There lives a small pig that builds a house of grass, soft shoots for the bed and long stiff leaves for the thatched roof. But this is not the children’s story of the Three Little Pigs.
The real-life pig ventures out of this structure only to eat and poop in the early mornings and late afternoons. While other porcine species make nests to farrow, the pygmy hog, the world’s rarest and smallest pig, cannot survive without a roof over its head all year round. The wolf of habitat loss, paddy fields, tea gardens, and intense fires, has been blowing hard to bring the pig’s house down and devour the little animal for more than a century. From a range that once extended across the entire southern foothills of the Himalaya, by the 1990s, the species’ domain had shrunk to just one location in the world — Manas National Park of Assam.
Hitting the jackpot
In 1995, Goutam Narayan, in collaboration with Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, set up a breeding programme near Guwahati with six animals trapped in Manas.
“We hit the jackpot,” remembers Narayan. Three of the females were already pregnant, adding to the genetic diversity of the small founding stock.
The one-foot-tall hogs are extremely shy, but they are more than a handful. It takes two men to hold down each eight-kilogram pig to administer the annual inoculations. Even then, the staff suffers bites and gashes from boar tushes.
Boars and sows live in paddocks separated by gates of netting with regular L-drop latches. The animals learned to slide the bolts and escape into the neighbouring enclosures. Since they were marked with rice-grain-sized micro-chips, Narayan and his team identified and returned them to their respective paddocks. The staff fixed the latches to the top of the gates, and as an additional precaution, bound them with wire.
Large litters in captivity
Enjoying better nutrition in captivity, the sows had large litters. Within six years, “we had pigs coming out of our ears,” Narayan says. They ran out of space when their captive stock shot up to 72.
Narayan and veterinarian Parag Deka separated the sires from the pregnant sows, afraid the males might kill the young. But the boars were attracted by the sight, cries, and smells of piglets, staring through the net gates separating their enclosures.
Favourite foods
When a mother died a month after giving birth, the conservationists gave the piglets to the father who took care of them, grooming and bedding down in a mass of bodies in his grass house.
But his paternal instincts wouldn’t have kept him away from their food of human baby cereal constituted with milk. They provided him favourites such as boiled eggs, dates, and sweet potatoes. They also set his feeding trough out of reach of the piglets, to prevent them from eating an adult diet before they were ready.
While breeding the pygmy hog wasn’t without its share of heartaches, finding a secure wild habitat in an area rocked by insurgency proved harder. After the 2003 Bodo Accord, the conservationists chose potential sites for release, areas with plenty of grass and few humans or livestock. For five months, they prepared the animals to live independent lives in large enclosures with natural vegetation near Nameri National Park.
Of the nearly 400 piglets that survived to adulthood, 130 were released into the wilds of Sonai Rupai Wildlife Sanctuary and Orang and Manas National Parks. Some which were released into Barnadi Wildlife Sanctuary, the site of the species’ rediscovery in 1971, didn’t stay put. The former grassland had been planted with trees and converted into a woodland, inappropriate for the pygmy hog’s survival. Today, the largest population of about 150 thrives in Orang.
In the children’s story, the third pig’s sturdy brick house withstood the wolf’s huffing and puffing just as the breeding centre in Guwahati has stalled the porcine decline.
The real measure of success will be when the pygmy hogs’ homes of grass endure under the immense skies of the terai.
The writer is not a conservationista but many creatures share her home for reasons she is yet to discover.
