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Fugitive Boar Gets a Taste of Bavarian Hospitality

DW staff (nda)January 12, 2006

A wild boar that had been fleeing for its life sought sanctuary in a house in Bavaria and caught forty winks on the bed in the guest room. Little did it know, the nap it was about to take would be an eternal one.

https://p.dw.com/p/7mId
A life on the run came to an unexpected and brutal end for one poor boarImage: AP

Few people would react to the unexpected appearance of a traveler in danger by blasting the needy to death with a shotgun. Nevertheless, this was exactly the reaction of a Bavarian family who prosecuted one such visitor with extreme prejudice.

The story, however, is not one of a collection of psychopaths in the Black Forest executing weary and lost travelers on their doorsteps. It is one involving a wild boar on the run, the sanctuary of a guest bedroom and the advantages of having a hunter as a neighbor.

The 60-kg (132 lb) sow had been running for her life from would-be assailants when she decided to lie low in the family's home. "The sow panicked and was completely disoriented after being chased in the morning by hunters," a police spokesman said. "It ran into a village and broke through a cellar window into a house. It fell asleep on a bed in the guest room."

Boar's safehouse turned out to be its last stand

Here's where the story takes an ironic turn. When the boar woke up later that afternoon, it panicked once more and went on the rampage in the home, alerting the family to their uninvited guest.

As luck would have it -- but not for the confused beast, of course -- the next-door neighbor was a man with experience in shooting boars. After fleeing similar humans for most of the day in nature, the boar's safehouse became the scene of its demise. The neighbor came on the behest of the family and shot the sow dead.