The Ground Pig - Part 1

I asked a few people what they thought of my new blog, the major feedback I got was good but the honest feedback I got was that and I quote (Deany) "It's a little bit too much love and not enough Tipper Trucks and Sierra Leone for me" I was also advised that people would want to know more about the day to day experience of living here, so here's the first installment of an unfinished story for you:

We keep chickens in our back garden,  we have 1 cockerel (Buddy), 5 hens who don't have names and 6 chicks.  Here  one of the challenges of keeping the chickens, apart from tolerating Buddy's incessant squawking (I thing he is a little neurotic!) is predators; we have a cat that ventures into the compound every now and again, there are several large hawks (I have no idea of the species but they are large and grey and I am yet to capture them on camera) and the dreaded ground pig!

SK is Winston's brother, he first told me about the Ground Pig (which is pronounced like you are saying it with an 'Allo Allo' French accent), it is basically a very large rat.  It lives in a burrow like a rabbit and is nocturnal so can often be heard stomping around the compound at night looking for food.  SK and Winston would tease me exaggerating the size and ferocity of the animal. Not that it had any effect, I have no fear of rats or mice or any small mammals but I was intrigued, I was determined to get a glimpse of the Ground Pig.

Now we got the chickens about a month ago, we converted an old pigeon house to serve as a chicken house so at night they are tucked up nice and safe and are not really in danger (unless I forget to close the house.)  We made a decision to catch the Ground Pig when our neighbour and helper Abdul Rahman (This is his full name and how everyone addresses him, not Abdul but Abdul Rahman, and the say it really fast so it actually sounds like Adama, which is a girl's name!) was digging a mound for me to plant my tomatoes, a Ground Pig ran out and escaped through a hole in the compound wall.  The neighbours killed it and there was a big hullabaloo because they were refusing to give any of the animal to Abdul Rahman as they themselves wanted to cook and eat it.  They agreed to once I spoke to them (as it is my compound and I am older than all of the people involved they were obliged to share the rat with Abdul Rahman if I asked them to.)

The following day Hadja (Winston's sister who lives with us and helps me survive here) told me that she had heard another Ground Pig during the night scampering around the rubbish heap.  Abdul Rahman went about digging up the animal's burrows trying to find and catch the thing.  He was just putting his arm right down the hole without any regard for his fingers.  I felt it was my duty to warn him about the risk of Rabies, Lassa Fever and any other rat related diseases and received a blank look and a chorus of laughter from both him and Hadja - I think that people here overcome so much that thinking about these relatively remote illnesses (compared to Typhoid, Malaria e.t.c) is just a waste of time to them.  Anyway he dug around the tomato patch to no avail, Plan B, the trap…..

He brought 2 lengths of thick bamboo, 4 thick twigs some string, a pointed metal rod and some cassava (a root vegetable popular in West Africa) for bait. He constructed the trap as demonstrated in the photos:

Abdul Rahman with the materials to make the Congomi trap

One of the flexible twigs is tied inside the bamboo and bent round to create the tension required to set the trap

The two finished traps.

Springing the trap in the evening (once the chickens are in bed so the trap doesn't catch them instead!

The sprung trap: the idea is that you put your bait inside the bamboo beyond the small vertical twig, where there are 2 holes with string coming out of the bamboo to the left of the twigs is a noose, the Ground Pig will, in theory, knock the twig and set off the trap, the small horizontal will be disturbed and the large bent twig will try to straighten and tighten the noose trapping the Ground Pig. 

 See the hole for the Ground Pig to enter.

Well, I woke this morning to find that our crafty Ground Pig friend has foiled our plans (or Abdul Rahman has not made/set the traps correctly) as all the cassava had been eaten but no Ground Pig...the saga continues!