Chasing wild pigs is not a good idea...

Even in the land of kosher food, pork products are available in special stores. The wild cousin of the domestic pig is also roaming the lands, something Barak got painfully aware of the other morning when he was our running with Yoram and the rest of the running group. Barak has a strong prey drive and sometimes follows scents out in the vegetation and this morning Yoram heard more noise than Barak possibly could create himself. Suddenly a whole family of wild boar comes out from the grove and stand some 20-30 m ahead of Yoram. He thought that his last moment had arrived, but luckily the pigs took off in the other direction. Barak first joined up with the rest of the group and when they all gathered, the other guys told Yoram that Barak was probably stabbed by one of the pigs, and surely he had a wound on his thigh.

When Yoram came home with Barak I shaved the area around the wound opening, which was approximately a 3 cm cut and we saw that it bled pretty abundantly. I took him to the vet and at this point he also had a large bump on the thigh, which was indicating a hematoma inside his thigh muscle. He was put under anesthesia and our vet started to work on him.

He had to cut a 15 cm opening to be able to remove all the coagulated blood and damaged tissue in his muscle. After that he got stitches both in the muscle tissue and two levels of stitches in the skin, plus a long drainage tube exiting in two directions.



ּBarak was pretty docile the rest of the day, but ate his dinner in the evening. Already the next morning he was behaving just as usual, with no tendencies of pain. He is on antibiotics and he is keeping the drainage clean all by himself. I wonder, though, if he learned a lesson from chasing wild pigs - especially with babies...