Is Tusk IV a lucky Pig

Several American college football teams feature live mascots: either costumed human performers, barely costumed cheerleaders, or Dogs, Rams, Horses and other domestic non-humans. The latter fare only as well as the vagaries of domestication and human whim permit.

More problematic is the case of natural (aka wild) animals indentured as “mascots.” For the Bears in Baylor, the Tiger in LSU, the Buffalo in Colorado, or the Razorback in Arkansas, confinement –often solitary— is what a prison cell is for a human.

The Razorback, however, is a curious case. Is “Tusk IV” a wild Boar, a feral Hog, or a domestic Pig? Under different appearences, at the molecular level they are the same.  Their common ancestor, the Eurasian Wild Boar, or Sus Scrofa, was mindlessly introduced –like innumerable non-native species-- by New World colonizers with nefarious consequences for the American fauna, flora, and the imported Pigs in particular.

Domestication, however, doesn’t linger. If a domestic Pig escapes and finds a haven with no humans, s/he becomes a feral Hog and the offspring would become wild Boars in a couple of generations.  It follows that the Arkansas Razorbacks “calling of the Hogs” goes “woo Pig sooie” wallowing in the diversity of porcine nomenclature.  

In nature or in captivity, Pigs are social, clean, and smart -- more so than all but the most gifted Dogs. In fact, Pigs can learn tasks as quickly as Chimpanzees, and manipulate a computer joystick with their sensitive snouts as capably as Chimps do with their hands. Which shakes the moral foundation of condemning Asians for eating Dogs and Cats or Africans for eating primates.

Humans enslave each other and anyone else in their path, and so with Pigs 8000 BCE or earlier. Since then, Swine have endured gross exploitation, e.g., 1.3 million slaughtered annually in Arkansas ... Persecuted (no season, no rules, no limits for hunting and trapping feral and wild Hogs) ... Genetically engineered at UA and other agricultural research labs to render sentient beings into living, unthinking factories of protein and spare human parts ... Used as living targets for trauma and military training ... There is no abuse Pigs have not felt on their own flesh, while still preserving their considerable cognitive capacity and feeling the gamut of human feelings.

Grim alternatives

But back to the UA mascot: “Some yearbooks reference a hog mascot on the sideline at football games as early as 1914,” according to the Official Arkansas 2017 Football Playbill. “The formal live mascot tradition dates back to the 1960s.” Not all Hogs were willing participants, e.g., Big Red III escaped and was shot ... Ragnar also escaped and (improbably) “killed a coyote, a 450-lb domestic pig, and seven rattlesnakes.”

Once, I saw Tusk IV inside a cage being rolled toward the eponymous Razorback Stadium. He appeared resigned to be handled as a prop -- loaded, unloaded, transported, paraded and exhibited in crowded places, “pawing” autographs, and other unporcine shit. One just hopes that his keepers in Dardanelle, Arkansas, are decent to him when he is at rest. Either way, his options are limited. Were he not the UA mascot he would have been executed long ago as a pest or as protein.

What an ironic choice of “mascot” Arkansas.

 

Tusk IV