Warthogs typically forage in family “parties.” Contrary to popular belief, warthogs rarely, if ever, use their tusks to dig out food. They do use their dexterous snout to root underground. This action actually helps to aerate the soil, which helps promote plant growth.

Courtship behavior includes the following:
1. A chanting boar nudges the sow’s flanks
2. He sniffs her genital region.
3. He indulges in lateral displays and repeatedly attempts to rest his chin on her rump.
4. This “chin resting” stimulus causes a fully receptive sow to stand for the male.
5. Mating may last for up to 10 minutes.
6. The male’s corkscrew shaped penis fits into a grooved cervix in which a plug forms after copulation.

Mating occurs in the fall, and the female farrows (in pigs = “gives birth”) the following spring after a gestation period of 170-175 days. Young are born in a hole underground prepared by the mother. The piglets remain in the nest for approximately 10 days before following their mother in a closely-knit family group until she is ready to give birth again. After farrowing in isolation, young sows may rejoin her. In this way, larger matriarchal herds (sounders) are formed.

The main social units are solitary boars, bachelor groups and matriarchal sounders made up of one or more adult sows with their young. Fragmentation of larger mother-daughter groups leads to kinship units or clans comprising of a number of related sounders with overlapping home ranges. Home ranges include the following characteristics: feeding areas, water holes, wallows, resting sites and sleeping dens. Home ranges vary from 0.4-1.5 square miles. These areas are marked with lip gland secretions and pre-orbital gland secretions. The mating system appears to be a roving dominance hierarchy among the males within a clan area.

African wild pigs also support blood sucking tsetse flies, the carriers of trypanosomes that is responsible for sleeping sickness in man and ngana in domestic livestock. The Savanna tsetse fly is particularly partial to Warthogs, and the elimination of Warthogs and Bushpigs has played an important role in controlling ngana, which covers an area of Africa equivalent in size to the United States.

In Swahili, warthogs are called ngiri.

Birds, such as yellow hornbills, eat parasites off of warthogs. This is a symbiotic relationship – the bird has a constant food source and the warthog remains free of external parasites.