Title: Brehm's Life of animals : a complete natural history for popular home instruction and for the use of schools
Identifier: brehmslifeofanim00breh (find matches)
Year: 1895 (1890s)
Authors: Brehm, Alfred Edmund, 1829-1884; PechuLoesche, Eduard, 1840-1913; Haacke, Wilhelm, 1855-1912; Schmidtlein, Richard
Subjects: Mammals; Animal behavior
Publisher: Chicago : Marquis
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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THE SWINE—WART HOGS. 547 tion. The natives are said to kill it with spears and sometimes to organize hunts in which the animal is driven by beaters, under which circumstances it usually seeks safety in flight. The sow is said to give birth to one or two young, in February. They are pretty little creatures, from seven to eight inches in length, and are loved and defended by their mother with great devotion. If the young are taken early, they gradually acquire a certain degree of tameness; they become used to Man, occasionally follow their keepers about and express their gratitude by shaking their ears and tails. One sometimes finds a living Babirusa in the possession of a native chief, for the people of the islands which it inhabits regard it in the light of a queer creature and keep it in confinement as a curi- osity. This, however, happens quite seldom, and a high price is asked for a Hog of this kind. the London Zoological Garden, and some of them throve quite well, and propagated in captivity, under the careful treatment accorded to them. THE WART HOGS. Besides the Humped Hogs (Potamocluvrus), Africa harbors genuine monsters of the same family, the Wart Hogs (Phacochcerus). They are the clumsiest and ugliest of all known Swine, distinguished above all by the ungainliness of their heads and the pecul- iarity of their dentition. The body is of cylindrical shape, the neck short, the head bulky, with a low, broad forehead, the nasal area being perceptibly broadened all over and disproportionately so in the front part of the upper lip. On the sides the head is disfigured by three wart-like growths; one of these is over an inch high, pointed and mobile and is situ- ated below the eye; another, a smaller one, stands
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Markus, the Dutch governor of the Moluccas, made a present of a couple of Babirusas to the French naturalists, Quoy and Gaimard, when they visited him on their tour around the world. These two Babirusas were the first that were brought to Europe alive, arriving in 1820. Both animals became tolerably tame. They proved to be ex- tremely sensitive to cold. In March the female gave birth to a young one and immediately became very irritable and vicious. She allowed nobody to touch her offspring, tore the clothes of the keepers and snapped violently at those who approached her. Unfortunately the animals did not long survive, for the cold climate proved fatal to them. The little Pig, a male, grew rapidly and attained to a consid- able size in a few weeks. It died before it was two years old. Later, other living Babirusas reached of the lower jaw are erect on the fore part of the side of the upper jaw, and the third, which is long at the root, begins on the lower jaw and extends along it to the mouth. The small eyes are prominent, like those of the Hippopotamus; the disk on the snout is enlarged and is of an ovoid shape, the longest diameter being horizontal. The skin is covered with very short and thinly set bristles, with the exception of whiskers and a spinal mane-like crest. The dentition con- sists originally of six incisors above and below, gigantic, longitudinally furrowed tusks, which bend directly upward, as they do with the Hogs, and six molars in each row, above and below. Thus there are forty teeth, of which, however, not only the mo- lars, but also a majority of the incisors, usually drop out, although the loss of the teeth is not uniform but varies in different individuals.

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