How To Catch a Pig

Great story as we celebrate Independence Day:

chicagotribune.com
Pigs in a pen deliver lesson about freedom
John Kass

July 4, 2010

Every Fourth of July we Americans celebrate our liberty and our independence from an oppressive, overreaching government.

We do this through wonderful, time-honored rituals.

We wave the flag. We shoot off fireworks. We barbecue and eat watermelon in the shade. Someone brings out a radio or a tiny TV and soon we're enjoying baseball (or the World Cup).

We drink some beer and the kids gather round and sit upon the grass and listen to our stories. But few, if any of us, tell children of the most important Independence Day story of all:

How to Catch Wild Pigs.

The Americans who won independence with their blood and sacrifice didn't have to tell their kids how to catch wild pigs. They knew. Their kids knew.

But these days, especially now, our children need to know. But this sort of thing won't be taught in school. It's too subversive.

If you're one of these people who don't want to know how to catch wild pigs, you should stop reading this immediately. You might be a vegetarian. Or it might upset you for other reasons.

But the wild pigs have been on my mind lately, with federal government growing and growing. In the last decade, under a Republican and then a Democrat in the White House, the federal authority has grown beyond imagining.

Which brings me back to the story of the feral pigs.

I first read about it on the Internet a few years ago by an unknown author who deserves the thanks of every American. And I used the idea at the tail end of a column about the politics of the baby boomers.

When they were young, the boomers smoked pot in the streets, listened to Dylan and dreamed of taking great risks. But now they're old, and with age comes fear and it's become easier to yearn for the embrace of the federal leviathan.

Young people — I'm talking about teenagers like my sons — have no understanding of how things were before the cameras were everywhere, before the president ran the banks and the automobile industry and just about everything else.

So this Fourth of July, I'm going to tell my boys my own version of how to catch wild pigs.

Wild pigs are crafty creatures. They live free in the wilderness. They're cunning, and they're quick. And they have tusks. So they're dangerous.

When my father fought the Nazis in Albania during World War II, the Greek Army starved in those hard winter mountains. Theirs wasn't the hunger of missing a breakfast or a snack. They missed days and days of breakfasts, lunches and dinners while fighting battles in the cold.

One morning, another soldier spotted some boar tracks in the snow. He took a pack mule and a rifle, promising the guys he'd be back by sunset with dinner.

They found the soldier three days later, frozen solid, all but cut in half by the tusks. The giant boar was dead. The mule was dead.

They ate the boar and the mule — starving armies don't waste good meat — but nobody tracked wild pigs after that.

Even so, pork is a scrumptious and traditional Fourth of July food as we celebrate American freedom and liberty, serving barbecue on patriotic red, white and blue paper plates.

The thing is, if you want to catch wild pigs, please don't try to chase them down. They'll get angry. You might get hurt.

Don't track them like some hunter. Use your head, like a crafty Washington politician or bureaucrat.

Don't pursue them.

Instead, bribe them. With corn.

I'm told that if you just pour a few buckets of corn on the ground, sooner or later, the wild pigs will come trotting through the woods.

First, they'll sniff the corn and run away. Eventually, though, they'll find it delicious. The best part is that they'll tell all their friends. Soon you'll have a whole herd of them scarfing what they think is free corn.

Then, put up one side of strong fence. Naturally, the wild pigs will run away. But soon, they'll drift back to the corn.

A few weeks later, put up the second length of fence. They'll disappear, but they'll return, because they're used to the program. Then the third side. But keep spreading that corn. It's part of their routine.

Finally, it's time to put up the fourth side of the fence, the business side, the side with a gate.

Just keep adding corn, and soon they'll trot through the woods and through the gate. All you have to do is close the door.

They won't even notice they've been caught. That's when you begin the process of domestication.

The problem is that a plain fence can be so boring. So let's dress it up, say with a little placard over the gate. Perhaps we should inscribe fancy words on it, too.

What comes to mind is an expression often attributed to a wise Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about the American experiment with freedom and liberty after it began more than 200 years ago.

No matter who said these words first, they're perfect for the plaque on our fence. Here goes:

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

Happy Independence Day.

jskass@tribune.com