Javelinas, also known as collared peccary, are tough desert dwellers with a fearsome reputation. “In the old days,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt in 1893, “it had been no uncommon thing for a big band to attack entirely of their own accord, and keep a hunter up a tree for hours at a time.”
William T. Hornaday, turn-of-the-twentieth-century director of the New York Zoological Park, wrote that “An enraged peccary, athirst for blood, is to any one not armed with a rifle or first-rate spear a formidable antagonist.”
(Both are quoted in Dangerous to Man, by Roger Caras.)