Clip of the Week: October 4, 2023

Reason #37,852 not to wander into the wilderness alone:

Mr. Farrier, the Colonial Secretary of Honduras [present-day Belize], while exploring the interior of the colony, was overtaken by a drove of peccaries, and was compelled to scramble up a tree, dropping his rifle in the performance. The whole pack gathered around his perch, grunting and sharpening their tusks.

Now the peccary is not only ferocious, but patient, and rather than let an object of its anger escape will wait about for days, so that the Secretary had before him only two courses—either to remain where he was until he dropped down among the swine from sheer exhaustion and hunger, or else to commit suicide at once by coming down to be eaten there and then.

The fact that waiting for the search party to arrive wasn’t an option tells you everything you need to know about being a colonial secretary.

While he was in this dilemma, however, what should come along—and looking out for supper, too—but a jaguar. Never was beast of prey so opportune, for the jaguar has a particular fondness for wild pork, and the peccaries know it, for no sooner did they see the great ruddy head thrust out through the bushes than they bolted helter-skelter, forgetting, in their anxiety to save their own bacon, the meal they were themselves leaving up the tree.

And you thought my puns were bad.

The jaguar was off after the swine with admirable promptitude, and the secretary, finding the coast clear, came down.

– The News and Herald, March 31, 1881

There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity. Mr. Farrier demonstrates this best not by running into a pack of wild peccaries by himself nor dropping his rifle, but by not keeping his big mouth shut about his somewhat embarrassing misadventure when got back home.