Several stories in recent weeks have emerged about wild boar. Together they paint a vivid picture of contradictions in everything from environmentalism to zoonotic diseases, as Claire Hamlett explains.

A wild boar has demonstrated a high level of intelligence and empathy by freeing two piglets trapped in a cage, according to a new paper published in Nature. Such rescue behaviour is an “extreme” form of prosociality only exhibited by a few other species. The story has gained wide media coverage, with newspapers lauding the ‘clever’ and ‘daring’ animal, assumed to be the piglets’ mother. But a number of other news reports in the last few weeks have highlighted the fractious relationship that humans usually have with wild boar (also called wild or feral pigs or hogs).

A number of countries are killing wild boar as populations grow and conflicts with farmers become more intense. The forest department of Kerala, India, is ramping up its efforts to kill boar that have been destroying the crops of those farming on the edge of the forest. A wildlife expert from Kerala Agriculture University said, “Wild pigs live in bushes and the rubber plantations in rural Kerala provide good habitat to the animal. It is the dumping of food waste by the roadside and vacant lands that attract wild pigs. The animals proliferate in the midlands and they multiply very fast.” He recommended culling as the right course of action to control the population when it “exceeds the carrying capacity of the forest.”

Two weeks ago in Greece, a massive 200kg wild boar was killed ahead of the start of the official hunting season for having “constantly destroyed crops.” In Italy, the mayor of Rome is suing the regional government for failing to control the “boar invasion” in the city. In recent years there have been complaints from Rome’s farmers and residents about the boars damaging farms and causing car accidents.

There have also been recent reports of African Swine Fever (ASF) detected in wild boar. The disease was detected in a dead wild boar in Hong Kong for the first time earlier this month, with local pig farmers now worrying that their pigs could become infected. In the UK, the Animal and Plant Health Agency is warning people visiting the Forest of Dean, which has the largest wild boar population in England, not to feed the animals and to properly dispose of food to prevent an outbreak of ASF. Wild boar have been blamed for spreading ASF to Germany, where it was discovered in farmed pigs for the first time this year.

Another story from earlier this year only helped to worsen the already bad reputation of wild boar. A widely-reported study found that the soil disturbance caused by the world’s population of feral hogs released the same volume of greenhouse gases as one million cars.

These reports certainly paint a picture of wild boar as destructive creatures of almost no benefit to the planet. The tone of media reports as well as the war-like language used around wild boar by officials (the “boar invasion” described by Rome’s mayor, for instance) only adds to their image as a menace and a scourge. But some argue that these depictions are often unfair and reflect a deeper problem with the way human society views animals that escape its control.

Journalist Marina Bolotnikova argues that feral hogs, which have spread across the world into areas they did not previously inhabit, like other invasive species, are “so reviled and seen as deserving no moral consideration whatsoever because they represent a violation of human sovereignty over animals…” In an article for Sentient Media written with animal studies scholar Jeff Sebo, she and Sebo wrote of the human-centric view of invasive species gives them no value because they conflict with our own interests - often economic ones. 

They further point out that wild hogs and many other invasive species are only where they are because human activity transported them there, for which the animals are then punished by being culled. In the case of feral pigs, many of them escaped from farms. As Alex Lockwood tweeted when the story about the emissions caused by these animals came out, “Feral pigs globally cause same emissions as 1.1m cars. That's about 3% of the UK carpool and 1% of UK road traffic. But, okay, let's blame pigs who dodged slaughter.”

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Another issue to consider is why the wild pigs are so often moving into human spaces. Their growing numbers are only one aspect. As the wildlife expert in Kerala noted, the pigs in India find good habitat in human-created spaces (rubber plantations) and are drawn to communities by food waste dumped on the roadside. It isn’t the fault of the pigs that they take advantage of these human actions.

In addition, as Bolotnikova and Sebo note, humans keep destroying wildlife habitat and killing off animals’ food sources, inevitably increasing the chances for contact and conflict. This of course happens with many other species too, such as the polar bears who come to Russian towns looking for food because of shrinking ice cover preventing them from hunting (note that stories on this also use the language of ‘invasion’).

This isn’t to say that wild boar don’t cause problems. But Bolotnikova argues that they are seen as particularly problematic because of their economic impact by destroying crops, and that their negative impacts are conveniently not put in the context of the massive amounts of destruction caused by human activity. Furthermore, it is beneficial to some groups, particularly hunters, to demonise the animals. This website, for instance, highlights the money to be made from killing the animals: “Feral hog problems can be turned inside out to become a source of income. Some hunting ranches charge as much as $900 to target and shoot a large hog. Exotic meat processors and their many customers, mostly from Europe, favor wild boar meat and often consider it a delicacy.”

Despite the dominant narrative around wild boar, they do have ecological benefits. By rooting around through leaf litter and soil for grubs, they create space for the germination of the seeds of wildflowers, shrubs, and trees, and create warm basking spots for grasshoppers and places for species like bees and beetles to burrow. Amphibians and dragonflies and birds are drawn to the small wetlands the boar make when they create their own mud baths.

The dominant narrative also comes into tension with evidence of and public admiration for the cognitive and emotional capacities of these animals. (Ironically, the intelligence that wild boar were shown to have in the piglet rescue study is one of the qualities that makes their numbers difficult to control, as they are smart enough to learn to avoid both traps and hunters.) How can we condemn a whole species as a plague on the earth and then marvel at its mental abilities - especially at its capacity for empathy?

Perhaps it’s good to nd on a story that clearly shows that not everyone who comes into contact with wild boar are so keen for their destruction - that of the boar who wandered into a nude sunbathing spot in Berlin with her two piglets and made off with a naked man’s plastic bag containing his laptop. The man gave chase and succeeded in retrieving his computer, and everybody laughed about the incident. When forestry officials later gave the order for the boar to be killed because she had clearly become too bold, nearly 9,000 people signed a petition to spare her life.

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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