A 60-year-old woman was attacked by two adult wild boar in the northern city of Haifa on her way back home from grocery shopping Tuesday.
"The pain in my leg has mostly subsided today, but the terror didn't," Edna Engel told Ynet a day after the attack. "I had nightmares last night, and I woke up a few times in panic. It terrified me. I thought I was going to die. My life has become a nightmare, but I'm not going to give up."
"As I was going home with the groceries I bought, I parked the car and went into my yard holding two bags, and then I spotted a phenomenon that is not foreign to me, but this time around, it terrified me. I saw 15 little piglets, and next to them was their mother and two large boar. The mother looked at me and started snorting menacingly. I got scared, and decided not to go into the yard and started walking back to the car."
And then the wild boar began chasing her, and even though Engel tried to pick up the pace to avoid them, they kept pursuing her.
"Maybe the female spotted the bags with the food. I could sense them behind me and heard them sniffing loudly. I ran as fast as I could, and as a result, I twisted my ankle and shrieked in pain. One of the boars snatched a bag out of my hand, and all of its content spilled on the road. A second boar encircled me and tried to grab the other bag," Engel said.
"I felt like I was going to have a heart attack from all the running and the panic. I started screaming, 'Help, help.' The manager of a nearby cafe heard me and ran toward me. She was also frightened because she saw that the boars were determined to try to get the other bag, and they were aggressive. I walked into the cafe with her and felt like I was about to get a heart attack, and she helped me calm me down."
"Those 15 piglets I saw will grow up one day. We find ourselves fighting for our territory, as they grow by the numbers. They lost every ounce of fear, so they become very violent. I mean, a senior citizen like me should not lose all sense of personal security. I'm a tax-paying citizen who lived in Haifa for years. This isn't Tel Aviv here, we don't have that many attractions but we have a lot of flora, trees, and fresh air. So, if you take that away from me, I don't want to live in Haifa anymore."
The Haifa Municipality has yet to respond to a request for comment.