Introductionxxi
considerable effort to pull together all the relevant informa-
tion about all the species, and we were right. It was hard work
to get people to commit their precious time and write up their
in-depth knowledge about these species, but our gamble paid
off, and the evidence is here in your hands. We really hope that
this volume will find its way into not only the scientific com-
munity, but also to the general public with an interest in wildlife
or wildlife impacts and the political decision-makers who need
to understand how important pigs and peccaries have become
in present-day environmental conservation, as well as develop-
ment thinking.
The book is novel in that it provides the first ever compre-
hensive and up-to-date review on the ecology and conservation
status of each wild pig and peccary species as well as the manage-
ment of feral pigs. We believe the monumental effort by all the
co-authors will be rewarded by a significant increase in under-
standing and comprehension about the many suid and tayassuid
species that live in close proximity to about 90 per cent of the
humans on our planet.
Learning from the first book on wild cattle, we thought that
this second volume might well follow the steps of the first one.
Thus we involved most wild pigs and peccaries experts across
the world and we have also been successful in recruiting most
IUCN/SSC Wild Pig Specialist Group and Peccary Specialist
Group members to contribute their valuable expertise to this
project. The final result is an original book made possible thanks
to the contribution of 100 international experts from 25 coun-
tries. But as mentioned, bringing together this heterogeneous
group of authors with sometimes conflicting ideas was a major
task for us as editors. We should have learned from the quote
attributed to Bernard Shaw: ‘Never wrestle with pigs. You both
get dirty and the pig likes it.’ There was some of that dynamic in
trying to work with and coordinate the pig and peccary experts,
who sometimes had strong views on issues varying from taxon-
omy to ecology and disease, but in the end we managed to settle
the debates, albeit with a few grunts here and there.
We recognize that science is an ongoing effort to broaden
the knowledge frontier. Scientific ‘truths’ are primarily the exist-
ing ideas that are presently best supported by the available data.
What is true today may well be outdated tomorrow. With that
in mind, we present to you the best available and supported
information on the wild pigs and peccaries of the world. And in
that we accept that for some species or topics our knowledge is
embarrassingly limited. For example, we still haven’t settled on
a finally accepted taxonomy of the species groups and further
morphological and genetic studies are needed. Similarly, the
distribution and population trends of several species are almost
unknown, in particular in Asia.
With regard to the taxonomy in this book we generally fol-
low the Phylogenetic Species Concept (PSC) of Groves and
Grubb (2011) in their work, Ungulate Taxonomy. They define
the species as the smallest population that has fixed heritable
differences from other populations. This concept differs from
the traditional biological species concept in which the popula-
tions are reproductively isolated. A species for which the use
of Groves and Grubb’s (2011) classification is likely to gener-
ate major debate is the Eurasian wild boar (Sus scrofa). Here
we provisionally split wild boar into 11 species, based on dis-
tinct morphologies and supported to some extent by genetics,
although we admit that this requires additional study. Further
genetic and morphological analyses are needed to better under-
stand the complexity of wild boar taxonomy through its huge
range, but it is clear that major evolutionary specialization has
occurred. Other species revised by Groves and Grubb include
the forest hog (Hylochoerus meinertzhageni ivoriensis; H. m.
rimator; H. m. meinertzhageni), which they divided into three
species, a division supported by follow-up research by Erik.
Nevertheless, the authors of the Hylochoerus account still refer
to the three subspecies, acknowledging that they might deserve
the status of species with further morphological and genetic
evidence. Similar taxonomic discussions occurred in some of
the peccary chapters, specifically the white-lipped peccary (see
Chapter 25).
The present book discusses the conservation context of pigs
and peccaries from various angles: (1) as threatened conserva-
tion targets themselves; (2) as conservation threats, e.g. feral
pigs; and (3) as ecosystem engineers influencing survival of
other species. We decided to include feral pig management in
our book, because these invasive animals pose serious threats- for example, negatively impacting many ecosystems, hybridiz-
ing with native wild pig species reducing their genetic diversity,
increasing disease transmission to domestic stock, threatening
indigenous species, in particular on small islands, and destroy-
ing cultivated land causing important economic losses.
Many of the chapters in the book address the threatened sta-
tus of pigs and peccaries. Most pig species in South East Asia
and some peccaries in South America are threatened by habitat
loss and degradation, by hunting pressure, and by increasing
isolation on small habitat islands where the combined impacts
on small population size are exacerbated by continuous poach-
ing and other threats. One example is the pygmy hog, one of
the rarest mammals in the world. The species was believed to be
extinct until 1971 when it was rediscovered in two small areas in
Barnadi Reserve Forest and in Manas National Park in Assam,
India. Since 1996, a conservation breeding programme has
worked carefully with the few remaining animals, and through
successful capture, captive breeding, and release programmes
has managed to bring the species back from the brink of extinc-
tion. The current population is around 250 adults spread across
a few populations (see also Chapters 22 and 27 in this book), still
far from safe but in a much better state than a few decades ago.
Another example of a rare pig is the Bawean warty pig (Sus
blouchi), an endemic species confined to the 192 km^2 island of
Bawean in the Java Sea, Indonesia. It has an estimated population
of fewer than 250 adult individuals and is listed as Endangered in
the IUCN/SSC Red List of Threatened Species (Rademaker et al.
2016; see also Chapter 20 in this book). Based on morphological
research, it was recently proposed to upgrade this subspecies of
the Javan warty pig (Sus verrucosus blouchi) to full species level
(Sus blouchi; Groves & Grubb 2011).
Indonesia and the Philippines are definitely the evolutionary
hotspot of wild pig species. Unfortunately, there is a major lack
of study of these species and some are virtually unknown. The
Mindoro warty pig (Sus oliveri), for example, was only described
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