Section:GDN 1J PaGe:11 Edition Date:190730 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 29/7/2019 17:42 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Tuesday 30 July 2019 The Guardian •
11
birthday. Meanwhile, their taste for junk food or crops
such as corn and cereals boosts fertility: wild boars that
feed on such a high-calorie diet, scientists observe,
produce larger litters, and more often. Olvera observes
something else. “Urban boars,” he says, “live large and
fast. They die younger than the boars of the forest.”
Wild boar are smaller than the farmyard pig, but they
are growing more prodigious. Some are s o accustomed
to human foods , they are becoming obese. In the
autopsy lab on UAB campus, Olvera’s colleague Fuentes
cut back a piece of an exterminated urban boar’s
midsection revealing a thick layer of spongy tummy fat.
He measured up the girth between his thumb and index
fi nger. “In boars, it should be half that,” he told me.
Swine, or sus scrofa, have confounded humans for
millennia, since pigs were domesticated 9,000 years
ago. Keeping pigs penned in is not always easy, and the
ones that escape adapt to the wild in a matter of months.
They don’t just change their habitat, but also behaviour
and appearance in subsequent generations. They grow a
coat of coarse hair. Their tails straighten. Tusks lengthen.
They become super-adapt ers, shape-shifting problem
solvers with speed and agility. “Wild pigs can run up to
30 mph. They can jump over fences less than 3ft high
and have ‘climbed’ out of pig traps with walls 5 to 6ft
high,” writes Billy Higginbotham , a wildlife conservation
expert at Texas A&M AgriLife Research.
If the wild boar senses it is being hunted, it becomes
more nocturnal. “In the forest, a wild boar can smell
you well before you can see it,” says Torsten Reinwald,
a German hunter and press offi cer for Deutscher
Jagdverband , the German hunting lobby. In the city, the
boar’s innate “fl ight distance” threshold – the distance
in which it perceives a human as a threat – drops to fi ve
metres , Reinwald says. The traditional hunting tactic,
known as drive hunting is massively ineffi cient for
conservation. It typically involves more than a dozen
hunters and their hounds, working in concert for hours,
to bag a few boar.
Hunters and scientists attest to the animal’s
intelligence. Sebastian Vetter, of the Research Institute
of Wildlife Ecology in Vienna, t ells me he fi nds it
increasingly diffi cult to round up new specimens
for behavioural studies. Despite abundant numbers,
wild boar become scarce precisely at the moment
the researchers seek to lure them into a wood-fenced
enclosure for observation. Vetter wonders if changing
something – his entrapment strategy, his appearance, his
car, anything – might improve the odds. “They seem to
know all my tricks,” he marvels.
A native to Eurasia and north Africa, the wild boar,
thanks to its adaptability, can be found on every
continent outside of Antarctica. In almost every case
of humans introducing swine to a new region, a vast
number escape and quickly fi nd the new surroundings to
their liking. And then they multiply.
British hunters drove the wild boar to the brink
of extinction centuries ago. Their reintroduction,
according to the Department for Environment, Food
and Rural Aff airs (Defra), can be explained by “escapes
and deliberate releases from wild boar farms”. Defra
estimates wild boar numbers in the past 10 years jumped
from a few hundred to more than 4,000 in Wales,
Scotland and England, including the group that turned
parts of the Stourhead National Trust estate in Wiltshire
into a no-go zone last year, and another that ran amok in
Kent, shutting down the A21. Bodenchuk says he sees the
tell-tale signs in the UK – rapid urbanisation squeezing
an already dwindling habitat and no central plan to
control the numbers – for what he calls “a pig bomb in
about 60 years.”
African swine fever has been raging in parts of Europe
for the past fi ve years, putting pressure on health
offi cials and scientists to contain it. For Barcelona, the
closest active ASF problem area is in Belgium, 620 miles
away. But the naturalist Jordi Baucells Colomer told me
that, even at that distance, nobody assumes they are
safe. Spanish pork production accounts for roughly 1%
of GDP. And Catalonia, with a population of 3m pigs, is
particularly vulnerable, he says. “It’s not a matter of if,
but when,” he said.
There is no vaccine to combat African swine fever, one
of agriculture’s most feared animal diseases. Pigs, feral
or domesticated, pass it to other pigs. With a near 100%
mortality rate, ASF kills swine within 10 days, putting
whole farms and boar colonies at risk. (It poses no health
risk to humans.) ASF causes high fever, weakness and
vomiting in the stricken pig, its skin turning red or blue.
Aff ected pregnant sows often abort spontaneously.
The most recent strain bedevilling the EU arrived
via Georgia in 2007. It spread to Russia and Belarus and
then bordering EU states in 2014, as well as into China,
where it has had a devastating impact. The nature
of the outbreak – ravaging some regions, but sparing
neighbouring territories – leaves little doubt: people,
not animals, are the main disease vector. The virus can
latch on to clothing and persists in food scraps, leaving
pigs or wild boar especially vulnerable. To date, 10 EU
countries have reported ASF outbreaks (it is active in
nine), causing the quarantining of pig farms along the
EU’s eastern border from Estonia to Romania.
According to European commission data from June
this year, between quarantines and culls, ASF outbreaks
on farms is beginning to come under control. ASF among
wild boar , however, is as bad as ever. In 2015, as reports
of the disease were streaming in, European Food Safety
Authority offi cials convened an emergency panel of
conservationists and wildlife disease experts. They laid
out an unsparing containment strategy: if you drastically
reduce the number of wild boar , you will eradicate ASF.
In practice, that means cutting off their food supply and
upping the kill rate with the explicit targeting of young
sows and piglets.
Beginning in 2015, many EU countries responded by
extending boar hunting season year-round. Bounties
were paid to hunters and record numbers were
slaughtered. Those measures may have backfi red in
places. In Poland, scientists wrote an open letter to prime
minister Mateusz Morawiecki in January, urging an end
to the hunts. With so many hunters traipsing through the
forest, they argued, it gave rise to the perfect conditions
for spreading swine fever. Sure enough, nearly 1m wild
boar were killed in Poland from 2015-2017, and the
number of confi rmed cases in Poland went from 44 in
2015 to, according to commission data, more than 2,500
a year ago.
The stakes are high. If a producer lands on an
ASF quarantine list it can be ruinous – for them, and
their region. In January, after Australian authorities
discovered Chinese imports carrying the virus, offi cials
raised the spectre of restricting the global pork trade
from aff ected countries. With a $22 billion pork industry
to protect, the USDA announced in May it would begin
testing Asian pork imports into the US for ASF.
In Europe, as ASF spreads from east to west, fears of
contagion are beginning to divide the bloc from within.
Hog-tight barriers have already been erected along
the French/Belgian, Danish/German and Bulgarian/
Romanian borders in the past year. Boar barriers have
become highly unpopular gestures in some countries.
“Under the guise of biosecurity, it brings back the
argument of erecting fences on Europe’s eastern
border,” Marianna Szczygielska, a Polish researcher and
post doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science in Berlin, told me. In a sign of how
political Europe’s boar problem has become, thousands
of mainly urbanite Poles took to the streets.
In Italy, several hunters, farmers and urban wildlife
management offi cials have told me the boar plaguing
Italian towns and causing car accidents are not a local
breed, but rather an overly aggressive invader from
eastern Europe. Scientists say there is no evidence,
but that has n ot stopped some offi cials from using this
argument to justify boar culls in Puglia. Before Italianpolitics turned overtly anti-immigrant, it was anti-boar.Back in Llars Mundet on that May evening , darkness fell.
On a gravel road near the park’s entrance, Olvera and the
Estrateko team discussed trapping strategy, one eye on
a tablet device broadcasting the live feed from the trap’s
infrared camera. Footage showed several boar circling.
Clearly, the racket we had made minutes earlier, racing
away from the trap site, hadn’t fazed the animals.
One of those who joined the trapping operation as an
observer that evening was Mercedes Vidal, a politician
whose constituency includes this district. The day
before, Barcelonans had gone to the polls in a tightly
contested mayoral race. The boar problem never rose
to the level of a talking point in the mayoral campaign.
Barcelona has bigger issues. Mass tourism and the
secessionist question loom over every discussion about
the city’s future. Nonetheless, the boars are a frequent
complaint in her district, Vidal told me. “A concern,” she
added, “not a panic.”
Vila from Estrateko approached Vidal and me. He
held out the tablet. We could see that a group of boars
had settled in to feast on the bait. It was time. With a
swipe, he set off the trap. Terrori sed screams fi lled the
night. We ran in the direction of the commotion.
I arrived at the trap site somewhat winded. The
squeals were deafening. Eleven boars were captured
in the netting, the nylon strands wrapping tighter and
tighter around their thighs the more they bucked and
struggled. Olvera and Mentaberre pounced, injecting
each boar in the backside with a tranquilli ser.
Before long the boars were breathing easy, then
snoozing, then snoring. Olvera and Mentaberre took
blood samples. A few minutes later they administered
the euthanising injection. Lifeless boars were stacked in
the van, and the trap was set up for round 2. Just before
midnight, more hellish squeals pierced the gloom.
Again, the catch was knocked out, blood was drawn and
they were killed, bringing the death toll for the evening
to 21 – eight adult females and 13 piglets.
The following night, in Nou Barris, another part of
the city, the trap was set up again – this time in a grassy
clearing a few metres from a bus stop. Down the road was
an asphalt football pitch, high-rise apartment buildings
and a school. The team caught and killed eight more –
seven females and one large aggressive male.
In mid-June, the preliminary lab tests on the 29
slain boars came back. I scrolled through the results on
my mobile. These four-legged city dwellers were sick
and contagious. One tested positive for salmonella.
Three carried rickettsia-infected ticks , a pathogen
that can move from animal to human. Fourteen had
campylobacter , which the World Health Organization
calls a top cause for diarrhoeal diseases in humans,
and “the most common bacterial cause of human
gastroenteritis in the world”. Seventeen tested positive
for the antibodies against the hepatitis E virus, with six
showing signs of ongoing infection. One consolation: no
trace of ASF.
On my last day in Barcelona, Olvera and I met with
Míriam Martínez, a vet who oversees wild and farm
animal protection for FAADA , the Spanish animal rights
group. It has the ear of many in city hall and has sparred
with Olvera in the past. Martínez and Olvera agree on
one thing: that for the safety and wellbeing of citizens
and animals, the number of urban boar must be reduced.
But she believes Olvera’s methods to achieve that end
are morally wrong. The animals should be repatriated to
reserves, or sterilised, she insists, not euthanised.
This discord reveals the precariousness of Olvera’s
position. If the local political winds were to shift, he
acknowledges, their city contract may not be renewed
at the end of 2020. Olvera plans to re-pitch the EU for
funds, but unless they fi nd the right European partners
and backers in Brussels, it is a longshot. Despite the
long odds, he hopes that science will restore the natural
balance – the distance that once kept us safely apart. In
short, he wants science to help save the boar from us.
“The urban boar has become a species unto itself,” he
says, a species that is looking less like its wild forebears
from the forest. “It’s become habituated to city life, and
we are transforming it. It’s not healthy – for the boar, or
for us.” •Wild boar
raiding bins
in Spain
SEFAS/AJUTAMENT DE
BARCELONA
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Warner is
a regular
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