Wild Boar

Autorentext

Dorothy Yamamoto is a freelance writer and poet. She is coeditor of Animals on the Agenda and author of the monograph, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature, and the collection of poems, Landscape with a Hundred Bridges.

Klappentext

Ancestors of domestic pigs, wild boars are tough, resourceful omnivores that have presented humans since prehistoric times with a tricky situation: they make for a delicious food source, but they are formidable animals with long tusks that can inflict serious harm. Wild Boar traces the interaction of humans and boars in fascinating detail, showing how our relationship has evolved over time and how it can be seen today as fundamentally representative of the questions at the heart of ecological preservation and restoration. Dorothy Yamamoto takes us from the dense streets of Tokyo to the Forest of Dean in England to show how wild boars have survived in a variety of settings. She also explores the ways that they have figured in our imaginations, whether as the iconic Calydonian Boar from Ancient Greece, the White Boar of Richard III, or any of the other forms it has taken in mythology and lore. As she shows, the boar has been an especially prominent figure in hunting culture, and as such it has often been construed as a larger-than-life monster that only the most heroic of us can take down, a misperception that has threatened the boar's survival in many parts of the world. With an illuminating combination of natural with cultural history, this book paints a vibrant portrait of a unique and often misunderstood animal.

Zusammenfassung
Wild Boar traces the history of the interaction between humans and wild boar in fascinating detail, from the iconic beasts of myth and legend, such as the Calydonian Boar, to the adoption of the boar as a heraldic device.