Wild Boar - should they go or should they stay?

The Government's rural affairs department (Defra), is currently carrying out an important consultation on what should be done about the increasing number of wild boar, which are now roaming the British countryside after an absence of 400 years.

The Game Conservancy Trust, a game and wildlife research charity, now monitors the return of wild boar through its National Gamebag Census, which studies the rise and fall of game and other species through the bag records kept by gamekeepers. The Trust has also recently responded to the Defra public consultation on wild boar in England.

Dr Stephen Tapper, Director of Policy and Public Affairs with the Trust said, "In the consultation document released by Defra, a number of potential options, ranging from complete eradication to doing nothing, were suggested. However, we are concerned that Defra, does not think the population has grown much over the last decade. They also think that damage is more or less tolerable and losses could be compensated for through hunting. But we are not so confident."

In most other European countries wild boar numbers are burgeoning, even in the face of heavy hunting pressure. In Germany, the annual bag was over 250,000 in the 1990s, now it is over 500,000. In France, they were shooting some 40,000 annually in the 1970s, now the number is 400,000.

Dr Tapper warns, "Defra suggests that we don't have anything like as much forest as these countries, so our populations will be much lower. But boar don't seem to need much forest, for example, there is a population of 5 - 7,000 wild boar living in the centre of Berlin."

When considering what we should do, the Trust suggests that we need to not only think about damage, disease risk to farm livestock and traffic accidents, but whether we really want to see the return of this long-lost native animal.

The romantic notion that we can return all our native animals, whether they are boar, beavers, or wolves is appealing but does it make sense? For several thousand years wild boar were hunted relentlessly by man and wolf and later by man alone. Dr Tapper says, "If we bring them back we will certainly have to be equally relentless about keeping their numbers down otherwise we will simply be overrun."