A Napa County woman was recovering after a wild boar attacked her in what a state wildlife official on Wednesday said was the first such unprovoked attack on record in California. This wild boar was killed two days after attacking a woman in rural Napa County. on Nov. 10, 2014. (Credit: Robert Wargowski) This wild boar was killed two days after attacking a woman in rural Napa County. on Nov. 10, 2014. (Credit: Robert Wargowski) The 50-year-old woman reported that she was out with her dogs in rural Gordon Valley (area map) when the boar came up behind her, hit her and knocked her down, according to Lt. Patrick Foy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “It had some pretty large tusks,” Foy said. When she tried to get up, the boar attacked her again. Eventually, the wild animal wandered away, and the dogs were uninjured. The woman was left with cuts to her legs, buttocks and arms in the Nov. 10 attack. She was hospitalized, released and recovering at home, Foy said. “It’s very, very unusual,” Foy said. “Very rare — I can’t even overemphasize how rare it would be.” Authorities do not know why the boar attacked, he said. Two days after the attack, the unidentified victim’s neighbor found the boar and fatally shot it. A rancher told KTLA sister station KTXL in Sacramento that he had shot the animal through the neck with a pistol. “I’m just glad to get rid of a bad pig, because that’s what he was,” Linda Bushey, a neighbor of the victim, told KTXL. The animal was identified by a major abscess in one of its front legs that had left it hobbling on three legs, Foy said. The carcass was taken into custody by Napa County’s animal control department, he said. Foy did not know exactly how big the animal was, but said wild boars in the state are typically several hundred pounds, sometimes as large as 450 pounds. Wild pigs or boars are not uncommon in rural areas of California below 2,000 feet in elevation, Foy said. They are not native and have descended from interbreeding between escaped domesticated swine and European wild boars that were introduced in the 1920s in Monterey County, according to CDFW’s “Keep Me Wild” page on wild pigs. Though the animals are not unusual, there has never been a recorded unprovoked attack on a human in state history, Foy said.

• published: 19 Nov 2014
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