Boar hunting

Boar hunting is the practice of hunting wild boar, feral pigs, warthogs, and peccaries. Boar hunting was historically a dangerous exercise due to the tusked animal's ambush tactics as well as its thick hide and dense bones rendering them difficult to kill with premodern weapons.

The wild boar (Sus scrofa) is the ancestral species of the domestic pig. It is native across much of Central Europe, the Mediterranean Region (including North Africa's Atlas Mountains) and much of Asia as far south as Indonesia, and has been widely introduced elsewhere.

Wild boar are hunted both for their meat, and to mitigate foraging damage to crops and forests.

Pigsticking is a form of boar hunting done by individuals, or groups of spearmen on foot or on horseback using a specialized boar spear. The boar spear was sometimes fitted with a cross guard to stop the enraged animal driving its pierced body further down the shaft in order to attack its killer before dying.

In India, pigsticking was popular among the Jatts, Gujjars, Rajputs, Sikhs, Maharajas, RajGond Rajas and with British officers during Victorian and Edwardian times. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, it was encouraged by military authorities as good training because "a startled or angry wild boar is ... a desperate fighter [and therefore] the pig-sticker must possess a good eye, a steady hand, a firm seat, a cool head and a courageous heart."

Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement wrote a book on the subject. In Lessons from the Varsity of Life he says that, "I never took the usual leave to the hills in hot weather because I could not tear myself away from the sport." To those who condemned it, he said "Try it before you judge. See how the horse enjoys it, see how the boar himself, mad with rage, rushes wholeheartedly into the scrap, see how you, with your temper thoroughly roused, enjoy the opportunity of wreaking it to the full. Yes, hog-hunting is a brutal sport—and yet I loved it, as I loved also the fine old fellow I fought against." Michael Rosenthal quotes him as saying "Not only is pig-sticking the most exciting and enjoyable sport for both the man and horse as well, but I really believe that the boar enjoys it too."

In ancient Persia, aristocratic hunters used elephants to panic boar into marshland shallows, where they were then shot at from boats. Elephants ferried the carcasses to the hunting camp. Reliefs of these scenes have remained largely intact in Taq-e Bostan.

Hunting dogs have been used to hunt boar since ancient times. Boar hunting dogs are loosely divided into two categories, bay dogs, and catch dogs.