Wild hogs are fruit eaters for the most part, and their flesh is delicious. They are enormously abundant on the island of Tawi Tawi, where the durian tree abounds. The Moro inhabitants will not touch them, and as food is very plentiful during much of the year the island swarms with them, and they attain the largest size. Moros say that during the fruit season they become so covered with fat that if pursued for any length of time they fall, overcome by the heat and the running!
When I was in Tawi Tawi in 1901 with Dr. Bourns and a Filipino helper, one of us took a rifle along each morning when we went out to collect birds and in a few moments, after finishing his bird shooting for the day, was able to kill hogs enough to keep not only our party but the local Spanish garrison in meat, while the lard which our servants tried out lasted us for more than a year thereafter.
There are two animals in the Philippines which can with propriety be dignified by the name of “big game.” These are the wild carabao, which is still to be found in various parts of the archipelago, and the tamarau, a true buffalo of a species which occurs nowhere in the world except on the island of Mindoro.
The wild carabao is a formidable antagonist, hard to stop and a vicious fighter after he is once wounded. Under ordinary circumstances he is very wary and difficult to approach. It is highly important in hunting him to use bullets with great stopping power. A number of men have been killed in the Philippines by wild carabaos which they had severely wounded. The most recent case which has come to my knowledge was that of a Mr. Barbour, in Mindoro. He was an old hand at the game, and had killed fifty-odd specimens. He shot a bull three times and it dropped apparently dead. Walking close up to it he dropped the butt of his rifle to the ground between his legs, and held the barrel with his knees while trying to light a cigarette. Without the slightest warning the injured bull sprang to its feet and drove a horn completely through him, killing him instantly.
There is an interesting and unsettled question as to whether the wild carabaos of the Philippines are indigenous to the islands or are merely the descendants of imported animals which have made their escape from captivity. My own opinion is that both beliefs are true or, in other words, that we have both a native wild race and other carabaos just as wild and just as fierce which are the descendants of tame individuals. The ordinary wild bulls have comparatively short and thick horns, while the bulls of the species found in Nueva Ecija and in northern Luzón generally have long, slender, very sharp, strongly curved horns. I believe that the latter animals belong to the true native race.
Wild carabaos are found not only at various points in Luzón, but abundantly in Mindoro and the Calamianes Islands. They appear in considerable numbers in Masbate, Negros and elsewhere in the archipelago.
To the inexperienced hunters who are inclined to try to bring them down my advice is “Don’t!”
Few indeed are the men who have killed so much as a single specimen of the tamarau of Mindoro. It is a small jungle-inhabiting ruminant. Its color, when adult, is precisely that of the carabao. It is, however, a much smaller and more active animal. The bulls lose no opportunity to attack carabaos, both domesticated and wild, and in spite of their own inferior size kill them with apparent ease.
The tamarau is extremely muscular and when it charges, which it is prone to do on very slight provocation, bores a hole through the jungle vegetation, coming on with the speed and recklessness of a rhinoceros. Under such conditions it is excessively hard to stop, and when it pushes its charge home, woe be to the unlucky hunter. With rare exceptions it attacks when wounded if it so much as catches sight of a human being. Even when unmolested it not infrequently charges, without warning, when one gets unduly near. It feeds at night, and never lolls around in the water as does the carabao.
At the time I first came to the Philippines to collect natural history specimens in 1887, this animal was known only from travellers’ tales and from what purported to be a stuffed individual in the Dominican museum. It was certainly stuffed, being about as shapely as a kerosene barrel. Its skin looked so exactly like that of a carabao that uncharitable persons had suggested that it was an artifact.