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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: January/February 2007
Javelinas claim a U.S. desert home
TUCSON--Encountering
a dozen peccaries during a dawn walk with her three Chihuahuas on December
7, 2006, Tracy Gordon, 34, of Tucson, was bitten, knocked down, and trampled.
One Chihuahua was critically injured. Another suffered a large bite on
the neck.
Arizona Game & Fish Department information
and education program manager Tom Whetten suggested that the javelinas
were protecting younger members of the herd.
Gordon "did exactly what she was
supposed to do by getting those dogs under control," Whetten told
Enric Volante and Jeff Commings of the Arizona Daily Star.
Whetten attributed the presence of the
javelinas in Gordon's suburban neighborhood to people who leave food out
for them.
"If we can get people to stop feeding,
we can stop having large herds in the metropolitan area," Whetten
said.
The attack on Gordon and her dogs was
the most serious human conflict yet with javelinas in the Tucson area,
but hardly the first. "Pima County Animal Care Center data released
last month show 17 incidents since November 2001 in which one or more
javelinas bit a person, including six bitings this year--more than in
any year since 2002," wrote Commings.
"All bites except one were serious
enough for the victim to seek medical treatment, rather than treat the
wound at home. Many of those injured were adults in their 40s or 50s,
although one man bitten last January was 76," Commings continued.
That middle-aged and older adults were
most often bitten may chiefly reflect the composition of the human population
where the incidents occurred, in recently developed upscale neighborhoods
with relatively few young children--or may hint that peccaries are less
inclined to live where children are often outside making noise.
Commonly considered "pigs,"
javelinas are actually peccaries, the most pig-like animals who are not
pigs.
"Though pigs and peccaries are classified
within the same order of mammals, they're in different families,"
explains nature writer Lauray Yule in her 2004 book Javelinas. "The
two families diverged about 38 million years ago: pigs evolved in the
Old World, peccaries in the New World."
Like elephants, camels, lions, and horses,
peccaries actually evolved in North America, but vanished during the Ice
Ages. Twenty-five-million-year-old fossil peccaries found in Nebraska
had skulls three feet long, longer than the entire bodies of modern peccaries.
Their descendants apparently downsized as they retreated south, away from
the advancing glaciers.
Old World pigs and modern javelinas, migrating
from Central America, appear to have reached the U.S. Southwest at almost
the same time. Spanish missionaries had been exploring and establishing
settlements in what is now the U.S. Southwest, often bringing pigs with
them, for nearly 200 years before two Jesuits mentioned javelinas between
1756 and 1767. Beaver trappers recorded the presence of javelinas in 1826,
wrote Yule, but the Smithsonian Institution did not identify javelinas
as a U.S. species until naturalist E.A. Mearns discovered them near the
Mexican border in 1907. The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed their existence
in 1931.
Since then, javelinas are often seen in
much of their range. Increased visibility roughly coincided with predator
control campaigns that in the mid-20th century extirpated Mexican gray
wolves, substantially diminished the puma population, and killed millions
of coyotes.
The human tendency to kill rattlesnakes might also have helped javelinas to establish themselves on the edges of fast-growing cities, since rattlesnakes can be a deadly rival for burrow space.