From the local rag.....
When Paul Dayman went fishing on the Motueka River last week he was hoping to catch a wild trout – instead he ended up with a wild pig.
Paul and his partner Marion Whyte, both of Tahunanui, were enjoying a peaceful day fishing on the river under blazing sunshine and with the sound of birds all around. Then, while standing on the side of the river with their fishing rods, a 35kg wild boar came barrelling down from the bushes, swam across the river and charged Paul. He says he wasn’t quite sure what to think other than “that’s unusual, wild pigs don’t do that”.
Within a minute the boar had charged at Paul three times, each occasion its tusks ripping his flesh but he managed to stay on his feet. “I thought after the first charge he would just carry on but he didn’t, he kept coming back and I thought, ‘well that was a bit anti-social’.”
After three hits on Paul the boar focussed on Marion who was about five metres away and holding onto the fishing rods. “I had no idea of the danger,” she says. “It all happened so fast, I was still trying to get my head around the fact that pigs can swim. I just thought I’d shoo it back to Paul, he wanted it.”
The boar obliged and began to reacquaint itself with Paul, who in the meantime had just enough time to pick up a boulder and slammed it down on his head as it charged in for the fourth time. |
The pig didn’t flinch and Paul ended up on his back with the pig gouging his foot.
“When I was down I thought I was in trouble and that there is no second place. The way he kept coming in, he wasn’t going to stop. One of us had to be stopped and I preferred that it wasn’t going to be me because if it was me, Marion was next on the list.”
With Paul’s arm now in the boar’s mouth he grabbed its leg and ear and wrestled it to the water’s edge, about a metre away and held the boar in the river, trying to drown it.
After a few minutes of holding the boar under water Paul says it finally stopped moving and he was able to walk out of the river with blood streaming from his arms and legs.
Marion’s first thought was getting Paul to the hospital, especially for one deep hole on his arm but Paul’s mind was elsewhere. “We wanted a trout but we’ve got a pig here, I didn’t want to just leave it. But we wouldn’t have been able to get the van down so we went down the road where a friend Steve has a farm and told his son to go down and grab the pig.”
On Friday night, less than a week after the incident, Paul and Marion travelled back to the Motueka Valley to have barbequed pork with Steve and his family.
“I’m glad he didn’t burn the bugger,” he jokes. “But I do feel sorry for the pig, one of the back legs had evidence of dog bites so I’m assuming that it was bailed up and somehow got away.
“He must have had a pretty hell morning already and then to get taken out by some 57 year-old in jandals isn’t the best way to go.”
Paul says he’d like to know the first part of the story and if anyone lost a jet-black 35kg boar with very visible tusks near where the Baton River joins the Motueka River. “I’m interested to know how all this actually started and how far he’d come from.”
