January 12th…“CAN FARM ANIMALS BE DANGEROUS? DID “PORKY PIG” EVER GET NASTY ON YOUR FARM NEAR KIESTER, MINNESOTA?”
Privy to the process of his perambulation, Dad caught the prominent pungent porcine perfume percolating from our farm’s piggy palace. On most occasions, our farmer father, Russell, got along well with our porcine princes and princesses……till one day. Male pigs, called boars, could reach up to 650 pounds in weight. Their immensity (along with their loads of testosterone) made them hard to handle as far as showing them who was “The Boss”. A particular boar of ours even had a set of long and ugly tusks (vertical teeth) protruding upwards from each side of his drooling snout. “Mr. Power Pig” had been “visiting the ladies” in our sounder of sows. His romancing and “pitching the woo” (for the next generation of little pigs to come) was over and it was time for Dad to separate him from the sows and into his own private pen.
This story was relayed to me second-hand, so, in that sharing, I’m told that Dad was pressing a hog board (plywood board with handles) against the boar to move him in the direction he had to go to get to his private pen. Any and all protection, for a farmer, was essential in dealing with these porky power pushers. To begin with, boars are known for their aggressiveness, and this boar was getting more and more perturbed with every push of Dad’s hog board against him. For whatever reason, our daddy took his eyes off this nasty nemesis for just a second or two when the boar caught Dad’s “hog board” with his tusk and flipped it out of our father’s hands.
Caught off balance, and now at the mercy of that gargantuan grunting beast, Dad was knocked over as the boar charged at him. The pig’s powerful snout tossed our father’s body like a toy. In all the higgledy-piggeldy of the fear-filled moment, Russ saw that the only way of his surviving this attack was to make a beeline towards the split-railed fence of the pen. Quickly regaining his stand, our father shot towards and through the railings just as that boar was about to charge him again. Thankfully, those wicked tusks had not made ripping contact with our dear daddy’s flesh. We were thankful to the Lord above that bruises and being shook up were the only injuries that had to be dealt with by the father of this Norwegian Farmer’s Son.
Norwegian Farmer's Son 