I’d say your grandfather had a huge adrenalin rush from fear when he saw the sow attack your dad! Your dad was fortunate he was within earshot.
A lot of people don’t know that it’s not uncommon for sows to eat their own litters. Apparently they aren’t all born with maternal instincts.
Not long ago I was watching a nature program when they showed something that shocked me. A fox kit died and they showed the mother fox eating the body. I wasn’t shocked that it happened but that it was shown. That kind of reality isn’t common.
Yeah, some sows do eat their offspring. These tend to make it to the breakfast table a lot earlier than brood sows who succeed in delivering healthy litters. However even good mothers have stillborns and large litters can have an occasion stillborn or an weakling in a large litter that gets pushed away from an teat or just one that gets squished as the sow stands in the nest and resettles. That’s why it’s important to keep an carefully eye on the nursing sow for the first few days. Removal of the dead piglet is important so the good mother doesn’t develop “a taste” for “pork”
In nature, I imagine all animals have this instinct, mostly to keep the nest the clean of dead offspring(stillborn) or to remove an offspring that would be too weak to survive and the nutrients would be better given to an healthy littermate to thrive. And dead creatures could alert a pred
Mother
Nature can be cruel but she has to ensure her children live to ensure the next generation... and then the next. And she has many children to feed. And they all get hungry.
The Disney version or “anthropomorphizing” nature shows do a disservice to young viewers, especially urban and suburbans youths who will never see the wonders, and the horrors of Nature in the raw. Add in the ruse of the “villain” in these shows is usually Man. Usually in the pursuit of hunting, development of wild territory(pollution or expansion of suburbia) or of late, “Global Warming”
Kudos to the show that allowed the fox eating it’s young. It’s all part of “nature’