Gastro Gnome - Eat Better Wherever

Origin of Russian pigs in CA?

So here is the response from my know-it-all older brother...
rolleyes.gif



Actually, pretty accurate. It's HOPPER Bald, not Hooper's Bald (near
the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park)==The guy was game manager in
Carmel on
a big estate and brought them in from back east (He had also managed a
game
farm on Hopper's Bald)==one caveat is that, by the time he brought them
in,
they had hybridized with feral pigs and, later research has shown, his
pigs came from Bavaria, NOT Russia and had already hybridized there
also
(Hey, salesmen are salesmen everywhere!!). People say (among other
fallacies) that boar and pigs have different numbers of chromosomes but
they don't==both have 36 (one chromosome has a tendency to "break" and
sometimes will look like a total of 38==this is similar to one cause of
Down's Syndrome in humans)

There's a good book out on biology?history of wild pigs in the US by
Brisbin (or Brisbane??) and Mayer (I think)== I can look up the
reference
if you want it==I have it at home, left over from grad school. For
instance, did you know there is a population of feral hogs near
Blythe???
Introduced in the 1950's by who knows who.

Boddington's book on pig hunting is good on tactics and equipment but
not
on biology (Bears, pigs, and humans ARE NOT closely related, as he says
==
we merely are the only animals with a peculiar type of molar).

Greg Van Stralen
Senior Fish and Wildlife Biologist
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
 
I didn't know you had a know it all brother. Don't those Bavarians mix with the Russians, don't they move back and forth. Does he know literature, not all literature is biology you know?

Look at Chapter 228 of War and Peace, the Bavarians and the Russians fought a lot during Napoleon's time.

"He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the whole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians."

The Bavarians pushed Russians back, maybe they took some Russian hogs. Some hybridized with other hogs, some of which were probably Russian too, but did all of them? What about Gengis Khan, didn't he move the Russian hogs back and forth from China to Europe. They're Russian's I say, they're a mix, Russian characteristics, I call it Russian. There's no pure papers on them anywhere, is there?

So, what's your brother saying, those Ca hogs that look like Russians are really Bavarian hogs? I guess I better read your first link sometime, so I know what I'm talking about.
 
Ok, I read some of the link. It says, they quote a guy, they are from
"Ural’skiye Gory mountain chain in Russia"

It sounds Russian to me, what does your brother say about that?
 

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