I have hunted numerous hogs both here in the US and in the rocky scablands of north China. Mainly used a takedown recurve bow with 70lb draw. Also in a North Chinese tradition that was adopted from the Mongols, domestic animals are often, and preferably culled by "free-range harvesting" as opposed to traditional slaughter in an abattoir. An arrow would be fired at close range straight through the base of the skull of the animal that was to be eaten. Quick and unsuspecting it would deliver a near instant kill and the animal's body would not be flooded with the stress hormones from a traditional slaughter by exsanguination that many Chinese believe renders the meat unhealthy to eat. And wounded hogs CAN and WILL be a potentially lethal threat to the hunter. Plenty of stories and scars from my family's neck of the woods from huntsmen who have killed boars and sold them on the highly limited personal-owned markets of the 1970s and 1980s. They used bows and bolt action rifles and not all hunts were clean kills and those hunters who lived to tell the tale often carried with them the gore marks of their near-death experiences. Most of the archery hunts I have been on I had been on horseback when making the approach and firing the shot. Not because it looked badass but because being on horseback allows far easier escape in case something goes very wrong.
All this talk of hog hunting just immediately brought to my mind of a movie which features some of the most intensive and prolonged footage of what a traditional boar hunt looks like. The movie is titled "Barbarossa" and it tells the story of the attempt by Emperor Frederick I Hohenstauffen aka Barbarossa to bring all of Italy under his control in the 1170s, the peak of the Crusades, and the formation of the Lombard League by a blacksmith turned warrior named Alberto da Guessano which defeats the Germanic army at the battle of Legnano.
The beginning of the movie shows the Emperor and his knights pursuing a wild boar through the forest. Subsequently a lance hurled into it's flanks failed to kill the animal outright and the leader of the Holy Roman Empire was saved from death at the last second at the tusks of the enraged boar by a young Alberto, who had been stalking the same boar through the undergrowth with a crossbow. The following exchange between the young peasant boy and the most powerful king in Europe whom he just saved was one of the most memorable moments in film history...
Alberto (aiming his reloaded crossbow at Frederick, who had just gotten up after being pursued by now dead boar): "Stop!...Don't come any closer!.......I told you to stop!"
Emperor Frederick: "I am not a wild boar. I am your emperor!"
Alberto: "You are...........Barbarossa???"
Emperor Frederick: "Is that what they call me here? (Chuckles)...Yes, and you?"
Alberto: "I am Alberto da Guessano...Son of Giovanni...Milanese and Blacksmith.
Emperor Frederick: (takes a beautiful and ornate dagger from his belt and gives it to the boy as a gift): "Well blacksmith...Take this dagger...It will serve you when you become a man".
Ironic that years later, it would be this same boy who will thwart Frederick's ambitions to bring the Italo-Norman city states under his control and revive the glory of Charlemagne. And even more ironic, Frederick did not die in battle or at the tusks of a boar, but by drowning, as his army crossed the Salef River in Anatolia on their way to join up with Richard The Lionheart on the Third Crusade.