Why is it said that "one pig, two bears, three tigers"? Are wild boars really that powerful?

A saying like this is widely passed down in many rural areas: one pig, two bears, three tigers. It means that when you encounter a wild boar in the mountains, it’s more dangerous than running into a bear or a tiger.

In everyday life, because they may be brought to the table often, domestic pigs give people the impression of being harmless to humans and animals. They’re always sluggish, like heavy, lovable clowns.

​And domestic pigs were domesticated from wild boars. Many people may find it hard to accept that wild boars can be compared to bears, tigers, and other savage beasts—even ranked higher than them.

However, wild boars live up to that ranking. In the wild, encountering a wild boar really is extremely dangerous.

A big part of the reason is that male wild boars spend most of the year fighting for reproduction, while female wild boars are among the top “great mothers” in the animal world. They become highly aggressive to protect their young.

The Domestication of Wild Boars

Pigs are one of the earliest animals domesticated by humans. As early as between 13,000 and 12,700 BC, they were already kept in pigpens among people in the Near East.

In most regions of Europe and Asia, domestic pigs mainly come from domestication in the Near East. However, China’s domestic pigs were domesticated independently—about 8,000 years ago.

Our purpose in domesticating wild boars was very clear—to store high-quality protein. But wild boars were able to be domesticated mainly because they have excellent innate conditions.

First, their growth rate is very fast, and their growth cycle is very short. A just-born Eurasian wild boar can increase its body weight by 100 times in a year—this growth speed is extremely rare among land vertebrates.

Second, they reproduce very strongly. Generally speaking, from November to January of the following year is the breeding season for wild boars. Before that,

Male wild boars develop a subcutaneous “armor.” Simply put, they become thick-skinned and thick-fleshed, so they can win in fights against their own kind.

Wild boars are a classic “maternal society.” Female wild boars go out to forage in groups with their offspring, while male wild boars leave the group after they mature to live on their own.

Wild boars aren’t protecting their young—they’re either protecting them or fighting for breeding!

When they enter the breeding season, male wild boars become extremely driven and pushy. They look all around for female wild boars and drive away animals and their rivals nearby—of course including humans.

Moreover, if at this time the female wild boar also has piglets, they will drive away even the little wild boars.

You may have noticed that female wild boars might continue the pregnancy even when the piglets haven’t fully developed yet—and that’s indeed the case. If food is plentiful, most female wild boars can have two litters per year (gestation lasts about 4 months; each litter can produce 4–12 piglets, mainly determined by age and food availability).

The nursing period for piglets is only about 3 months, and by 7 months old they can forage independently—so it doesn’t prevent them from continuing to nurse the next litter.

However, female wild boars are very responsible mothers. During the nursing period, they keep their piglets tucked under their belly, almost never taking a step away—and they’re also highly aggressive.

In fact, you can see this even from domestic pigs. Although we have domesticated them for a long time, their instinct to protect young never disappeared. After giving birth, sows become completely unrecognizable in terms of kinship—they’re indifferent, including toward their owners.

With a responsible wild boar mother like that, the survival rate of wild piglets is remarkably high. In fact, even if a nursing-season female wild boar dies, other female wild boars in the group will take over the care of the piglets.

Actually, in certain situations, a wild boar mother really is more likely to die than the piglets.

Because when danger strikes, wild boar mothers will do everything they can to protect their young, and wild boar piglets also have very strong self-defense abilities. When they encounter danger, they will immediately find a place to hide and then stay completely still. Their strange brown fur helps them blend into the forest.

Female wild boars can have two litters a year, so male wild boars need to prepare for it twice. In fact, during the year, males spend most of their time eating and fighting for reproduction—this is why they’re always dangerous.

During a breeding season, a male wild boar will mate with 5–10 female wild boars, and each mating opportunity is won through fighting. A male’s mating period lasts about a month and a half. During that time they eat very little, they’re extremely combative, and their final body weight will drop by 20%.

After that, they start “recuperating,” and once their weight increases, they enter the breeding season again, becoming thick-skinned and thick-fleshed, full of fighting spirit.

How strong are wild boars?

There’s data showing that in 2000, the number of wild boars in Zhejiang was about 29,000. By 2010, that number became 150,000. I haven’t found current specific statistics for the number of wild boars in Zhejiang, but it absolutely won’t have decreased.

Now, wild boars breaking into rural areas and destroying crops is no longer big news. In my hometown in Zhejiang, in a remote mountain village’s sweet potato fields, it would be strange if wild boars hadn’t rooted through them.

In our country, wild boars are protected animals. And their main natural predators—large mammals like tigers and leopards—have been driven near extinct by humans, so they rarely appear in the wild. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the wild boar population rebounds quickly.

But when you think about the scenes of countless “man-versus-pig battles,” you might still want to know what wild boars are really capable of—and why they’re so powerful.

Tigers are one of the few predators that can break into a wild boar herd. From tracking research on how Indian tigers hunt wild boars, researchers found that tigers will keep following the wild boar herd and carry out a strategy of picking them off one by one, slowly wiping out the whole herd.

But what’s surprising is that some tigers—and even tiger cubs—get counter-killed by wild boars.

Figure caption: Overrun wild boars in North America won’t even spare crocodiles

​Wild boar food is extremely varied. It’s almost similar to humans: whatever we can eat, they’ll eat. From birds flying in the sky to earth-dwelling earthworms, it all appears on the wild boar menu.

In fact, male wild boars are even competitors of large apex beasts like tigers. They hunt small deer and mammals like macaques.

Wild boars don’t have very good eyesight. They lack color vision and can’t identify objects 10–15 meters away, so they aren’t as likely to show fear as some other animals.

Figure caption: Rock-age murals show wild boars charging people

​When wild boars feel threatened, they go berserk and charge at their opponent. And as long as they find that the opponent is still moving, they will quickly launch the next round of attacks.

Actually, they don’t even need particularly good vision, because most of the time they spend rooting in the ground for food. Instead, they have a very strong sense of smell and hearing—so good that in some regions, wild boars have replaced police dogs.

Besides that, wild boars are also one of four kinds of mammals that are naturally unafraid of venomous snakes. The other three are civets, honey badgers, and hedgehogs.

In these animals, nicotine-type acetylcholine receptors mutate. This mutated receptor protects them from snake venom. That’s also why our domestic pigs aren’t afraid of venomous snakes.

Well, in fact, those venomous snakes that get lost—and accidentally end up on the wild boar “rooting path”—will become wild boar food.

Clearly, when those large savage beasts hide inside zoos seeking shelter, wild boars have already become undisputed “mountain kings.” They defend the mountain that belongs to them—female wild boars for protecting their young, and male wild boars for competing for mating rights.

Finally

Wild boars’疯狂 reproductive ability and strong survival skills make them one of the most widely distributed mammals on Earth. From solitary small islands to high mountains 3,000–4,000 meters high, their presence is everywhere.

So wild boars appear in many cultures. The most interesting is in Greece: in almost all Greek myths, the heroes either fought wild boars or killed one.

Figure caption: In Greek mythology, the strong Hercules defeated the wild boar

​​These heroes were respected for beating wild boars, and eventually became legends—transformed into gods in the stories.

And it’s exactly because wild boars are so powerful that the IUCN Red List classifies them as one of the species that needs the least protection, and in fact they have become a disaster in many places.

So if you really encounter a wild boar in the wild, that’s normal too. The best choice is simply not to disturb them.