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boar gives tyrone 300 stiches
“A boar decided he was going to show me who was boss — and he showed me!” That’s how Tyrone Fiegen of Garvin describes his encounter with a 600-pound boar last week which opened his thigh to the tune of 300 stitches. Fiegen, the 18-yearold son of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Fiegen, has been helping with general farm work at the Neil Horsman farm west of Tracy after school, Saturdays and summers. He said he has worked on farms and been around animals all his life and had been taught through the years that sows were usually more dangerous than boars when it came to dealing with pigs.
Late last Wednesday afternoon, Tyrone, Horsman and his son Mark had completed feeding the pigs on Horsman’s farm and were sorting sows when a boar got into the wrong “run.” Fiegen was using a whip and holding a panel in front of him while moving the boar down an alleyway when it suddenly turned on him.
The Garvin youth said he tried to stop the animal with the whip, but it kept coming.
“I really didn’t have time to do anything — it all happened so fast,” he said. “He just took his nose and batted the panel away.”
Fiegen says he doesn’t know for sure if the boar bit him in the thigh or hooked him with his tusks. Either way, he said, the animal literally picked him up off the ground twice, then walked away, leaving him with an eight-inch gash in his leg.
The Garvin youth said he was apparently in a state of shock, because he walked to the pickup and could feel no pain until after the Horsmans had rushed him to the emergency room at Tracy Hospital. At the hospital. Dr. James Kegel took him to the surgery room for a two-hour session under local anesthesia. Only about 25 of the stitches are visible from the outside, Fiegen said, since the rest were used to repair layers of muscle and tissue beneath the skin. Luckily, he said the boar missed an artery, although the gash was nearly to the bone.
