Wild boar
As a wild boar you would plough through the forest floor with a snout sensitive enough to find an acorn, a truffle or a mouse nest under the leaves.
Built like a battering ram
The wild boar, Sus scrofa, is the wild ancestor of the domestic pig and one of the most widespread large mammals in Europe and Asia. A big male can weigh 100–150 kg in central Europe, occasionally more; females are lighter. Your front half is heavy and wedge-shaped, covered in coarse bristles, and males carry sharp lower tusks that grow throughout life.
Eyesight is modest, but your snout is a superb tool: a flexible disc of cartilage packed with nerves, used to dig and sniff out roots, bulbs, acorns, beech nuts, fungi, earthworms, grubs, small mammals and carrion. Boars also raid maize and potato fields, which makes them unpopular with farmers.
Life in a sounder
Females and their young live in groups called sounders, led by an experienced older sow, while adult males mostly live alone and join groups in the winter rut. In spring a sow gives birth to usually four to eight striped piglets in a nest of grass and branches. The stripes, excellent camouflage in dappled light, fade over the first few months.
You would wallow in mud to cool down and get rid of parasites, then rub yourself on trees, leaving muddy marks that other boars sniff. You are mostly nocturnal where people hunt you, and increasingly visit city parks and suburbs, especially in Polish cities such as Kraków and Gdańsk and in Berlin.
Hazards of a pig’s life
Wolves and, for piglets, lynx, foxes and eagles take some boars, but hunting and traffic are the main causes of death in most of Europe. Since 2014 African swine fever, a viral disease harmless to humans but usually fatal to pigs, has spread through wild boar populations in Poland and neighbouring countries. Wild boars can live over ten years, but most die much younger.
