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When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When it hands you wild boars, make sausages.

The island of Omishima, part of Japan’s Ehime Prefecture and located in the Seto Inland Sea, has a lot of great food to offer. Delicious sea bream comes from the surrounding waters, and the island is also home to some of Japan’s best orange orchards.

Omishima also produces pork, which is sort of unexpected considering that no one raises pigs on the island. So where does the meat come from? From wild boars that are culled by the citrus farmers.

See, wild boars aren’t necessarily known for their table manners, nor for their consciousness in paying for goods they help themselves to. Nevertheless, the animals seem to love those tasty Omishima oranges, and so they periodically force their way onto citrus farms to eat their fill, damaging the farms in the process. In order to protect the crops, sometimes the boars have to be killed, but rather than letting the sacrificed life go to waste, the three members of Omishima’s Boar-Use Squad had a better idea.

▼ We’re assuming those clenched fists are just a sign of energetic solidarity, and not a subtle declaration that they punch the boars to death.

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Thanks to the trio’s clever thinking, the culled animals are used to make sausages and bologna, under the brand Arakure Pork. 1,730 yen (US$16.80) gets you a 150-gram (5.3-ounce) pack of sausages, while 300 grams of bologna sells for 3,350 yen.

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Ads for the meat feature testimonials praising its flavor, which is said to be enhanced by the boars’ diet of citrus fruit and fallen acorns, a phenomena reminiscent of the citrus-enhanced sea bream that also comes from Ehime. And because any thorough marketing plan in Japan contains a bit of cuteness, the logo for Arakure Pork features a manga boar with a pirate hat, eye patch, and hook hand as a nod to the region’s pirate-rich history.

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If you’re looking to try some Arakure Pork for yourself, domestic orders for the sausages can be placed here, and the bologna is available here.

Source: Jin
Images: Guru Navi (edited by RocketNews24)

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he now has even more of a desire to bike across the Seto Inland Sea again.