A fun fact about pigs, hogs, boars, et al.: They all fall under the Sus genus, and you are about to find out why.
Shakira, yes, Shakira, says a pair of wild boars recently robbed her while she strolled through a Barcelona park with her son. This news comes via the BBC, which recounts the episode as Shakira shared it in her Instagram Stories on Wednesday. “Look at how two wild boar which attacked me in the park have left my bag,” she told her fans, presumably waving the purse around for emphasis. “They were taking my bag to the woods with my mobile phone in it. They’ve destroyed everything.”
She then turned to her son, her primary witness in the assault, asking him to corroborate her account, the BBC reports: “Milan, tell the truth. Say how your mummy stood up to the wild boar.”
Whether or not Milan backed her up is presently unclear, as the Story in question has since expired, but I have no reason to doubt Shakira’s story. (Though I am dying to know how she got her purse back from the thieving swine.) As CNN reminds us, “her hips don’t lie,” and then, wild boars are a known menace. In 2016, the BBC reports, Spanish police fielded 1,187 calls calls reporting hogs gone wild, “attacking dogs, plundering cat-feeders, holding up traffic, and running into cars.” According to the New York Times, the feral-swine program at the Department of Agriculture estimates that wild pigs do at least $1.5 billion, and maybe as much as $2.5 billion, in damage every year — and that’s in the U.S. alone. They dig up crops and gardens; they’ve pushed other species to the brink of extinction; they possess the destructive power to take out whole military planes. They’ll even do murder!
All of which to say, the hogs are out of control: First they were merely feral; then they got their hands on some cocaine; now they are mugging celebs in city parks? Where does it end, hogs? Where does it end.