A Boar in a Chinese Shop

When a boar invaded a Hong Kong mall, the incident was reported across the Internet. A large wild animal loose in a modern city is rare and clickworthy, especially when there's video.

But it wasn't long ago that undomesticated pigs were a regular feature of the urban landscape:

pigs are just fundamentally different from other farm animals like sheep or cows. Those are herbivores, and must be put out to pasture. Pigs, on the other hand, lived right among Europeans—in the streets or beside their homes eating trash.

In order to survive pigs are willing to eat slop (and another "s" word), and these dietary habits perhaps led to ancient prohibitions against eating pig. However, under controlled conditions swine have demonstrated both cleanliness and intelligence.

Despite pork's tastiness, texture, and relatively low cost, Americans prefer beef and chicken, perhaps because subliminally we recognize an animal that's closer to us than we would like to think.