Decades of forest building and protection of the grassland has a heady serious effect in China. Boars have multiplied rapidly in some regions and are posing a critical threat to the livelihood of humans.
In Xiji County in Guyuan City in Ningxia in Northwest China, the local government recently issued a notice in a bid to hire a team of hunters among the locals to kill 300 boars each weighing above 40 kilos, on the back of funding siphoned off from the Central Government’s fiscal funds for protecting and restoring the ecological conditions for the county. The hiring notice stipulates that it is mandatory that hunters are equipped with drones, infrared cameras, more than 10 hunting dogs, hunting traps, military knives, iron nets, protective clothing and other tools.
Boars have increased drastically in numbers in the arid county and have caused severe damages to the farmland and locals’crops and livestock. The county government has been unable to make due compensations to the beleaguered farmers, forcing itself to draw the sword and throw down the gauntlet!
China has accumulated some valuable tricks and experiences in killing boars in 2021, when State Bureau of Forestry and Grassland experimented in organising hunters to curb the boar population in Shanxi, Sichuan, Fujian, Jiangxi, Shaanxi, Ningxia and eight other provinces.
On 30 June 2023, the bureau made public a list of wild animals that are “beneficial to the humans or that have significant economic and scientific research value”. The boar, which once enjoyed state protection, was taken out of the list.
The hiring notice has sparked off a lively debate on the Internet. Some say that the county can develop tourism like in some African countries where tourists pay to kill animals, some say that Manchurian tigers from Northeast China and lions from Africa should be transported over, some say that boars’meat sells for RMB 80 per kilo, some three or seven times higher than meat of pigs and thus boars should be cross-bread with local pigs to turn out pork that is more pricey. A few people have obviously eaten boars’ meat and say that boars’meat have a strong unpleasing flavour and might carry some dangerous viruses themselves.
Others worry that the traps might indiscriminately harm protected animals, which may die of an innocent death.
At the end of the article there is a survey that shows 85.62 per cent (125) of the people who joined the poll supported the killing of bars in the county, 5.48 per cent (eight) say they don’t care.
A Guyuan City’s Forest and Grass Bureau officer supports the county’s flight against boars, saying that the project is officially denominated as "Wild Boar Population Control Project", which is improvised to “regulate” a carefully calculated number of boars when an area is “overloaded” with boars.
“This is not blindly hunting”, he stressed.
Wild boar populations are considered of a species of least concern by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature because they are abundant in their ranges, which are increasing, according to a National Geographic article, which said that they’re also highly adaptable, thriving wherever there is water and tree cover but avoiding extremes of heat or cold.
“In fact, they’re considered a harmful invasive species, pushing native species out of delicate environments, attacking people, destroying public and private property, and carrying the same diseases as domestic pigs, some of which can infect humans,” the article said, adding that boar cause $2.5 billion worth of damage a year in the U.S. alone. In response, the U.S. government has allocated funding for trapping, research, and financial aid for farmers, which can be used to hunt wild boar.
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