POLAND : Hog Turns Up Its Hairy Nose at Southland

WARSAW —  Yo, Southern California, get a load of this one: One of Poland’s gnarliest dudes, a studly type with a mean tan and bad-boy attitude, says no thanks, out of my hairy face, hasta la vista!

The wildly popular Guziec, as he is known here, had long planned to blow off the draggy Polish clime for the pearly sands of paradise 6,000 miles to the west. Fame, fortune and mobs of adoring fans were said to await him in a posh San Diego neighborhood.

But when the time came last month to split, Guziec was outta here. He fled on foot just as his ride to the airport pulled up, and he has been in defiant seclusion ever since. Warsaw authorities say he is holed up in the woods south of the capital.

Now into its sixth week, Guziec’s pigheadedness has inspired a nation.

“Although about half of Poles dream of going to America, Guziec, who was born in Warsaw of African heritage, doesn’t even consider going to California,” wrote one Polish newspaper, reflecting widespread astonishment among Poles. “His patriotism has touched a lot of people.”

Guziec (pronounced goo-zyets) is Polish for wart hog.

Indeed, Guziec is a wart hog--100 pounds of stubborn swine with an ugly flat face and pocked cheeks only a zoologist could love. He is cousin to Pumbaa, the singing varmint of Disney’s “Hakuna matata” fame. But, as most any Pole will explain, that plays only a small part in his celebrity.

“I am getting telephone calls from people saying let him stay,” said Andrzej Zielinski, an official at the Warsaw Zoo who has the unenviable task of persuading Guziec to honor his engagement at the San Diego Zoo. “They don’t want us to catch him. They want him to stay in Poland.”

One elderly man, living on a monthly income of about $200, offered to contribute a quarter of his earnings if the zoo found Guziec a female companion. The two of them, the man insisted, should then be allowed to frolic freely.

“Maybe it was his destiny to be free,” said Marianne Wilczynska, a self-described animal lover who works at the zoo and has chickens, geese and other pets at her home outside Warsaw. “He who wants to be free should be free.”

That Guziec wants to be free is beyond dispute. He escaped from a quarantine center on the forest’s edge after knocking over a zoo employee, squeezing through a window, breaking down a door, dashing through an open gate and tearing apart a chain-link fence. He then darted 30 mph through a botanical garden and disappeared into the woods.

“I have worked here for 25 years, and I have never seen anything like it,” said Zielinski, who heads the zoo’s breeding program and was loading Guziec and four other wart hogs destined for San Diego into travel crates when the mad dash took place.

But at $5,000 a head, Zielinski said, there is no dispute--at least within zoo management--whether the wart hog should be free, particularly since it has been promised to a paying customer.

Zielinski has hired hunters with dart guns, released specially trained dogs into the forest and offered a reward for Guziec’s capture, but so far he has only one faraway sighting of Guziec to show for the effort.

“He immediately saw me and ran away,” Zielinski lamented.

Zielinski has been so distressed by the escape that he has taken up smoking. During the first days after the April 2 breakout, he was unable to sleep.

In a new tack, he recently set traps with a cornucopia of Guziec’s favorite eats--apples, bananas, tomatoes, carrots and beets--and has arranged for Polish soldiers to immediately deploy in the forest if the fugitive is spotted again.

But the despondent zookeeper said he has just two more weeks before the woods become so overgrown that the hunt will have to be put off until autumn.

Georgeanne Irvine, spokeswoman for the San Diego Zoo, said the zoo is prepared to wait as long as it takes to get Guziec, who is supposed to join the four others from Warsaw in a new breeding program.

Irvine described the outpouring of sympathy for Guziec, regardless of the animal’s gender, as touching. But she warned that the wayward wart hog really needs to get home to San Diego before winter, which will be too harsh for a species native to southern Africa to pull through in the Polish wild. “We really hope they find her,” Irvine said. “I personally think she would like Southern California better once she gets here.”