View from the North 40: This is how our world ends? Pigs?

Really, Canada? Super pigs? What were you thinking?

I mean, of all the countries in all the world we might’ve imagined would bring about the end of mankind in some manner, did any of us pick Canada?

Russia? Absolutely. China? 100 percent. The U.S.? Be honest. France even? You’ve seen them riot, right?

But Canada orchestrating events that will make the world uninhabitable for mankind — using pigs?

It all started in the 1990s when the Canadian government and some pig farmers decided to cross domestic pigs with wild boars to produce a larger, hardier domestic pig.

Somehow, they thought that an animal with “wild” in its official name was going to produce offspring that would not A) want to break free from their pig pen, and B) be hardy enough to survive in the wild during a Canadian winter if they did get loose.

A 2019 study by Ruth A. Aschim and Ryan K. Brook on the best methods of tracking the wild pigs’ expansion across Canada says that by 2019 the wild pigs, which they dubbed “super pigs,” had a range from nearly coast to coast and north, in Alberta, to just a few hundred miles from The Northwest Territories.

I kind of get why Canadians thought the domestic pig-wild boar crosses couldn’t survive in the wild in Canada.

The wild boar was domesticated in the deserty regions of the Middle East in about 8500 B.C. — ironically, now an area with the highest population density of people who won’t eat pork for religious reasons. The early pig farmers’ solution to the prohibition was to export their domesticated pigs to Europe, where the porcine livestock have remained popular, lo, these many millennia.

The pigs adapted to cold, wet, snowy Europe. That should’ve been a hint, Canada.

From there, pigs — proving long before “Charlotte’s Web” that being domesticated doesn’t mean you’ll never get an opportunity for adventure — made their way across the Atlantic Ocean to the West Indies with Columbus in 1493, and with De Soto to the continental U.S. 50 years later.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Though, technically speaking, all the first part was history too. That’s just, you know, a thing people say. On the other hand, so is this: “He went to (do the four-letter-S-word in the outhouse) and the hogs ate him.”

It’s based on true stories.

Now, domestic pigs are very popular in the U.S. as a food product, but their feral cousins, not so much.

Their rooting and wallowing and other pigishness causes more than $1.5 billion damage annually, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says, and because they do eat meat, they can be aggressive with living beings, hence the saying about a hog eating a guy answering nature’s call.

The feral pigs’ bad attributes got worse, when in the early 1900s some wiseguy imported and released a bunch of, you guessed it, wild boars in the south for sport hunting purposes. The history lesson just about writes itself at this point — the boars mated with the feral pigs and made wild pigs.

These were not the wild super pigs of select breeding in Canada, but they did alright for themselves.

USDA says the porcine population, a combination of feral pigs, wild boar and the cross-bred wild pigs in the U.S., numbers around 6 million across at least 35 states.

Canada obviously did not learn a lesson from our bad example.

The tracking study says that Canada’s super pigs have expanded their range about tenfold in the past decade, at the rate of about 34,000 square kilometers per year. The majority of this range is in the lower half of Saskatchewan.

Apparently being a big hunk of muscle and bone, sometimes larger than 600 pounds, with tusks and the survival instincts of a virus, make you tough enough to survive Canadian winters.

Plus, I’ve heard that pigs are smart. I don’t know any pigs to help me attest to that and, y’know what, I can’t tell by the flavor. To me, pigs don’t taste any smarter than chickens.

The Canadian study, though, reported that the super pigs will do things such as dig snow caves and line them with vegetation like cattails to shelter from the cold. That’s some advanced survival skills right there.

So here’s the thing, those super pigs are spreading like a super bug across Canada, skyrocketing in the last 10 years to not only extend their range about 2,000 miles both east and west, but also expand their numbers within that range. They will be a learn-as-we-go conquering force across the vast northwest, which has few humans to keep their porcine numbers in check.

In another decade or less, depending on momentum, they will have made it another 2,000 miles to Nome, Alaska, where it’s just a short winter’s ice skating party across the Bering Strait to the sparsely populated northern tier of Russia.

In a couple more decades or so they will have spread the 4,900 miles to the Ukraine and a little radioactive site called Chernobyl where, a Statnews article says, scientists are already studying several packs of feral dogs that have moved in and are being influenced in unknown ways by the radiation.

If I have my math right, and it’s simple math so the odds are good, in about 30 years, a population of super pigs that researchers have described as “incredibly intelligent, highly elusive” — aka smarter than humans already — will meet up with a pack of mutated dogs at a radiation leak site and joint, nuclear-powered force.

I don’t see this ending well for us, people.

——

Hope I didn’t ruin your weekend at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .