When Albert Schweitzer was in Africa running a volunteer hospital, he had a standing offer out to the natives that if they brought him an animal which they would otherwise have killed, he’d pay them for it. In such manner did he save numerous animal lives, create an entourage of assorted critters around him, and show the natives new possibilities of interacting with the local animals. He wrote a remarkable account of meeting a pig.
“One day a Negro woman brought me a tame wild boar about two months old. ‘It is called Josephine, and it will follow you around
like a dog,’ she said. We agreed upon five francs as the price. My wife was just then away for a few days. With the help of Joseph and n ‘Kendju, my hospital assistants, I immediately drove some stakes into the ground and made a pen, with the wire netting rather deep in the earth. Both of my black helpers smiled. ‘A wild boar will not remain in the pen; it digs his way out from under it,’ said Joseph. ‘Well, I should like to see this little wild boar get under this wire netting sunk deep in the earth,’ I
answered. ‘You will see,’ said Joseph. “The next morning the animal had already gotten out. I felt almost relieved about it, for I had promised my wife that I would
make no new acquisition to our zoo without her consent, and I had a foreboding that a wild boar would not, perhaps, be to her liking.
“When I came up from the hospital for the midday meal, however, there was Josephine waiting for me in front of the house, and looking at me as if she wanted to say: ‘I will remain ever so faithful to you, but you must not repeat the trick with the pen.’ And so it was.
“When my wife arrived she shrugged her shoulders. She never enjoyed Josephinet confidence and never sought it. Josephine had a very delicate sensibility about such things. In rime, when she had come to understand that she was not permitted to go up on the veranda, things became bearable. On a Saturday some weeks later, however, Josephine disappeared. In the evening the missionary met me in front of my house and shard my sorrow, since Josephine had also shown some attachment to him.
“‘I feel sure she has met her end in some Nero’s pot,’ he said.
‘It was inevitable.’
“With the blacks a wild boar, even when tame4 does not fall within the category of a domestic animal but remains a wild animal that belongs to him who kills it. While he was still speaking, however, Josephine appeared, behind her a Negro with a gun.
“‘I was standing,’ he said, ‘in the clearing, where the ruins of the former American missionary’s house are still to be seen, when I saw this wild boar. I was just taking aim, but it came running up to me and rubbed against my legs! An extraordinary wild boar! But imagine what it did then. It trotted away with me after it, and now here we are. So it your wild boar? How fortunate that this did not happen to a hunter who is not so quick-witted as
“I understood his hint, complimented him generously, and gave him a nice present.
Later, writing of the same boar, Schweitzer spoke of her coming to church and causing an uproar by behaving like a wild pig, but then gradually learning to “behave more properly in church.” Struck again and again by the spirit of this animal, Schweitzer wrote:
“How shall I sufficiently praise your wisdom, Josephine! To avoid being bothered by gnats at night, you adopted the custom of wandering into the boy’s dormitory, and of lying down there under the first good mosquito net. How many times because of this have I had to compensate, with tobacco leaves, those upon whom you forced yourself as a sleeping companion. And when the sand fleas had so grown in your feet that you could no longer walk, you hobbled down to the hospital, let yourself be turned over on your back, endured the knife that the tormentors stuck into your feet, put up with the burning of the tincture of iodine, with which the wounds were daubed, and grunted your sincere thanks when the matter was once and for all done with.