The Decibel - Wild boars are in Canada and it’s no joke

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

Adaptable, smart and invasive. No we’re not talking about humans. We’re talking about wild boars. With their populations growing and sightings – even around big metropolitan areas – increasing, governments are rushing to find ways to contain them before they wreak ecological and agricultural damage.Jana G. Pruden, a feature writer for The Globe and Mail, discusses what kind of damage these creatures can do and why letting hunters lose on them is not the answer.This episode originally aired July 4, 2022.

Hi, it's Manika here, and today, for this Thanksgiving episode of The Decibel, we're bringing you a rerun of my interview with Jana Pruden. Hope you like it as much as we do, and thanks for listening. That's the sound of the Eurasian wild boar. Picture a black beast with huge haunches and a mohawk of spiky fur running up its neck onto its head. It's got a long snout with sharp teeth, bookended by tusks on the outside. Some of the biggest wild boars can weigh more than a thousand pounds, and they travel in packs called a sounder. So if you come across a sounder, you could be faced with several thousand pounds of wild pig. So wild boars can inflict a lot of damage, and they're no joke, despite the fact that a lot of jokes are made about them. They actually do kill more people around the world every year than sharks, than all species

of sharks combined. Globe feature writer Jana G. Prudent has recently become a little obsessed with this invasive species. They're increasingly encroaching on populated areas. And Jana is here to tell us about the growing threat they pose in Canada. This is The Decibel. Jana, it's so great to virtually meet you and thank you so much for being here. It's so great to virtually meet you and I am thrilled to be on the show.

So this is such a unique story that you wrote. Can you just start by telling me, like, how did you get into this? Yeah, you know, I think it really came onto my radar in the fall, and I saw a tweet of a news story that said something to the effect of, you know, wild boars are the most destructive and adaptable mammal that there is. And I immediately thought, well, they have to be number two after us. But it caught my attention. I think I made that joke on Twitter. And in the fall, I would notice headlines and then Shakira was attacked by a wild boar. And I thought that was funny. And then I um or interesting not funny I'm sure wait a minute what what what happened with Shakira there uh so Shakira's walking with her

son in a park in Barcelona having a beautiful day and suddenly these wild boars run out of the forest and grab her purse that has her phone and her car keys and everything in it and uh she basically like fights them off. They're trying to run away with her purse. She fights them off. And one of the things that struck me is so funny. In one interview with Glamour magazine, she said it felt almost personal.

You know, it was like they understood her. So that's Shakira on the wild boars. Shakira on the wild boars, wow. And then sometime early in the year, I just started thinking more about it. And I set up some news alerts. And they were just, you know, humming with all these wild boar stories. And then at some point, I knew I had to write about it. Can you give us a sense of like some of the other stories or headlines that you were seeing? Queensland woman's terrifying ordeal as feral pig attempts to, quote, eat her legs.

Boar breaks into jewelry store, chases employees. Feral pig attack, victim's gruesome injuries as she loses fingertip and needs 30 stitches. Oh. Nose to task with a 200-pound wild boar outside my local supermarket rome's wild pig problem gets closer to the vatican humans versus feral hogs why can't we be friends dutch hunter mistaken for boar shot in german forest

squealing for 20 minutes wild pig caught in christchurch streets as feral hogs take to suburbia. This is fascinating. This is like literally all over the place, all these crazy things happening with wild boars. And it makes me wonder about how they behave, like, or their temperament, because we hear about pigs being really smart creatures. So are wild boars smart as well? Yeah, I would say in a lot of ways, we sort of met our match. They're very smart. They're very adaptable. They can be very dangerous and they can be quite vicious. All the scientists I talked to, you know, they're careful not to overhype the risk of

wild boars, but pretty much everyone who's ever worked near them has at one point, you know, scuttled up a tree or dove into the cab of a truck trying to get away or have scars. I talked to many people who told me, oh, you know, this, I have a 20 stitch scar on my leg from a wild boar or someone on the research team does. And they actually do kill more people around the world every year than sharks, than all species of sharks combined. And they actually do kill more people around the world every year than sharks, than all species of sharks combined. So they can be quite vicious, and they're smart, and they're adaptable, and they're extremely destructive. So all the like the smart aspect, the adaptation, the power here, like this is this is kind of

making me think about how humans can act in an environment, for sure. Yeah, including that there are things that you really have to admire about them. They are survivors, and they're so clever in how they adapt. And so in a lot of ways, it does remind me of some of the best and worst parts of human nature, we're dealing with ourselves, right? Like we're face to face with our very worst possible foe, which is us in pig form. On the face of it, it's depressing. This is an actual big problem. It's quite dire.

We have to figure out what to do about it. But then on the other hand, it is really kind of fun and funny and interesting. And there's something that you really just do sort of have to love about them. Yeah, no, it's very true. It's an interesting thing to think about, actually. I know, Jana, you live in Edmonton. Have you actually seen a wild pig before? No. And they're some of the hardest animals to ever find on the land. You know, Ryan Brooke, who's Canada's like wild pig guy, he's based in Saskatoon at the university.

You know, he's told me you could be up in a helicopter. They're down below you. They have collars on so you can actually, you're tracking them, you know where they are on the land and you still cannot see them. A wild boar can be injured, like shot, and a bleeding boar could run into the forest dripping blood right in front of you and you could not be able to find them. But by the time they're obvious, you're screwed. Like then it's way too late. By the time they're running down the streets of Saskatoon or something, you have a very, very, very bad problem. So where in Canada might we see a wild boar today? best, Saskatchewan. So in Ontario, they're taking really, really aggressive steps to make sure they don't establish because the problem is wild boars have an incredible reproductive rate and very

quickly from a few boars, you can have a very big problem. And when you're talking about Ontario, are we talking about like northern Ontario? The situation that I followed related to Pickering, North Pickering. So actually pretty close to Toronto, relatively speaking. Yes, close to communities and populations, close to farmland, close to national parks, close to a lot of areas that would be really devastated by wild pig infestation. Do we have any idea like how many wild boars are there in Canada? It's extremely, extremely hard to estimate because they're so hard to find. So that's why a lot of provinces currently have hotlines, sometimes called a squeal on pigs hotline,

encouraging people to call and to log these reports so that we can start getting a sense of where they actually are. Ryan Brooke in Saskatchewan says that based on all of his research, quite soon there could reasonably be more wild pigs in Saskatchewan than people. Wow. So Saskatchewan actually has a population of over a million, like 1.1, almost 1.2 a couple of years ago. So that's a lot of wild boars then. Yeah, that's a lot of wild boars. And when you look at what a single pig or a small sounder of pigs can do to waterways, to populations, to birds, to, you know, turtles, to humans, to land. It's really quite terrifying. We'll be right back.

So this feels like kind of a weird problem for humans to have at this point. Can we just back up a bit, Jana? How did we get here with all of these wild pigs roaming Canada? They're first introduced to North America by Spanish settlers who brought pigs and wild boar for meat and as livestock. And in the United States, they started bringing in specifically wild boar in the 70s and 80s as a hunting animal. In Canada, our wild boar problem really started with this push that started in the late 90s towards diversification in agriculture. And that's actually the time that I started reporting at a small town paper. I did a lot of agriculture reporting. So I remember this quite well. So the idea was there was already wild boar meat was very popular in Asia at the time. So there's going to be this big market there

and that wild boar and these other alternative meats, Canadians are going to love them because, you know, it's super healthy for you. It's leaner. It's really flavorful. So suddenly there's all these wild boar farms, super lucrative. You can make a lot of money really quickly. They're so hardy. They can, they basically raise themselves. You know, it's the only problem that people were seeing is that they escaped constantly and then they would tear up other people's crops and fields. Okay. So, so then what happened? Then the market really collapsed, you know, really bottomed out. The market for the food, for wild-bore meat as food, didn't really

come to fruition in Canada in the same way that bison and ostrich and these other alternative meats didn't really fully take off outside of a few gourmet applications. So there's essentially this crash, the market's too flooded. And some people and there's many documented cases of where a farmer might just open the gates and let 300 boar run. And that's when the population starts to be established. So like many things, it has its roots many years ago, and they're all coming out right now. So when we get a lot of wild-borne area, so maybe you can kind of help me understand this. What happens when a group of wild boars moves into a new area? Like what kind of destruction can they cause? I think the best example of that was Mary Delaney, who I talked to in my story.

She was one of the people in North Pickering that had the wild boar on her property. And she told me a story about how she went into her kitchen to refill her cup of coffee. And she goes back to the exact same spot she had been standing. And she looks out the window and her yard is completely torn up. And there's four wild boars there. Wow. When you say her garden was torn up, what do you mean by that? Like, what would it look like?

Yeah, so they root, they plow with those really powerful snouts. They're just pushing the earth aside, moving it aside with their snouts, essentially. Are they looking for food? Or why are they doing that? Yeah, and they like all different kinds of food. So they'll eat sort of whatever they feel like eating, which can also make them hard to trap, depending what other food is in the area and not to get too disgusting. But, you know, experts told me about, for instance, studies of what they'll eat from landfill, which let's just say there's lots of really disgusting things that pigs can and will eat. I'm so curious now, though, like what kinds of things?

Like diapers. Diapers. Yes. Okay. so they're not picky they're really no well i mean they can be picky if there's lots to eat but they can also eat and will eat anything so this is on like kind of a specific level but if we zoom out janna like on an ecological level what's the impact of this? There's a long list. So contaminating waterways, they take bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella with them everywhere. They tromp through marshland.

I mean, just imagine some of those really important grasslands and imagine sounders of pigs snuffling through them and tromping through them. They eat and destroy crops. They eat and destroy other species. And then there's the one that, you know, truly strikes fear in people's hearts. And that's African swine fever. African swine fever is an illness that can occur in domestic pigs. But in domestic pigs, you know, you can take really aggressive action, you can quarantine a farm, you can quarantine a whole area, you know, it involves often extermination of really large numbers of animals. So it's, it's even that is pretty devastating. If it gets into the wild pig population, some of those estimations or visions

of what the future looks like after that are like, truly the stuff of nightmares. How much would that kind of damage cost? I don't know if we can quantify this, but for an agricultural field or a farm, like what numbers are we talking? Yeah, I mean, it actually is unquantifiable. And because we're not even talking about the deaths of humans and the deaths of humans on roadways, because wild pigs are very hard to see at night. So there's a lot of vehicle crashes with them. And when their boars are big, sometimes that results in death and or serious injury. So in the United States, they spend about 2.1 billion. And that's just on like, sort of logged mitigation of trying, you know,

trying to contain it. And everyone I talked to said, like, that's the starting point that doesn't count death, that doesn't count car accidents, that doesn't really count ecological destruction. So the price tag is, it's really sort of beyond estimation. It sounds like this is a pretty significant problem. What can we do about it? Oh, boy. Well, there are some strategies that work. The consensus seems to be that whole sounder capture and extermination is one of the main things where you're trying to capture a whole sounder. One of the ways that they do that is something, I love this term, a Judas pig. A Judas pig. A Judas pig. Okay. Yeah. So a sounder of pigs is the mother pig and all the generations of her offspring,

several generations of her offspring. But the breeding age males travel from sounder to sounder. So they'll show up at a sounder and they'll just mate with anyone who can be mated with, right? So these males, sometimes they will be captured by, say, a researcher or scientist, and they'll put a tracking collar. And then that pig becomes a Judas pig because when it goes to a sounder, they follow it and then they trap and exterminate. Can we just get hunters to go out and kind of look for these pigs and get them that way? Yeah. So if you go into some comment sections, that's a comment you will see often. There's sort of two, there's like, bacon, which is one way that people respond to a story like this. And then another way is,

you know, well, if they just tell me where they are, I'll go and kill all the pigs near my town. This is not at all how it works. And hunting, in fact, does typically make it worse because what happens is, so say you are someone, you see a sounder of pigs, you have a very, very high caliber firearm with you and you manage to take down, say, one or two. You're not going to get the whole sounder, no matter what kind of weapon you have, I don't think. So you've got one or two, the other five, six, seven scatter to the wind. And they've also just learned about you. So a couple things have happened. Those have now potentially split into other sounders. You've maybe increased their range that they're going to travel in. You've basically split it up and spread it, taught them about you. If they weren't already nocturnal, they'll go nocturnal and they will be even harder

to find. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So yeah, this is not an easily solvable thing. Jana, we've talked about a whole bunch of different things here with the wild boars. I think when a lot of people hear the term wild boars, though, we think of some of these kind of funny things we've seen online, like i think of like the naked man in berlin chasing after the the boar who took his laptop

or some people might remember the the 30 to 50 wild boars meme um which is where some guy on twitter was justifying having an assault weapon by by presenting like a very specific hypothetical scenario about you know needing a weapon in case specifically 30 to 50 feral hogs ran into his yard within three to five minutes while the small kids were playing. I imagine you would have heard that a lot while writing this piece, people referencing this meme to you. Well, it's so funny, because as I started researching, I was aware of the meme. Anyone who's on Twitter probably saw it. It was roundly mocked. I mean, it was seen as the most ridiculous thing anyone could say.

People made memes of it. It was a big joke. As I was researching this, I was like, I mean, he's kind of right. Not that I think people need AK-47s, but the reality of living with these animals and also the firepower that can be needed to take one down, he's not totally off, you know, but I have to say, I feel like he kind of got unfairly hung out to dry because he was expressing something and, you know, we can argue about whether his solution for it is correct but he was definitely expressing something that is actually a problem and you could have 30 to 50 wild boars

right into your yard while your young children are playing and it would be extremely dangerous so I feel like um 30 to 50 wild boar guys kind of like vindicated a little bit in my mind. Jenna, this was fascinating and a little weird. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.