EyeItalia

Being a native Californian, the idea of hunting anything other than the perfect wave has always seemed absolutely criminal. A decade of living and farming in Tuscany however, has changed my mind. I’ve had to seriously re-visit my stance on the issue of hunting after seeing small vineyards wiped out overnight and fields of grain thrashed in a matter of two pre-dawn hours by an animal that rarely even makes a daytime appearance. Who is this reckless recluse? Wild boar…cinghiale…aka “Sus Scrofa:”Tuscany’s super-sized, numero-uno public nuisance, who may look great in a sauce over a plate of papardelle but standing on all fours, is nothing but trouble.

Sus Scrofa—A Bristly-Haired Immigrant
The Italian wild boar is a mixture of the local native stock (Sus Scrofa) and various combinations of introduced wild boar from Eastern Europe. The animal was literally hunted to extinction by the beginning of the 1900’s but reappeared in the1990’s thanks to migrating boars from the Balkans. This grandaddy of swine has a compact but powerful, bristly-haired body and a very large head. Despite having proportionately short legs, it is a fast runner and capable of manuevering with blurring agility.

Omnivores with a Good Nose but Bad Teeth
Being ominvores, boars aren’t picky eaters and will gorge on just about anything that grows wild; from nuts and tubers to worms and small game. They can smell food…and trouble…from so far away that a freshly showered-and-shaved hunter is a dead give away and a minus, rather than a plus, in this social situation! Both sexes of boar have mean-looking upper and lower tusks which grow continously and can be used as a weapon. A mad, injured boar, or a mother boar with young, can easily gore a dog to death or rip open the groin of a hunter. If an boar is injured in a hunt, but can still run, it always heads downhill to conserve energy, searching for water to drink and mud to act like a natural bandaid.

Prolific Pigs—Twice A Year!
In Italy,Tuscany is the mother lode of wild boar, with estimates of a 150,000-head population. Bears and wolves have long -disappeared from the region’s hilly area, allowing the number of boar to grow at an alarming rate. Despite culling more than 30,000 from the herd every year, hunters barely make a dent in the population since female boars are fiercely reproductive and can bear from 4 to 13 piglets, twice a year.

If It’s Wednesday (or Saturday or Sunday), It Must Be Cinghiale!
Seventy percent of Italy’s 800,000 registered hunters live in Sardinia, Tuscany and Umbria. Much of Tuscany is a mixture of cultivated and heavily-wooded land and hunting may be the closest that many middle-aged males get to an aerobic sport. The local hunting clubs, or “squadre” have names like “I Prepotenti”…the Bullies…and “La Berlinguera”…for the mythic secretary of the Italian Communist Party in the 1970’s…and consist of up to 50 hunters who religiously meet at a small roadside snack bar early on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday mornings to hunt boar during the winter.

Lucia–La Zampa di Lepre Good Luck Charm
This morning’s pre-hunt rendezvous was a lively scene of back-slapping, camouflauged-clad, working-class Tuscans, in well-worn boots and belts strung with bullets. The ages ranged from the 86 year-old great-grandfather, Vittorio,  to the lovely fresh-faced, “acqua sapone” 20 year-old Lucia, the snack bar owner’s daughter.  Sottovoce, I asked a nearby hunter if the rumor that women hunters brought bad luck was true. He denied it, and said with a twinkle in his eye, that she was the squad’s “zampa di lepre;” their rabbit’s foot lucky charm.

Grappa, Opera and Chaos—Hunting Italian Style
After a couple of cigarettes and espressos “corrected” with grappa, the hunters drew numbers to determine their position for the day’s hunt. The hunt is “la battuta,”…the beating…referring to the way the boars are flushed out of their lairs by dogs and then pushed towards a semicircular stationary “poste” or network of hunters waiting to catch the prey. The hunt typically starts off in very-untypical Italian silence with all the issue walkie-talkies turned down…when hunting wild boar, the ears are used more than the eyes …When the hunting dogs pick up the animal’s scent, the barking crescendos into a high-pitched yelping, then when they actually face-off with the wild boar they go wild. This is when all hell breaks loose and the woods become a macabre opera of frantically howling dogs, gun blasts, shouting hunters and grunting boar. This eerie chaos can go on for hours and can result in, like last Wednesday: seven, two-hundred pound wild boar, or like today; nothing, absolutely zilch.

Boar Liver, Fruit Cake and Caul—The Good, Bad and the Ugly
The hunter that shoots the boar is entitled to the animal’s head, for a trophy, and the liver, for “fegatelli;” a local delicacy of liver wrapped in caul fat. The rest of the meat is divided up evenly between the whole squad and needs to age for a few days before being cooked. Everyone in my town has a hunk of cinghiale meat in their freezer which they’ve either caught or been given. Properly prepared, the meat can be quite tasty but sometimes, especially if it’s an old animal,the meat is tough and it ends up it making the rounds like an unwanted Christmas fruit cake….wrapped up, re-gifted, and stashed away until the next time.

To Hunt or Not to Hunt—This is the Question
I refuse to budge from my anti-hunting stance when it comes to most animals, especially song birds, though at times I find myself on the fence about wild boar. A couple of days ago while driving down a road in the woods, I ended up in the middle of a hunting “battuta” gone haywire. A pack of histerical hunting dogs were running in frantic circles while in a nearby clearing…and on the opposite side of the fence from the dogs…I saw a huge male boar gallantly loping off towards the safety of the distant woods. I have to admit, I was really happy to see that boar outrun, and outsmart those dogs….as long as it was headed away from my land!

—Text & Photos by Lisa Halderman