A pig named Bruce held an elderly woman hostage in her home in eastern Australia after she befriended the juvenile swine, which is the size of a Shetland pony.

The domesticated hog ran amok on Caroline Hayes’s property at Uki in a regional area of northern NSW after wandering in from an adjacent rainforest where it had been left to live in the wild by its previous owners a few weeks ago.

Ms Hayes, 63, said she began feeding Bruce 10 days ago when he first arrived at her property after taking a shine to her 70-year-old neighbour’s garden.

The pensioner fed the year-old pig fruit from the local markets and he had been living a relatively happy co-existence with other animals on her property, including her pet dog and horse along with various other wildlife including wallabies, goannas and snakes.

Ms Hayes had even nursed Bruce back from ill health, putting cream onto his infected eye. “When I first saw it, it had 15 ticks in its eyes which I actually took out with tweezers," she told Times Online.

But by 4am (AEST) on Monday their friendship had soured when Bruce – a white boar pig weighing approximately 175 pounds (80kg) – began ramming Ms Hayes’s bedroom door, grunting loudly and demanding to be fed. He became so aggressive that the pensioner could not leave her bedroom in order to go to the outside toilet.

“He was head-butting the door really hard, and snorting really loudly,” Ms Hayes said.

“But I really needed to go to the toilet so I opened the door and he pushed me so hard I fell over. So I picked up a broom handle to kind of push him away, and he snapped it in half.”

In the melee Bruce bit Ms Hayes’s leg and arm. “I was so scared I stayed in my room for about two hours until I couldn’t wait to go to the toilet anymore.”

She was finally able to make a run for the lavatory by coaxing the pig outside with food that she threw down the back of the garden.

Throughout the next few hours Bruce proceeded to trash her garden, dragging a mattress out of a garage and ripping it to shreds, and also – rather cleverly – rolling up a doormat with its snout.

In desperation, Ms Hayes called rangers from the local Murwillumbah Council who tried to coax the pig into a dog cage, but the cage was too small and Bruce only got half way in before escaping to the bottom of the property.

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