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<\/p>\nCopperopolis, CA…Shortly, my wife and I are to receive a $1,400 free hand out from the government. This reminds me of a story about wild hogs. Over a century ago, in the hills of Appalachia, there existed a large drove of wild hogs that the locals could not catch. These hogs ran wild and free eating acorns and roots. They avoided human beings for hundreds of years. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Then, one day, a tall stranger with a beard and wide brim hat, rode into town on a buckboard with some rope and tools. He called for a meeting of the local people and offered to sell them all the wild hogs in three weeks. The people had a hard time believing him but agreed.<\/p>\n
Three weeks later, he returned and told the people he had all the hogs in a pen outside of town and he wanted payment. The people rushed to see and sure enough there were hundreds of hogs in a pen. They paid him as agreed, and as he was leaving town a small boy ran after the buckboard, shouting mister! mister! How did you catch those wild hogs? <\/p>\n
The stranger said:<\/p>\n
“The first day, I put out some corn and continued each day for a week. At first the hogs wouldn’t touch it. Then some of the younger ones did. They figured, if they didn’t eat the corn, some others would. The second week, I started building a pen around the corn. Now the older ones were eating the corn. They figured that if they didn’t, the young ones would. Soon all the hogs were eating the corn.<\/p>\n
At the end of the third week, I closed the gate. They raised quite a fuss, but it was too late. Son, I can catch any animal on the face of this earth, if I can first get them to take a free hand out,”<\/p>\n
Albert J. Segalla,
\nCopperopolis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copperopolis, CA…Shortly, my wife and I are to receive a $1,400 free hand out from the government. This reminds me of a story about wild hogs. Over a century ago, in the hills of Appalachia, there existed a large drove of wild hogs that the locals could not catch. These hogs ran wild and free […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25991,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_cbd_carousel_blocks":"[]","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,20,5,1,143],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-copperopolis","category-featured","category-government","category-news","category-opinion","last_archivepost"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Soapbox7.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116386\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.thepinetree.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}