“No more wild boar” was read on a banner. “Wild boar are a danger to the fields and the roads,” was another slogan of the demonstrators. Hundreds of farmers, ranchers and shepherds from across Italy gathered in Rome on Friday for a demonstration once morest an “invasion” of wild boar in the country. “We have to kill them, otherwise we farmers will become a protected animal species,” said one protester.
As in the previous year, the protest march was organized by the Coldiretti agricultural association. In their protest, the farmers not only point to the damage to agricultural land. “Wild boars destroy fields and kill flocks of sheep, they cause car accidents in rural and urban areas where they feed on garbage. They pose a concrete danger to the health of citizens,” says the agricultural association.
Number of traffic accidents doubled in ten years
According to Coldiretti, more than 10,000 traffic accidents per year can now be attributed to wild boar. According to the farmers’ association, the number of accidents involving wild animals has doubled in the past ten years. This should roughly correspond to the increase in the wild boar population in the country. It is estimated that more than two million wild boars now live in Italy. On average, there is one wild boar for every thirty inhabitants. Every fourth person has already crossed paths with a wild boar in their life.
Only on Thursday did an accident cause a stir throughout Italy: a 17-year-old from the southern Italian province of Caserta was driving his father’s car on a country road with his 18-year-old friend without a driver’s license at night. He was killed when the vehicle struck a wild boar crossing the road. The wild animals can grow up to 1.2 meters high and two meters long and weigh around 150 kilos. On their way, they can cover up to 40 kilometers at a time.
Ban on picnics in Roman parks
The probability of encountering a wild boar has increased once more in the past two years. During the CoV-related lockdown in spring 2020, there were increasing reports of wild boars foraging in residential areas. Not least in the Italian capital, the brown-black bristly animals are now a common sight in many parks. Around 23,000 wild boars are believed to live in and around Rome.
It was not until the beginning of May that the Roman city administration issued a ban on picnics in the parks in the north of the city. In the middle of the month, Rome’s social democratic mayor Roberto Gualtieri announced a program for the targeted killing of wild animals. Previously, wild boar in the capital and its environs was the African
swine fever has been detected.
plans for culling
The Italian government also wanted to think regarding how to reduce populations in the country. A “killing plan” is being discussed, said Andrea Costa, State Secretary in the Ministry of Health. He “respects the sentiments of animal rights activists and environmentalists, but this is an emergency that needs to be addressed with emergency response,” he said on public television.
A few years ago, the Tuscany region planned to kill 250,000 of the animals – and thus caused violent protests. Environmentalists and a number of celebrities, including Italian TV stars, artists and intellectuals, launched a campaign once morest the planned killing of the animals.
man made problem
According to animal rights activists, there are other ways of getting the situation under control – for example with drugs that affect the fertility of the animals. Or you just have to limit more road sections with fences and give the wild animals the opportunity to cross roads with overpasses or underpasses.
The fact that wild boars are multiplying so rapidly in Italy is of course due to the lack of natural predators. The problem is likely to have another cause, also man-made. In the 1990s, hunters brought animals to Italy from Hungary and other Eastern European countries. These were larger and stronger than the Italian wild boar – and more fertile.
