Achtung, Achtung! These pigs gon' eat you.

The other night while walking back to my friend’s apartment in NYC, we began talking about our study abroad experiences and travelling.  Somehow the conversation made it’s way to my semester in Berlin, and my friends requested I post this today. 

My study abroad semester was really just travelling around Europe and having a grand ole time.  However, when I wasn’t frolicking around and singing songs from the Sound of Music all across Europe, I lived with a nice older German couple in a northwest suburb of Berlin.   My study abroad program placed us each with host families instead of forcing us to live in the student housing at the Humboldt built before Mr. Gorbechav tore down his wall.

My house was very nice and my host family even gave me my own apartment with cable tv (the only English channel was MTV and they only played Viva La Bam and the Girls Next Door).  They also gave me a bicycle! I rode that bike everyday to the train station and back through the nice little suburb.  However, there was one opening to the Brandenburg forest I had to pass each night.  Since I lived so far away and was pretty social with my classmates, I never got home when it was light out. I should also note the bike was much too large for me, so I had to jump on it, pedal to my destination and jump off. I couldn't just stop and start as needed.

So one night happy little Eileene is riding her bike through the northern Berlin suburb, humming about the alps, when a bunch of creatures started emerging from the Brandenburg forest.  One, then two, then before I knew it a huge group of creatures walked out of the forest and into the street in front of me. 

At first I thought they were wolves, but then I noticed there were probably not any wolves as big as these things to be found.  They were as large as a car, brown, snorting, and…started running towards me.  Luckily I’m a fast biker, so I took off in the other direction as fast as I could go, biking an extra two miles around the neighborhood to get to my house. I pretty much threw my bike on the porch and ran into the house, sort of like kids did on Are You Afraid of the Dark when they had  just barely made it home before being snatched up by a monster.

If I believed in mythical creatures, I’d have insisted  they were bigfoot and his kids running around.  But I didn’t, so I burst into my host family’s house blabbering in German about these big monsters that popped out of the forest and chased me home.  I barely made it alive, I was sure of it.  My host dad looked all grave and then got really excited telling me about these “wildschweine” that lived in the area and sometimes came out at night. They were both loved and feared by Germans.

So when retelling this story the other night,  my friends demanded I find out the background behind why the wildschweine evoked such fear.  They believed me about the size and ferocity of them, but not that I should have actually feared for my life.  So I started researching the wildschweine on the train ride back to Charlottesville from New York.  While I didn’t find any smoking gun accounts of wild boars eating children and puppies, I did find some pretty interesting information about them and why they’re so prevalent.

Here’s what I found in a news article written just a year after my program ended: “Clemens von Saldern just erected an electric fence on the site of the Berlin Wall. The organic food distributor isn't rebuilding the Iron Curtain -- he's trying to stop wild boar from tearing up his garden.”

Well, according to my host dad, gardens weren’t the only things the wild boar tore up.  Supposedly they’d been known to kill animals and… children. Since I’m not that much larger than most children, I took that to mean they might try to kill me too.  However, there were some super secret Pig Aversion Tactics (PAT) to thwart them. 

My host dad, a former German judge named Klaus, was insistent that I learn a few lessons in protecting myself from the wildschweine should I encounter them again.  Step 1) jump on top of car and make a lot of noise until pig left or until someone (hopefully an adult larger than myself) would hear me and come to my aid.  If there was no car upon which to leap, I should move on to the next step. Step 2) Pull jacket or outerwear up over head, extend arms, and stand on tiptoes making loud noise until pig left.  This was supposed to make me appear larger than the wildschweine and they would be scared of me and run.  This sounded easy enough, and it was!

  The next time the wild boars came out, not only did I jump off my bike and onto a car, I combined step 2 in an advanced PAT and pulled my coat over my head and started hollering at them.  Well, I’m some sort of PAT genius because it worked and they ran the other way.   I never feared the wildschweine again, but I still like to tell the story of me thwarting them like I’m some sort of badass.

Upon further reading today, I learned that the wild boar are so prevalent in Germany because of Nazi Hermann Goerring (Hitler’s number 2 man). He loved the wild boar so much he enacted a hunting edict known as the “Reich Hunting Law” that required hunters to feed wild game enough food to get them through the winter if they intended to hunt and kill them.  That law is still in effect and some hunters feed the wildschweine way too much so unless they’re shot, they pretty much live and breed without hindrance.  Had I known that, I’d have taken up boar hunting as a hobby. My host parents probably would have frowned upon that because they were vegetarians.  They also almost starved me to death with their vegetarian food, but that post is for another day.

Here's a pic of me, and a wildschweine.  I photoshopped it to give you the full effect (you have to click on it and it will get bigger).

Me, scared in Europe (left); wildschweine being ferocious (right).