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Chapter

37

Ex-situ Conservation of Wild Pigs and Peccaries:

Roles, Status, Management Successes and

Challenges

Kristin Leus

Introduction

Wild pigs and peccaries have been held in zoos for a very long

time. The impressive-looking warthogs were among the first

to reach western zoos. It is assumed that the common warthog

(Phacochoerus africanus) painted by Nicolas Robert (1614–

1685) was living in the Ménagerie Royale in Versailles during

the reign of Louis XIV (d’Huart et  al. 2013). About a century

later, in 1765, a Cape warthog (Phacochoerus aethiopicus) was

sent to the menagerie of William V, Prince of Orange, in The

Hague (Tuijn & Van Der Feen, 1969; Rookmaaker 1989). In

the 1800s, warthogs were also present, for example, at London

Zoo (1850), Brussels (1856), Hamburg (1862–1872), Antwerp

(1867), Philadelphia (1875), and National Zoological Park

Washington (1893) (Vercammen & Mason 1993; Species360,

consulted 20 July 2016). Some early records for the red river

hog (Potamochoerus porcus) include the New York Bronx Zoo

and Philadelphia Zoo (first decade of the 1900s) and London

Zoo (1934) (J. Reiter, personal communication). Bushpigs

(Potamochoerus larvatus) have always been quite rare in zoos,

both in range states and in the west. Among early records,

Philadelphia Zoo reports housing a bushpig from 1923 to 1930

and Antwerp Zoo obtained four individuals between 1946 and

1953 (Species360, consulted 20 July 2016). Very few forest hogs

(Hylochoerus meinertzhageni) have been held in captivity, mostly

in the 1930s to 1950s, in a handful of collections in Africa (e.g.

Leopoldville, Nairobi, Abidjan, Monrovia), Europe (London

Zoo, Hamburg Zoo, Antwerp Zoo, Amsterdam Zoo), and

North America (National Zoological Park Washington, Bronx

Zoo) and without successful breeding (d’Huart 1993). Among

the Asian wild pig species, the Paris Menagerie du Jardins des

Plantes obtained a pair of Sulawesi babirusa (Babyrousa cel-

ebensis) in 1829 that successfully produced a male offspring

in 1830 (Quoy & Gaimard 1830; Biotard, 1851), and between

1915 and 1925 Amsterdam Zoo maintained three hairy babi-

rusa (Babyrousa babyrussa) (Anonymous 1916; Mohr 1960).

Pygmy hogs were exhibited in London in the nineteenth century

(Garson 1883) and in Berlin in the early twentieth century (R.

Weigl, personal communication (Berlin records)). San Diego

Zoo reports the import of a pair of Javan warty pigs (Sus ver-

rucosus) from Surabaya Zoo in 1935 (Species360, consulted 20

July 2016) and Zoo Gelsenkirchen exhibited them in the 1940s

and 50s (Mohr 1960). Rotterdam Zoo appears to have exhibited

Sulawesi warty pigs (Sus celebensis) in the 1940s and 1950s (Mohr

1960) and at least Rotterdam Zoo and Amsterdam Zoo had early

exhibits of Sunda bearded pigs (Sus barbatus oi) (Mohr 1960). As

an example for early peccary records, Philadelphia Zoo exhib-

ited collared (Pecari tajacu) and white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu

pecari) in the late 1880s (Species360, consulted 20 July 2016).

Naturally, Eurasian wild pigs Sus scrofa have been held in captiv-

ity in wild or semi-domesticated forms since ancient times.

Since those early days, various species of wild pigs and pec-

caries have trickled in and out of western zoos, with varying

degrees of breeding success and popularity. However, it was only

from about the mid-1980s onwards that populations began to

be deliberately and scientifically managed towards particular

goals, including, in a number of cases, direct or indirect contri-

butions to conservation. This chapter will describe these man-

aged ex-situ programmes, paying particular attention to their

conservation roles, status, successes, and remaining challenges.

Ex-situ Conservation

The natural world becomes ever more impacted by human activ-

ities (Newbold et al. 2016) and the pressure on species is unprec-

edented (Barnosky et al. 2011; Dirzo et al. 2014). Increasingly,

successful species conservation requires not only the reduction

or elimination of human-caused threats (e.g. habitat loss/dis-

turbance, harvest, invasive species, etc.), but also some form of

intensive management at the level of populations or individu-

als to address the effects on the population of both these deter-

ministic and a host of stochastic threats that automatically come

into play when populations become small and fragmented (e.g.

random variation in birth and death rates, environmental vari-

ation, catastrophes, inbreeding, loss of genetic diversity, etc.)

(Traylor-Holzer et  al. 2013, 2017). The boundaries between

environments and management activities that would tradition-

ally be described as ‘captive’ or ‘wild’, and ‘in situ’ or ‘ex situ’, are

becoming increasingly blurred (Pritchard et  al. 2011; Redford

et al. 2013). For the purpose of this chapter, ‘ex situ’ is consid-

ered to apply to ‘conditions under which individuals are spatially

restricted with respect to their natural spatial patterns or those of

their progeny, are removed from many of their natural ecological

processes, and are managed on some level by humans’, as defined

in the ‘IUCN SSC Guidelines on the Use of Ex situ Management

for Species Conservation’ (IUCN SSC 2014; McGowan et al.

2017). The same guidelines state that ex-situ programmes

directly contributing to conservation should have conservation

as their primary aim and have ‘clearly defined conservation goals

and objectives that contribute to the viability of the species as a

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