Columnist Susan Snyder: Taking a walk on the wild side

Friday, April 26, 2002 | 2:08 a.m.

The wild boar head mounted in the office of a small-town-Florida police chief was disturbing for a couple of reasons.

First, it was the head of what once was a live animal.

Secondly, it was an animal this police chief had wrestled to the ground with his bare hands. That's how they hunted a pig in the Florida backwoods, he told me. They wrestled it to the ground in a kind of hand-to-snout combat and slit its throat.

Barbaric, to be sure. But at least it seemed more fair than hound dogs and rifles. An angry boar can do some serious bodily damage. (Bully for it.)

The tale is 17 years old and not terribly significant. I probably wouldn't have thought about it again if it hadn't been for the daggers wildlife officials and Bunkerville residents are tossing at each other over the feral porkers roaming the Virgin River's banks.

Wildlife officials want to study the pigs, which they claim are damaging riparian areas and endangering already-endangered species. Residents say the only thing endangered is a free food supply many local hunters enjoy.

Now if you are a vegetarian, you may as well know this is not going down the we-shouldn't-eat-or-hunt-any-animals path. If I haven't offended you away by now, understand that the rest of the column probably isn't going to get any better from your standpoint. (I only eat animals that are vegetarians.)

But when we start deciding with our money and public regulations which animals we protect, which ones we discard and which ones we ignore, we probably should explore what we mean by endangered, feral and wild.

Endangered animals are the ones we protect through federal or state regulations. These are animals we filed under "ignored" until hunting, habitat destruction or both all but obliterated their populations.

Then there are feral animals. We are really weird and inconsistent in what we do with feral ones.

If they're feral horses and burros, we call them "wild" and protect them with a federal act. If they're feral dogs and cats, we adopt some and eventually kill the rest.

Locals say it's pretty common knowledge that Bunkerville's wild pigs are leftovers from a variety of Russian boar that a resident used to keep on a private hunting ranch. But, similar to what the ranchers and miners of the Old West did with their horses and burros, when the business turned south he turned the animals out.

Instead of treating them as strays, people decided they were wild animals to be hunted without the rules and licenses we place on the business of killing.

We'd probably have an easier time managing feral animals if we were consistent. I recall reading a while back that some California ostrich ranchers freed their feathered livestock when the market for meat faltered.

Will federal officials be managing wild ostriches along with horses and burros in 50 years? What about feral pigs?

Odd questions. Doesn't seem prudent to leave them. Doesn't seem sporting to hunt them -- not with dogs and guns anyhow. Unless we need to eat it, maybe we shouldn't kill it. If we can't kill it with our bare hands, maybe we don't need to eat it.

Kind of takes the sport out of hunting. Then again, without the sport would we even have feral pigs in Bunkerville?