Wild Pigs Become Domestic

It was a very wide river near which a lot of wild pigs lived. Nobody could remember how they had got there.

Then one day a man came to the nearest village and asked where he could find the wild pigs. Somebody told him, and he went off. The village people could not understand what he was going to do with the pigs.

A few months later the man came back and said that he had caught all the pigs. The village people were surprised. They wanted to see whether he was telling the truth. Some of the men agreed to go with him. Soon they came to a place which had a fence round it and a gate in it. All the pigs were inside.

“How did you do it?” they asked the man.

“Well, it was quite easy, really,” he answered. “I began by putting out some Indian corn. At first they didn’t eat it. But after a few weeks, some of the younger pigs began to run out of the bushes, take some of the corn quickly, and then run back. Soon all the pigs were eating the corn that I put out. Then I began to build a fence round the corn. At first it was very low, but then I built it higher and higher.

Then I saw that they were waiting for me to bring them the corn. Now they didn’t want to go and look for their own food as they had done before. When I saw it, I built a gate in my fence and closed it one day while they were all eating inside. I can catch any animal in the world in the same way.”