A pet that couldn’t be tamed
Austin Riley raised Waylon the warthog from birth, said Peter Holley in Texas Monthly. Then one day, the 250-pound animal decided to kill him.
BY THE AGE of 30, a time when most people are just beginning to think about their mortality, Austin Riley had already conquered his fear of death. He’d come exceedingly close to dying on multiple occasions, including a few months before his first birthday, when doctors discovered a golf ball–size tumor growing inside his infant skull. He would go on to spend much of his childhood in and out of hospitals, enduring highrisk brain surgeries and grueling recoveries. Then, in his mid-20s, he was nearly killed by a brain hemorrhage that arrived one night without warning, unleashing the worst pain he’d ever felt. He emerged from that experience reborn, feeling lucky to be alive and convinced that his life had been spared by God.
So, as he sat in a pool of his own blood on a beautiful October evening in 2022, he couldn’t help but acknowledge the morbid absurdity of his current predicament. He’d spent decades conquering brain injuries only to be killed while doing mundane chores on his family’s 130-acre Hill Country ranch in Boerne, Texas. “After all I’d been through,” he said, “I just couldn’t believe that this was how it was going to end.”
As he slumped against a fence and his mangled body began to shut down, Austin’s mind went into overdrive. He thought about his girlfriend, Kennedy, whom he’d never get a chance to marry, and the children he’d never be able to raise. He thought about how much he loved his parents and how badly he wished he could thank them for the life they’d provided. He thought about the land stretched out before him, a rustic valley accentuated by crimson and amber foliage that seemed to glitter in the evening light, and realized it had never seemed more beautiful than it did in that moment.
But mostly, he thought about the animal that had just used its razor-sharp, 7-inch tusks to stab him at least 15 times. The attack had shredded his lower body and filled his boots with blood, and then left gaping holes in his torso and neck. Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack.
But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.
“For years, that animal trusted me every day and I trusted him,” Austin said. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into his life, and he decided to kill me.”
AUSTIN, WHO SPENDS most days on his own, working with his hands, feels like a throwback from another era. Ruggedly handsome, with a fiveo’clock shadow and head full of unkempt brown hair, he favors beaten-up boots and Wrangler jeans and looks like he could’ve stepped out of a ’70s Marlboro ad. Though he’s partially paralyzed on his left side from a botched brain surgery decades earlier, he has a confident strut and refers to himself as “farm-boy strong.”
When it comes to animals, a softer side emerges. Animals have been a part of Austin’s life for as long as he can remember. Because of the threat of a seizure stemming from a traumatic brain injury, Austin wasn’t allowed to play organized sports, nor could he roughhouse at the swimming pool each summer or attend sleepovers at friends’ homes. He did have access to something that other children lacked, however: exotic animals. While other kids had dogs and cats, Austin had a pet ostrich, a white-tail and a fallow deer, hogs, a mastiff, a Lab, and a dachshund—all of whom followed the little boy around the ranch.
Austin’s father, Shane, spent much of his career working in oil and gas when Austin was young, but his passion was for his ranch, which he stocked with unusual animals from faraway places. After Austin’s second brain surgery, his parents decided to relocate to their Hill Country homestead full-time.
“He was never inside and didn’t like to play video games,” Gail Riley, Austin’s mother, recently recalled. “He wanted to be outside with the animals, hanging out, playing hide-and-seek, learning how to feed and care for them. Austin loved the animals and the animals always seemed to love him.”
But there was one animal that Austin poured more of himself into than any other: Waylon. Their bond formed on a cold December night in 2017, seconds after the tiny warthog took its first breath. The piglet’s mother had died in labor, but Austin immediately assumed her place, cradling the hamster-size infant in one hand and a bottle of milk in the other. Austin decided to name the rambunctious warthog as an homage to another unruly figure, outlaw country legend Waylon Jennings. “I just kinda became his parent, his dad, really,” Austin said. “Early on,
I’d take him with me through the drivethrough at Whataburger, and he’d sit in the front seat, happy as can be.”
Waylon soon grew to be “250 pounds of pure protein,” as Austin likes to say—more than an average-size NFL linebacker. By then, Austin had moved him to a large pen a few hundred yards away from the family home. On particularly beautiful days, he liked to lie on the ground in the enclosure, listening to sports radio and watching the clouds pass by. Inevitably, Waylon would lie down beside him, gingerly resting his enormous, wart-covered head on Austin’s thigh. They could remain that way for five or six hours at a time.
THE NOTION THAT a warthog could be a friendly sidekick can be traced to Pumbaa, the lovable Lion King character known for popularizing the phrase “hakuna matata,” a Swahili expression meaning “no worries.” On the ruthless
African savanna, however, where warthogs are native, they exist in an almost perpetual state of worry. Their wariness and quick trigger have helped to turn them into formidable opponents for some of the world’s most fearsome predators.
Warthogs’ lower tusks protrude from muscular jaws like blades on a scythed chariot. Adding to their terror is the reality that a warthog stab wound isn’t a clean form of penetrative trauma. The tusks’ hooked design ensures they cause even more damage coming out than they do going in. Despite their menacing appearance and deadly hardware, warthogs typically display limited aggression toward humans. But unlike domestic animals, which have been bred for generations to exhibit behaviors that humans deem favorable, wild animals are capable of dramatic shifts in behavior, even when they appear tame.
On the October evening that he almost killed Austin, Waylon greeted Austin at the front gate of his pen, happily accepted some back scratches, and trotted beside him to a nearby feeding trough. About 20 minutes after he’d arrived, Austin had just finished feeding Daisy, a potbellied pig he’s owned since she was a piglet, in an adjacent pen. He re-entered the warthog enclosure and was walking toward his all-terrain vehicle, parked at the entrance of the pen.
Suddenly, his right leg crumpled behind him and he found himself tumbling forward, landing some 15 feet away. As he gathered his bearings, Waylon’s bulky, gray head emerged from a swirling cloud of dust near his feet. Before Austin could stand up and run, Waylon thrust his face between the rancher’s lower legs and began violently swinging his tusks back and forth. One tusk stabbed Austin twice in the right calf and another stabbed him once in the left calf. His right leg was gashed from the knee to his upper thigh, an injury so wide Austin was later able to put his hand inside it.
Before Austin could fight back, Waylon had hooked his owner four more times in the upper left leg and genitals. Several more stab wounds to his upper right leg followed in rapid succession. Instinctively, Austin grabbed onto Waylon’s tusks, slicing open his wrist. After three more gashes in his abdomen, Austin tried to put Waylon in a headlock. But the animal jerked up, plunging his tusk into Austin’s voice box, leaving a quarter-size hole in his neck from which a piece of an artery dangled like a grisly necklace. “At that point, I just knew I couldn’t let him hit my head or get on top of me,” Austin said. “That’s what I kept thinking.”
Somehow, when he needed it most, Austin caught a break. Lying on his back and bleeding out, he might have looked dead to Waylon. The warthog relented, momentarily. Pumped full of adrenaline, Austin staggered to his feet and clambered halfway up an 8-foot fence using a foothold. It would take five tries to swing his body over the top. Once outside the pen, Austin made a disheartening discovery: His phone had fallen out of his back pocket. Afraid he’d lose consciousness soon, Austin realized survival depended upon him reentering the pit with the beast and crossing 20 feet of blood-soaked dirt to retrieve his phone and call for help, all without Waylon noticing.
Once Waylon had trotted a little ways in the other direction, Austin seized his opportunity. After climbing down the fence, he dragged himself over to his phone and then stumbled to a nearby gate. Steadying his legs and trying not to panic, he struggled to open two latches as Waylon circled back around and started charging. Slipping past with moments to spare, Austin collapsed on the ground as the warthog lunged at him from the other side of the fence, threatening to break through. “He almost looked like he was possessed,” Austin recalled. “Like he’d turned evil.”
Austin knew his survival was far from assured. His service rarely worked near the back of Waylon’s pen, but on this day, he was shocked to find a single bar of coverage. For Austin, it felt like a miracle. As his dad picked up the phone moments later, Austin told him he was “bleeding out.” When he made it to his son, Shane’s first instinct was to push the tissue back inside Austin’s body, as if trying to put his son back together.
DOCTORS WOULD LATER tell the Riley family that, by the time Austin reached University Hospital in San Antonio, 30 minutes away, he’d lost nearly half his blood; any more, they assured relatives, and he would’ve died. Even more shocking was the fact that Waylon’s tusks had come within millimeters of severing multiple arteries. It would take doctors 10 surgeries to keep Austin alive.
More than a year after the attack, Riley still has no idea what caused his favorite animal to turn on him. Waylon’s pen mate, an easygoing female warthog named Peaches, wasn’t in heat and Waylon wasn’t being cornered when he attacked. Extensive therapy has helped Austin work through traumatic memories and flashbacks that plagued him for the first year after the attack. He is grateful that he didn’t stop fighting, not just because he gave himself another shot at life, but because—in a twisted Texas warrior sort of way—he survived an encounter with an animal that is built to battle lions. How many individuals can say that?
The day after the attack, Austin’s parents asked a family friend to execute Waylon. After the killing, Waylon’s head was cut off and sent to a lab so he could be tested for rabies. The results came back negative. His slaughter was partly an act of revenge, but also an acknowledgment that the warthog could never be allowed around humans again. Shane and Gail deleted all photos of the animal from their phones. Unwilling to be in the presence of a warthog ever again, Austin had Peaches relocated to another ranch.
Recently, Austin began walking through the warthogs’ former pen multiple times each day to feed Daisy, the potbellied pig. During our last meeting, he showed me his phone, where he’s saved hundreds of images and videos of Waylon. He told me it had been a while, but he had finally found himself able to look at some of them again.
Gradually, feelings of shock and betrayal are being replaced by acceptance and understanding, he explained. As we looked at sweet-natured pictures of the pig and his owner trading nuzzles and belly scratches, I asked Austin if he thinks Waylon regretted attacking him before he was killed. He went silent for a few seconds, mulling over my question before responding. “I don’t think it was Waylon who attacked me,” he said. “I was attacked by a warthog.”
Adapted from a story that first appeared in Texas Monthly. The original article can be found online at texasmonthly.com. Used with permission.