Posts: 390
Tue 10 Jul, 2012 10:48 am
Painted pictures are interpretations. The above image highlights nobles enjoying killing boar while relatively safe on a horse but close to the bloodshed with short weapons and with the danger to the dogs and the horse. If you lose expensive hunting dogs that way hunting is unsustainable as a way of life and rather reflects the dramatic pastimes of courts.
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This image from Le Livre de chasse. ca. 1440, by Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, On Catching the Wild Boar in His Wallow, highlights the immense danger of male boars, tuskers, who often roam the lands in all-male groups. It's an over dramatization, but it shows different aspects of boar hunting. The hunters have poor equipment turned into makeshift lugged spears and are more likely to do this for economic reasons (protecting their harvest, getting some meat diet). The dogs are not expendable and don't attack boars head on. The dogs are rather used for confusing and slowing down the boars in order for the hunter to make the boar run frontally into his spear.
The tactic of the depicted tuskers is to use the massive energy of their charge for thrusting their tusks into their enemies flesh and tearing open an opponents blood vessels on the pass. Tuskers attack humans on the upper leg arteries.
Before impact, the spear is often held in an almost sitting position, in order to better defend the legs with the staff. The spear is then moved up in order to strike into the ribcage below the head of the tusker running towards the hunter at full speed. Technically, it's similar to receiving a cavalry charge.
After receiving the charge, the spear point is moved in the animal in order to create maximum damage and cut important blood vessels, especially the aorta from the heart. The men capable of facing boars this way have enough sang froid and skill with the spear to also face charging men-at-arms.
http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/student_orgs/arth...iblio.html
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The same technique on a Roman mosaic. Remember that Tarent in the Second Punic War fell because of a hunter who had claimed a special prey, a wild boar for the Roman garrison commander. That did convince the guards to let him and the disguised assault party in at night, against normal safety precautions. Wild boar was not the most frequent hunted animal for food.
The male tuskers do attack when they feel irritated and cornered for whatever reason. That's more frequent a reason to attack then for female hogs who rather try to escape in such situations. The female hogs rather defend their offspring only, but this at the drop of a hat. The females don't have these tusks and rather bite until they are satisfied with the result = perceived danger to their offspring is DEAD. Female hogs don't charge normally and have to be pursued and cornered with stabbing them from other directions than the front. They are not as dangerous as the male boars who counterattack, no matter what.
From a hogs perspective, the threats are to their youngs because they themselves are one of the most dangerous animals in their ecosystem.
The usual northern hemsiphere top predator, the gray wolf is from an "armament" point of view a very weak equivalent to the hog with both acting in groups. this leaves as "armament superior" predators large cats, but few of them act in groups, while hogs are in mutually supporting groups, including the aforementioned kamikaze mentality for tuskers if mortally wounded. Don't take me wrong, hogs do have problems with predators, but except humans, they are among the best omnivores to fight off almost all threats and not run away from them.
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