Here’s an incident destined for this year’s Darwin Award/Dumb Criminal lists.
A drunken thief who broke into an Ulyanovsk region barn reeked so strongly of alcohol that he roused a giant sleeping pig, who proceeded to trample the intruder to death, regional police said in a statement.
The tragic break-in happened Oct. 31 in the village of Malaya Khomuter when the 38-year-old unemployed man smashed a hole in the barn of a 72-year-old local woman, police said.
Police say it was the stench of alcohol emanating from the burglar that awoke the 200-kilogram hog, who was sleeping in his own excrement at the time of the break-in. To be fair, Russian police often play up ironic angles in their press releases, so there may have been other factors that prompted the pig to attack.
The 3-year-old hog tore into the man’s leg with his tusks and dragged the burglar into the slop, police said. The elderly woman came running when she heard the man screaming, and she managed to free him from the clutches of the pig before calling police.
The intruder, however, had died of his injuries by the time police arrived, authorities said.
Police told Gazeta that the woman had raised the animal since it was a piglet and that the beast always listened to the pensioner.
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