Not medieval times, but when my grandfather was a kid (nearly 100 years ago now), the pigs would roam his Sicilian town and its outskirts. He was about 6 when he decided to piss off a sow in a field. It mauled him and near killed him.
With government support and private-sector interest, Georgia aims to rebuild its once highly regarded and significant tea industry – dating back to the Russian Empire – that was destroyed following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In its history, first in the Russian Empire, then in the Soviet Union, Georgia played a crucial role in the tea market, producing at its peak up to 133,000 tonnes of packed tea per year from nearly 70 species, enjoying demand not only within the country, but also in some export destinations, including Mongolia, Iran and Afghanistan. However, this ended with the collapse of Soviet Union, when communism-style, tea-growing cooperatives appeared not to be ready for any competition with import supplies.
As a result, the tea industry was almost completely ruined, as annual volume of production dropped to nearly 4,000 tonnes. Approximately 95 percent of tea plantations have been closed, while out of nearly 100 tea factories, only 12 are operating now.
On an extended visit to a small village in Mexico where the pigs would wander, I made a sport of stalking the piglets and attempting to pick them up. I achieved my aim once and the mother sow came charging at me & thereby convinced me to yield up the piglet toot suite. No mauling ensued thank goodness.
Since the second 't' in tout isn't voiced and the 'de' is very quick and blended in, "tout de suite" sounds like "toot suite" to an English ear, hence the 'de' often being dropped (as well as spellings like the above).
Then I'll happily contribute my second improvement of french: suivite.
(For the curious, the first one is "toujourd'hui". And yes, this is tongue-in-cheek -- until these catch on and I'm celebrated by the Academy Francaise. Then it's Very Serious Business and was always intended as such, this post notwithstanding)
Not exactly "roaming in the town", but just last week I was talking with someone that remembered how - in the late 1950's or early '60's - her family (in Tuscany countryside) had usually three or four pigs that were routinely brought (by her, at the time 8 or 9 years old) to the nearby woods and it happened more than once that one of them would flee and get to the village, and be later brought back by this or that neighbour.
Parts of Corsica, other parts seem to be run by a small breed of cattle who keep pockets of human tenders around.
Observing the pigs at the Col de Vergio I imagined to notice a pattern of the bigger/older pigs venturing further away into the wild, as if they eventually developed a certain nagging suspicion but were too trusting minds to really act on it.
I've seen wild hog videos of them charging forward, full tilt against much larger animals. Things that would eat pigs for dinner, I tell you, they don't care and their charges mess you up.
It is a funny quirk of evolution that herbivores or mostly herbivorous omnivores often end up being more aggressive than predators. The predator would prefer dinner that doesn't fight back!
The largest domestic breeds push up to 300 to 400 kilos. We had one free-range pig on our farm that was certainly over a quarter-tonne, and she was agile enough that she'd occasionally run down chickens and eat them, and jaws strong enough to chew up cow skulls left over from home-kill.
Pigs are generally smart and friendly if they haven't been mistreated. I would not want to mess with one.
People like to joke about all the native Australian animals that can kill you, but the animal I was most afraid of as a farm kid was the feral pigs. I saw photos of recently shot pigs that were too big to fit on the back of a ute, and often found small trees completely uprooted by them.
Fortunately the largest feral pigs I ever ran into were a litter and a small sow that preferred to scatter than stand their ground.
As a kid I briefly lived in a rented trailer on a smallish farm which grew mustard greens and raised hogs. The owner was missing half an ear, taken by a hog. At least, that was the story he told when he caught me one day about to stick my hand into the hog pen. True account or not, the lesson is true all the same: hogs eat people, and angry or hungry hogs are not to be trifled with.
