THE WILD BOAR OF NEW ZEALAND.

Northland Age, Volume VIII, Issue 25, 9 February 1912, Page 2

THE WILD BOAR OF NEW ZEALAND.

HOW IT IS HUNTED. I suppose that to most men comes at times an instinctive longing to get back for a while close to Nature at her wildest, to experience, if only for one day, - the fierce joys and thrills and excitement of primal emotions. It is this longing, more than the mere lust of ’ killing, that sends the sportsman into the out-places. There still remain a few such places in a too orderly world, and none where the desire is better likely to be fully gratified than in the wild, unsettled spaces of New Zealand. In early Colonial days, the days of sparse settlement, so numerous , and predatory were the wild pigs thalt they formed an absolute menace to i the pastoralist. On the plains of the Hutt a nd in Hawke’s Bay the droves j wandered like Hocks of sheep, and early run holders found it necessary j to organise battues on a large scale j for their destruction. This was gen- j erally a matter of contract the squatters paying at the rate of sixpence a tail, as evidence of a pig destroyed.

With the arrival of the flocks and herds the wild pig quickly developed a taste for fresh mutton, and became a hunting animal on its own. account. Thousands of fat lambs, ewes, and hoggets disappeared annually to fill the maws of the porcine marauders, till at length exasperated flock-mas-ters banded together for the destruction of the common enemy. Decimated by this wholesale warfare, and harried by porkdoving Maoris, the pig tribes withdrew themselves far from the region of the menfolk. The hunter of to-day who would meet the wild boar of New Zealand in his native wilds, who would pit skill and weapons against the tusks and the rush of a genuine old fighting "Captain Cook,” must ssek his quarry far afield—in the wild footbills, beyond the fringe of the great upland forests. "Chambers’s Journal.”