creatures was even worse in ancient times, at least in the world of myth. One of the most perilous of the 12 Labors of the Roman demi-god Hercules (Herakles to the Greeks) was his quest to subdue the monstrous Erymanthian boar. Hera, enraged that her philandering husband Zeus had fathered Hercules with a mortal woman, drove the hero insane and provoked him in his madness to slay his wife and children. Once his sanity was restored, and distraught over his horrendous crime, Hercules asked Apollo’s oracle at Delphi how he might atone. The seer instructed him to do penance by serving the king of Mycenae, Eurystheus, who in turn commanded him to perform 12 increasingly difficult labors deemed impossible for any mortal.

The archetypal super-hero of western lore, Hercules proceeded first to strangle the powerful man-slaying Nemean lion, whose impenetrable hide he stripped from his body with its own claws and wore ever after as a cloak and token of his victory. Next he decapitated the many-headed Lernaean hydra, severing each head and cauterizing the stump before it could regenerate. He then trapped the Ceryneian hind, which could run faster than a speeding arrow, by chasing it on foot for a year until it collapsed from exhaustion.

Hercules’ fourth labor was to capture and bring back alive to Eurystheus the gigantic boar that had been ravaging crops and livestock on the farms around Mount Erymanthos in Arcadia. With help from the centaur Chiron, Hercules caught the beast in a snowstorm and carried it on his back to the Mycenaean king. Terrified at the sight, Eurystheus leapt into a huge storage jar and cowered in fear - a scene frequently depicted in Greco-Roman vase-painting - whereupon Hercules hurled the beast into the sea.

Like the wild hogs who have literally invaded the Southeastern U.S. and beyond, the boar Hercules finally subdued had for years been wreaking havoc on the fields of Mount Erymanthos, driving the locals to despair (and, 2,000 years later, inspiring a hunt quest in the "Assassin’s Creed Odyssey" video game). Another fearsome wild pig of Greek myth was the Calydonian boar, sent by the goddess Artemis to ravage the city of Calydon because its king, Oeneus, had neglected her worship. Heroes from across the Greek world were summoned to hunt the ferocious creature, which was first wounded with an arrow shot by the swift huntress Atalanta and then finished off by the king’s son Meleager.

The ultimate solution for our feral hog problems in the U.S. may prove less heroic, but will be every bit as vital for farmers and home-owners. Alice, who rightly insists that every living thing on the planet has its own important role to play in our ecology, hopes for a humane approach. I generally agree with her, but as the family foodie, if any of those critters in our area must indeed be dispatched to hog heaven, I’ll hope to be hosted at a back-yard barbecue by one of our more adventuresome friends. Sooie!

Rick LaFleur is retired from 40 years of teaching Latin language and literature at the University of Georgia, which during his tenure came to have the largest Latin enrollment of all of the nation’s colleges and universities; his latest book is "Ubi Fera Sunt," a lively, lovingly wrought translation into classical Latin of Maurice Sendak’s classic, "Where the Wild Things Are," ranked first on TIME magazine’s 2015 list of the top 100 children’s books of all time.