Going the Whole Hog

If riled, the wild boar will jump a five-bar gate. It will get its six-inch tusks under the femoral artery, at the top of the thigh, and rip upward, causing its victim to bleed out in less than six minutes. Bertrand De Courcy, however, can’t jump a five-bar gate. He is a 20-stone smoker, and the wrong side of 50. Which is why, this morning, he’s brought his rifle. And his friends, from all over France, to hunt boar on his Loire Valley estate. “It is a special day” says De Courcy. “Trust me – we never get this excited shooting pheasant.”

I am excited too. I presented a series on the BBC called Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, where diners witnessed the slaughter of an animal – and then ate it for their dinner. In a world where meat comes pre-packed, in plastic, the show was designed to reconnect us with what we were eating. But all the slaughtering for Kill It, Cook It, Eat It was done in an abbatoir, by a professional slaughterman. This is different. I am going to do the slaughtering myself.

The wild boar hunt is a French tradition. But, in France, nothing is très speed. De Courcy is the sort of man who regards ‘le sandwich’ as a vulgar imposter, and he likes to start the day with his hunting breakfast of eggs, bacon, cheese and boar charcuterie. With vin rouge, and cigars to follow. As the shooters break bread, and mop at their plates, they discuss how to differentiate the male wild boar from the female. “But when 40 stone is running at you, faster than a motorbike,” laughs De Courcy, “who cares?”

Immortalised by Asterix, and the heraldic crests of the aristocracy, the wild boar represents the French character. Or so they like to think. “I remember wounding one” says De Courcy. “So I had to follow it – to finish it off, you understand. As I tracked it through the undergrowth, I was picking up its guts as I went. When I finally found it, four hours later, it had no guts left. But it was still standing. That’s the boar for you. Real strength.”

Word of De Courcy’s hunt has brought Didier Huard all the way from Paris. “Although this actually counts as a ‘business’ day for me” says Huard. “I work in a bank that positively encourages boar hunting. My boss says it’s good for relationships – commericial and otherwise. I like the way the boar looks mystical and old-fashioned. With deer you have the ‘Bambi complex’ – you feel guilty when you kill it. But not the wild boar – it’s just this sinister black beast.”

The sinister black beast used to roam the forests of Britain too. But it was hunted to extinction – according to legend, the last wild boar was dispatched by the spear of King James I. British forests were quiet until the hurricanes of the 1980s blew away a lot of the fencing at captive boar farms. Animals escaped, and started to establish feral colonies. With no natural predators to keep their numbers down, they will soon need culling. Experts say that, within two years, Britain will be hunting wild boar again.

The dogs are getting restless. I pet one. It growls at me. These are dogs have a job to do – hunting boar. And by petting one, I am a distraction. They wear collars of hunters’ orange – the bright, reflective material that helps visibility on a shoot – and vests of Kevlar, to protect their bodies from boar tusks and stray bullets. The beaters, who have the job of flushing the boar toward the shooters, head into the woods brandishing spears and daggers. The dogs race ahead. It feels oddly primeval.

The shooters spill out from breakfast, resplendent in jackets and ties (from an autumnal palette of brown and green), and matching leather britches. De Courcy’s are made of roe-deer leather, although he does own a pair of buffalo – well-suited to hunting in the nettles and brambles. “And the leather dries quickly when it gets wet” he says. Not that there’s much chance of that – the shooters are shepherded, quickly, into the estate’s four-wheel drive.

Parc de Menars is a walled idyll that dates back to the 17th century. It is Eden – with shooting rights. And “high seats” scattered everywhere. The seats, three-feet off the ground, force the shooters to point their rifles downwards. Given that bullets can travel up to two kilometres, that’s a sensible precaution. The seats also allow the shooters a safe vantage point. The sound of the beaters, as they herd the wild boar towards the shooters, gets nearer. They clap. And whistle. And shout. The dogs bark. One short blast on a beater’s bugle, and the boar start racing toward us…….

The first shot goes off. It’s from the other side of the estate. Then a second shot. The shooters are all of a good standard, and aiming at the boar’s shoulder – the largest and most forgiving target area. The bullet goes straight into the vital organs and, in shooter speak, “yields a quick kill”. They avoid the head, neck and back because a bad shot could end up with the poor, wounded animal running off into the forest to die a slow, lingering death. “Encore un blesse” crackles De Courcy’s walkie talkie – a boar has been injured.

While the shooting continues, the beaters track the boar with their dogs. They track slowly because, if a wild boar is wounded, it will often turn and charge. “I was tracking once” says De Courcy, “and a wounded boar charged my legs. I only just had time to take my rifle and shoot it between the ears. When he dropped dead, he was only 20cm away from me.” The beaters keep their spears and knives within easy reach. But it’s not necessary. The wounded boar has escaped.

I hear the crack of twigs in the forest behind me – then the sound of movement to my right. Somebody yells, I turn my head and, with a loud grunt, a dark brown boar breaks for cover. It’s not ferocious. And it doesn’t have six-inch tusks. In fact, it doesn’t have tusks at all. From the conversation at breakfast, the female has a longer snout than the male, who has more of forehead. But it’s too quick for me to tell. I only have time to register its hairy ears, and its tufty tail. I don’t have time to raise my gun.

With three short blasts on the bugle, the shooting comes to an end. The beaters try their best, but it’s the nearest I get to wild boar all day. The drive home is full of stories about one that got away (not that there were many – the total bag was 34), and the two dogs that were attacked by wounded boars. Lucky that, at Menars, the beaters carry their own suture kits. But by the time the shooters arrive back at the hunting lodge, the boars have already been gutted. And it’s starting to get dark.

Now comes the traditional photo opportunity. “It is part of the respect to the animal” says Bertrand. The 34 boar are too small for proper trophies – not one of them has tusks – but the beaters arrange the animals, in order of size, and point them in the same direction. They should be lying flat, but are starting to stiffen with the rigor mortis. Some legs have to be forced down until they click into position. Odd really – the animals are dead, but to see them mishandled makes me prickle.

Like the tongue of the young red deer that is lolling from the corner of its dead mouth. A beater pulls out his knife, and cuts it off. “N’est pas jolie” he smiles – not so pretty in a photograph. No, nor is the pool of cherry-red blood that is forming round the animals. The meat is either bagged up for the shooter to take home, or sold at the Blois market. De Courcy takes the liver into the lodge to serve it up with what’s left of his hunting stories – and this morning’s vin rouge.

High seat shooting isn’t for me. It’s boring. I want to stalk. I have heard that some stalkers invite the boar to rush at them, so that they can run through the animal through with a spear. These stalkers (usually known as ‘Americans’) wear Boss Hawg, a “concentrated formulation of dominant bore urine and semen,” which provokes males to charge at them. Boss Hawg isn’t for me. And, from the first time I see him, I can tell it’s not for Christian Picard either.

Picard, the estate manager at Menars, is a strapping man – well over six-foot tall. The very definition of an Alpha Male. And just the sort of chap I want to teach me how to stalk wild boar. In the 15 years that he has worked on the Menars estate, Picard has collected 45 stitches behind his ear, from the time he was charged by a stag, and a slash on his right leg, from the time a boar bit through his boots. He gives me an arrogant shrug. These things, he says, come with the territory.

Picard carries a high-velocity 338 mm sniper’s rifle. It’s powerful. I think he said something about its specialized rimless bottlenecked centrefire cartridge, but I wouldn’t swear to it. He mimes the effect of the bullet hitting a man’s leg – you know the French and mime. In other words, he is going to carry the rifle. And I’m not. I get to carry the tripod. Sorry – ‘tripod’. It’s three 6ft hazel branches that Picard has whittled himself. But I really want to carry the rifle.

Picard is not happy. For lots of reasons. There has been snow overnight. And it has changed the sound of the estate. Picard says that hunting will now be harder because the boar can see further and hear better. To make matters worse, Picard is unhappy about the clothes I’m wearing – the wellingtons I do the gardening in, and some old skiing trousers are not, apparently, suitable for hunting. But what finishes it off if when I ask to borrow his hat.

Picard says “Yes”. But his face doesn’t. I think, in retrospect, that I was borrowing his favourite hat. I’m cold, but it was an ask too far. As we walk across the snow, he studies his surroundings. He raises his nose into the air, theatrically, and smells something. “Renard,” he says. A fox. Then he looks at my hat. Or, should I say, his hat. Picard is a man of few words (and most of them are French), but “Renard” is one of the last things he says to me.

Picard spots two narrow toes stamped in the snow – it’s a wild boar. But it takes an hour to find the family. When we do, it is a mother with three young. She doesn't seem too concerned about us observing her, but it’s a case of “get as close as you can – then get 10 yards closer”. Picard wants me to stalk behind him – up him, actually – so that we share the same silhouette. We manage, and the boar doesn’t feel threatened. Finally, I get the rifle in position.

What Picard would have taught me, if I hadn’t asked to borrow his hat, were the basics of trigger squeeze, breath control and follow-through. You can’t shoot while you’re inhaling or exhaling; you need to hold your breath. “Let part of the breath out,” Picard would have said, “and then commence your trigger squeeze.” I’m not saying I would have managed it. Especially after I had been walking for miles, in the snow. But it would have been nice to know the theory.

I have the boar in my sights. But I need to cough. Silently. By swallowing I try to remove the need to cough at all. And that just makes it worse. Like breathing – the instant you start to think about it, it all goes to pot. There is a fine line between waiting for a better shot and dawdling away an opportunity. I dawle away an opportunity. I’m too hung up getting the perfect shot. And if you wait too long for the perfect shot, the animal walks out of your life. That’s what happened.

I would like to say that I am Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter. That I pull my shot at the last minute out of respect for the animal. I don’t. I still take a shot. But I miss. God knows where the bullet goes. But I’m glad I miss. And because I miss so badly, I refuse to shoot again. I don’t want to end up hitting the animal in the leg or the throat – a boar can survive two weeks without food before it dies of starvation. I would rather leave it to the experts. Picard doesn’t need telling twice. We’re going home.

Charlie Jacoby, editor of Sporting Rifle magazine, predicts that wild boar hunting will become a staple in Britain in years to come. “The government says there are between 200 and 500 boar roaming wild” says Jacoby. “But a better estimate would be between 2,000 and 5,000. 15 years ago, Sweden was a keen pheasant-shooting country with a population of wild boar comparable to ours. Now it is a wild boar shooting country. I reckon the same will happen to us.”

And why not? Banging away at pheasants has become a corporate perk, like tickets to Wimbledon or a box at the Opera. Who is to say that boar hunting won’t be the next big thing? Boar is, at least, wild. Unlike the pheasants that are hatched in incubators at the game factories and then sold on to shooting estates. Wild boar hunting has made more committed than ever to the idea that, if I eat meat, I need to know how the animal has lived. And how it has died. But first I need some shooting practice. And a new hat.



		Going the Whole Hog If riled, the wild boar will jump a five-bar gate. It will get its six-inch tusks under the femoral artery, at the top of the thigh, and rip upward, causing its victim to bleed out in less than six minutes. Bertrand De Courcy, however, can’t jump a five-bar gate. He is a 20-stone smoker, and the wrong side of 50. Which is why, this morning, he’s brought his rifle. And his friends, from all over France, to hunt boar on his Loire Valley estate. “It is a special day” says De Courcy. “Trust me – we never get this excited shooting pheasant.” I am excited too. I presented a series on the BBC called Kill It, Cook It, Eat It, where diners witnessed the slaughter of an animal – and then ate it for their dinner. In a world where meat comes pre-packed, in plastic, the show was designed to reconnect us with what we were eating. But all the slaughtering for Kill It, Cook It, Eat It was done in an abbatoir, by a professional slaughterman. This is different. I am going to do the slaughtering myself. The wild boar hunt is a French tradition. But, in France, nothing is très speed. De Courcy is the sort of man who regards ‘le sandwich’ as a vulgar imposter, and he likes to start the day with his hunting breakfast of eggs, bacon, cheese and boar charcuterie. With vin rouge, and cigars to follow. As the shooters break bread, and mop at their plates, they discuss how to differentiate the male wild boar from the female. “But when 40 stone is running at you, faster than a motorbike,” laughs De Courcy, “who cares?” Immortalised by Asterix, and the heraldic crests of the aristocracy, the wild boar represents the French character. Or so they like to think. “I remember wounding one” says De Courcy. “So I had to follow it – to finish it off, you understand. As I tracked it through the undergrowth, I was picking up its guts as I went. When I finally found it, four hours later, it had no guts left. But it was still standing. That’s the boar for you. Real strength.” Word of De Courcy’s hunt has brought Didier Huard all the way from Paris. “Although this actually counts as a ‘business’ day for me” says Huard. “I work in a bank that positively encourages boar hunting. My boss says it’s good for relationships – commericial and otherwise. I like the way the boar looks mystical and old-fashioned. With deer you have the ‘Bambi complex’ – you feel guilty when you kill it. But not the wild boar – it’s just this sinister black beast.” The sinister black beast used to roam the forests of Britain too. But it was hunted to extinction – according to legend, the last wild boar was dispatched by the spear of King James I. British forests were quiet until the hurricanes of the 1980s blew away a lot of the fencing at captive boar farms. Animals escaped, and started to establish feral colonies. With no natural predators to keep their numbers down, they will soon need culling. Experts say that, within two years, Britain will be hunting wild boar again. The dogs are getting restless. I pet one. It growls at me. These are dogs have a job to do – hunting boar. And by petting one, I am a distraction. They wear collars of hunters’ orange – the bright, reflective material that helps visibility on a shoot – and vests of Kevlar, to protect their bodies from boar tusks and stray bullets. The beaters, who have the job of flushing the boar toward the shooters, head into the woods brandishing spears and daggers. The dogs race ahead. It feels oddly primeval. The shooters spill out from breakfast, resplendent in jackets and ties (from an autumnal palette of brown and green), and matching leather britches. De Courcy’s are made of roe-deer leather, although he does own a pair of buffalo – well-suited to hunting in the nettles and brambles. “And the leather dries quickly when it gets wet” he says. Not that there’s much chance of that – the shooters are shepherded, quickly, into the estate’s four-wheel drive. Parc de Menars is a walled idyll that dates back to the 17th century. It is Eden – with shooting rights. And “high seats” scattered everywhere. The seats, three-feet off the ground, force the shooters to point their rifles downwards. Given that bullets can travel up to two kilometres, that’s a sensible precaution. The seats also allow the shooters a safe vantage point. The sound of the beaters, as they herd the wild boar towards the shooters, gets nearer. They clap. And whistle. And shout. The dogs bark. One short blast on a beater’s bugle, and the boar start racing toward us……. The first shot goes off. It’s from the other side of the estate. Then a second shot. The shooters are all of a good standard, and aiming at the boar’s shoulder – the largest and most forgiving target area. The bullet goes straight into the vital organs and, in shooter speak, “yields a quick kill”. They avoid the head, neck and back because a bad shot could end up with the poor, wounded animal running off into the forest to die a slow, lingering death. “Encore un blesse” crackles De Courcy’s walkie talkie – a boar has been injured. While the shooting continues, the beaters track the boar with their dogs. They track slowly because, if a wild boar is wounded, it will often turn and charge. “I was tracking once” says De Courcy, “and a wounded boar charged my legs. I only just had time to take my rifle and shoot it between the ears. When he dropped dead, he was only 20cm away from me.” The beaters keep their spears and knives within easy reach. But it’s not necessary. The wounded boar has escaped. I hear the crack of twigs in the forest behind me – then the sound of movement to my right. Somebody yells, I turn my head and, with a loud grunt, a dark brown boar breaks for cover. It’s not ferocious. And it doesn’t have six-inch tusks. In fact, it doesn’t have tusks at all. From the conversation at breakfast, the female has a longer snout than the male, who has more of forehead. But it’s too quick for me to tell. I only have time to register its hairy ears, and its tufty tail. I don’t have time to raise my gun. With three short blasts on the bugle, the shooting comes to an end. The beaters try their best, but it’s the nearest I get to wild boar all day. The drive home is full of stories about one that got away (not that there were many – the total bag was 34), and the two dogs that were attacked by wounded boars. Lucky that, at Menars, the beaters carry their own suture kits. But by the time the shooters arrive back at the hunting lodge, the boars have already been gutted. And it’s starting to get dark. Now comes the traditional photo opportunity. “It is part of the respect to the animal” says Bertrand. The 34 boar are too small for proper trophies – not one of them has tusks – but the beaters arrange the animals, in order of size, and point them in the same direction. They should be lying flat, but are starting to stiffen with the rigor mortis. Some legs have to be forced down until they click into position. Odd really – the animals are dead, but to see them mishandled makes me prickle. Like the tongue of the young red deer that is lolling from the corner of its dead mouth. A beater pulls out his knife, and cuts it off. “N’est pas jolie” he smiles – not so pretty in a photograph. No, nor is the pool of cherry-red blood that is forming round the animals. The meat is either bagged up for the shooter to take home, or sold at the Blois market. De Courcy takes the liver into the lodge to serve it up with what’s left of his hunting stories – and this morning’s vin rouge. High seat shooting isn’t for me. It’s boring. I want to stalk. I have heard that some stalkers invite the boar to rush at them, so that they can run through the animal through with a spear. These stalkers (usually known as ‘Americans’) wear Boss Hawg, a “concentrated formulation of dominant bore urine and semen,” which provokes males to charge at them. Boss Hawg isn’t for me. And, from the first time I see him, I can tell it’s not for Christian Picard either. Picard, the estate manager at Menars, is a strapping man – well over six-foot tall. The very definition of an Alpha Male. And just the sort of chap I want to teach me how to stalk wild boar. In the 15 years that he has worked on the Menars estate, Picard has collected 45 stitches behind his ear, from the time he was charged by a stag, and a slash on his right leg, from the time a boar bit through his boots. He gives me an arrogant shrug. These things, he says, come with the territory. Picard carries a high-velocity 338 mm sniper’s rifle. It’s powerful. I think he said something about its specialized rimless bottlenecked centrefire cartridge, but I wouldn’t swear to it. He mimes the effect of the bullet hitting a man’s leg – you know the French and mime. In other words, he is going to carry the rifle. And I’m not. I get to carry the tripod. Sorry – ‘tripod’. It’s three 6ft hazel branches that Picard has whittled himself. But I really want to carry the rifle. Picard is not happy. For lots of reasons. There has been snow overnight. And it has changed the sound of the estate. Picard says that hunting will now be harder because the boar can see further and hear better. To make matters worse, Picard is unhappy about the clothes I’m wearing – the wellingtons I do the gardening in, and some old skiing trousers are not, apparently, suitable for hunting. But what finishes it off if when I ask to borrow his hat. Picard says “Yes”. But his face doesn’t. I think, in retrospect, that I was borrowing his favourite hat. I’m cold, but it was an ask too far. As we walk across the snow, he studies his surroundings. He raises his nose into the air, theatrically, and smells something. “Renard,” he says. A fox. Then he looks at my hat. Or, should I say, his hat. Picard is a man of few words (and most of them are French), but “Renard” is one of the last things he says to me. Picard spots two narrow toes stamped in the snow – it’s a wild boar. But it takes an hour to find the family. When we do, it is a mother with three young. She doesn't seem too concerned about us observing her, but it’s a case of “get as close as you can – then get 10 yards closer”. Picard wants me to stalk behind him – up him, actually – so that we share the same silhouette. We manage, and the boar doesn’t feel threatened. Finally, I get the rifle in position. What Picard would have taught me, if I hadn’t asked to borrow his hat, were the basics of trigger squeeze, breath control and follow-through. You can’t shoot while you’re inhaling or exhaling; you need to hold your breath. “Let part of the breath out,” Picard would have said, “and then commence your trigger squeeze.” I’m not saying I would have managed it. Especially after I had been walking for miles, in the snow. But it would have been nice to know the theory. I have the boar in my sights. But I need to cough. Silently. By swallowing I try to remove the need to cough at all. And that just makes it worse. Like breathing – the instant you start to think about it, it all goes to pot. There is a fine line between waiting for a better shot and dawdling away an opportunity. I dawle away an opportunity. I’m too hung up getting the perfect shot. And if you wait too long for the perfect shot, the animal walks out of your life. That’s what happened. I would like to say that I am Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter. That I pull my shot at the last minute out of respect for the animal. I don’t. I still take a shot. But I miss. God knows where the bullet goes. But I’m glad I miss. And because I miss so badly, I refuse to shoot again. I don’t want to end up hitting the animal in the leg or the throat – a boar can survive two weeks without food before it dies of starvation. I would rather leave it to the experts. Picard doesn’t need telling twice. We’re going home. Charlie Jacoby, editor of Sporting Rifle magazine, predicts that wild boar hunting will become a staple in Britain in years to come. “The government says there are between 200 and 500 boar roaming wild” says Jacoby. “But a better estimate would be between 2,000 and 5,000. 15 years ago, Sweden was a keen pheasant-shooting country with a population of wild boar comparable to ours. Now it is a wild boar shooting country. I reckon the same will happen to us.” And why not? Banging away at pheasants has become a corporate perk, like tickets to Wimbledon or a box at the Opera. Who is to say that boar hunting won’t be the next big thing? Boar is, at least, wild. Unlike the pheasants that are hatched in incubators at the game factories and then sold on to shooting estates. Wild boar hunting has made more committed than ever to the idea that, if I eat meat, I need to know how the animal has lived. And how it has died. But first I need some shooting practice. And a new hat.

		© Richard Johnson 2000 -