Advertisement
Published: March 19th 2007
Edit Blog Post
Sangliers
This is one of the wild pigs in the parc, the one who followed us around. Monday morning Florent and I drove to Louviers, met his mom at her house, and then headed on to a 'parc des animaux', a park/fenced in forest area about 45 minutes from Louviers.
We arrived, unlocked the gate, and entered. The moment we were inside we were greeted by five men with walking sticks apparently walking around looking for something. They all had very focused and determined looks on their faces as they trudged through the forest in our irection. A wiry guy who seemed to be the leader of the gang gave us instructions in a brusque rapid French that I did not completely understand. We drove ahead on the rough road until we arrived at a set of shacks/sheds and parked.
There was a pen nearby with a dozen or so wild pigs. In the distance in the forest we could see another pack of wild pigs, and quite a few deer (much smaller than the deer you see in North Carolina).
There were a few wild pigs who were not in the pen, not far away, but were sort of hanging around us waiting, apparently, for us to do something interesting, or for us the
The Animal Park
The park is in fact private land that is timbered every so often; at the same time it serves as a sanctuary for these pigs. There began only 5 pigs in the parc, and they multiplied up to 180. Now there are maybe 50, the others being sold or sent to forest areas to be readmitted into the wild. feed them.
We did neither. Ironically, we did the same thing--watching and waiting for them to do something interesting.
Shortly thereafter a woman arrived, and even before Florent told me that this woman was the wife of the man we had encountered earlier I could tell it was so just by her energy and her demeanor. She was just as hurried.
She backed the back of the C-15 Truck up to the shed and opened the rear to show the cache piled high with trash bags.
We began to unload the bags. They smelled rotten—because for the most part they were filled with rotten foodstuffs. This was the first time that I understood what Florent had been telling me the day before about ‘unloading and sorting the food for the pigs.’ All of this food was expired food from local supermarkets, butchers, bakers, florists even. It was all in trash bags, set aside for this woman to come and collect, and then bring to the pig sanctuary. And now it was our task to separate it all.
(Mary, I thought of you and your pigs throughout this whole experience).
First, we designated a bag
Sorting the feed
Separating food into containers: veggies, meat, bread, and pastries. specially for Flo and I that would later be filled with items that were still edible that we would take with us back to the house and consume (this made me realize that all of the food I had consumed up to this point at our house was ‘gratuit’ as well).
I was pretty grossed out by this whole process, especially going through the meat remains and bones, picking out the chunks of meet that would go in the pig trough. But at the same time I was intrigued and excited. For people who know me I like to recycle things. I like to consolidate things, make use of things, buy used things, use things up. So this was like Christmas morning in a sense. “You mean everything is free? No way!” I was very excited.
We now have packaged meat stocked up for the rest of my stay here in France.
Once we finished separating all of the items (including atleast 5 dozen baguettes and 50 packages of baked goods), we began collecting wood for a fire that would be lit nearby. We built the fire, put gas to it and lit it. Then went in a
small cabin and ate lunch, which consisted of bread (bought at the bakery that morning), smoked chicken (from the trash), confit foie gras (dumster), and expired chocolate pudding snacks for desert. Oh-and a drink that was a combination of white wine and a bit of mulberry syrup made from wild berries from the animal park.
Then we went outside, piled all of the trash up onto the bonfire, and watched it burn. Very ecological. All the while the biggest pig in the park hung around watching what we were doing, occasionally approaching us asking for food or tipping over the gasoline cane to try and get a drink.
Florent and his mother do this once or twice a month as a community service and as a substitution for grocery shopping. Superb.
That evening Flo and Olivier, my other housemate, ventured out into the neighborhood to track down some wood. Wood is apparently a very valuable commodity here, it is very expensive. They found some by the river, already chopped, and has come in handy in the cold evenings to fuel our fire.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.081s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 7; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0621s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
mary and lori
non-member comment
piggies!
that is so great and of course I would love this story. the food situation sounds a bit dire, however. yikes!!! xoxoxo