A grenade in the pig pen

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

That's a funny-looking truffle! Perhaps that's what the Enoree, S.C., pig was thinking when it unearthed an old grenade that had been buried in its pen since the Second World War.

Farmer Eugene Hunter Jr. spied the half-buried device while feeding the pigs. He told Fox Carolina that he immediately called 911. Once the police and bomb squad were on the scene, they were able to identify the grenade as a World War II Mark II. Luckily, this particular grenade was used for training and did not contain explosives or a blasting cap.

From time to time, however, a curious pig will unearth a live bomb. Back in 1997, the Scottish Daily Record reported an incident where a playful pig in Dunbar managed to dig up a live World War I mortar shell and ran around the field with the bomb in her mouth for a while before dropping it in a trough. And in 2009, the BBC reported that a herd of pigs in Wiltshire, England, worked together to unearth a live World War I bomb.

The farms were located on sites that were once training grounds, munitions dumps or firing ranges, respectively. BP