Italian Farmers Want Something Done About Wild Boars

Most Italians say the time has come to put a halt to the rapidly grow­ing pop­u­la­tion of wild boars whose feed­ing habits rav­age the coun­try­side and intrude cities and vil­lages.

A sur­vey con­ducted on behalf of the farmer asso­ci­a­tion Coldiretti showed that almost 7 out of 10 feel there are too many boars roam­ing the coun­try, threat­en­ing prop­erty, and caus­ing may­hem.

“These boars,” high­lighted a Coldiretti note, ​“may be longer than 70 inches, weight up to 440 pounds and have fangs that can reach 12 inches, being there­fore com­pa­ra­ble to real weapons, capa­ble of inflict­ing deadly wounds to both humans and ani­mals, while also being tools of dev­as­ta­tion through crops and orchards.”

Olive grow­ers and other farm­ers have long denounced the dam­ages caused by the roam­ing ani­mals to crops and agri­cul­tural infra­struc­tures. Many have incurred heavy costs while try­ing to pre­vent destruc­tion by one of the widest-rang­ing mam­mals in the world.

Local news sta­tions from north to south rou­tinely report roam­ing herds of ani­mals which are known to leave their marks, such as deep holes, in the vicin­ity of the olive trees. Traversing miles every night to reach feed­ing areas, they occupy roads and cross high-speed tracks, often caus­ing acci­dents.

“I have wit­nessed in my own farm how the wild boars move along rivers and banks to reach our crops. I got used to half yields,” said Filippo Gasparini, pres­i­dent of the Piacenza branch of the grow­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion Confagricoltura.

“During the hunt­ing sea­son 2019/2020,” noted Gasparini, ​“in our province, more than 2,000 wild boars were killed, and 26,000 more were ter­mi­nated in the whole region. Even with those num­bers, the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is out of con­trol, so regional author­i­ties are includ­ing new mon­i­tor­ing oper­a­tions within the regional wildlife plan.”

According to the fig­ures released by Coldiretti, in the last ten years the num­ber of wild boars in Italy has dou­bled to 2 mil­lion. ​“More and more they are involved in an esca­la­tion of inci­dents, aggres­sions, intru­sions within urban areas where they spread look­ing for food in the garbage they find,” the asso­ci­a­tion noted.

Farmers fear the boars could spread the African swine fever to their pigs. ​“We can not wait any longer, we need imme­di­ate action to com­bat the spread­ing of the swine fever through a severe reduc­tion of the wild boars’ num­bers,” said the sec­re­tary of agri­cul­ture for the Marche region, Mirco Carloni, who is join­ing col­leagues from other Italian regions in ask­ing the Italian Minister of Agriculture for a nation­ally coor­di­nated con­tain­ment plan.

“The African swine fever,” under­lined Carloni, ​“infects both wild and domes­tic ani­mals and kill them all. We must act to reduce both the san­i­tary risk and the eco­nomic risks that the epi­demic could bring to the whole pig breed­ing sec­tor.”

In an edi­to­r­ial pub­lished by the news­pa­per la Repubblica, Piero Genovesi, a researcher and man­ager at the Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA), argued for a com­pre­hen­sive approach. ​“These should include bet­ter fences for high­ways, warn­ing signs for dri­vers in selected areas, rein­forc­ing the fences around the most valu­able crops and avoid leav­ing food within cities,” he wrote.

Such mea­sures might help mit­i­gate the impact of the boar activ­i­ties, wrote Genovesi, when com­bined with other actions, such as mass ster­il­iza­tion.

The Italian expert observed, how­ever, that the lat­est sci­en­tific research showed that even ster­il­iza­tion oper­a­tions con­ducted on the boars will not be enough to greatly reduce their pop­u­la­tion. ​“Instead,” Genovesi wrote, ​“if we could remove every year 80 per­cent of all wild boars, we could obtain a dra­matic fall of their num­bers.”

In the Coldiretti sur­vey, six in ten respon­dents said they fear the wild boars, and almost half said they would not con­sider buy­ing a house in an area with a high boar pop­u­la­tion. Eighty per­cent of those sur­veyed said hav­ing spe­cial­ized per­son­nel kill the ani­mals is the best strat­egy to reduce the num­bers.

“The swine fever is mak­ing inroads even in European coun­tries pre­vi­ously untouched by the dis­ease and it is spread by the pop­u­la­tion of infected wild boars that is pro­gres­sively mov­ing towards Western Europe. It already hit Germany with sev­eral out­breaks,” Gasparini noted.

“We are fac­ing such a prob­lem, that the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Health is coor­di­nat­ing with sev­eral other admin­is­tra­tions to come up with a com­pre­hen­sive plan for the mon­i­tor­ing and the man­ag­ing of the wild boar pop­u­la­tion.”

• Coldiretti
• La Repubblica