I’ve been waiting for the Wild Boar to arrive. They are quite common in the Forest of Dean, and every year some of the youngsters have to leave home and find new territories. And so they have at last been seen at the head of some of the valleys on the English side of the Black mountains. Experienced wild boar can be quite shy and elusive. These young ones have been inexperienced enough to let themselves be seen, but adventurous enough to have come across the river too, and at least one of these has been seen behind my place. It’s not ideal habitat for them here, but once they get into the big woodlands in the north of the county they’ll be, as they say in Ireland, on the pig’s back.
I find it exciting that we now have wild boar and beavers in our countryside, and I’m sure I’m not alone. I feel that in a moral sense they are common property, or maybe not property at all, although the law in this country was written by the owners of sporting estates and says that they are the property of the owner of the land where they are found. If you want to shoot them on your land you have the legal, if not the moral, right to do so.
My neighbours sometimes shoot rooks. Often they do so illegally. You have to get a special licence to shoot rooks, and to make the case that they are harming a crop, where until recently you could shoot them anyhow under the term of what was called a ‘general licence’. But what narks me is that they are my rooks, and your rooks, as much as they are theirs, or no-ones. One minute they are flying over my ground. I could legally shoot them if I wanted to, if I had a special licence. Then they’re over my neighbour’s ground, and temporarily his, and so he permanently shoots them.
Someone on the other side of the river had a sow in a sty that the boar must have got wind of, when she was in season, and now she has a litter of hybrid wild boar piglets, striped like humbugs. And the word on the street is that that boar will be shot. I’d somehow accepted that this might happen. Whenever the boar are mentioned round here someone will talk about ‘them gun boys’ who all apparently have night sights on their rifles. I suppose I was accepting the inevitable, and hoping that some of the wild boar would be smart enough to keep out of the way and fertile enough to breed faster than ‘them gun boys’ could shoot them. Then I told a friend less inured to country ways about it, and she said ‘Why?’ And that’s a bloody good question.
I can see that there is a discussion to be had about predators. Throughout Europe conservationists are negotiating the return of apex predators with the farmers and landowners who raise objections, and in the UK we are quietly, stealthily, negotiating the return of that shy pussy-cat of predators, the lynx. This has to be done, tactfully, carefully and interminably. We’d still be discussing the pros and cons of beavers if someone hadn’t taken the law into their own hands. But Wild Boar? I’m trying to think what harm they do. They have a right to be here, of course, and I believe we have to find ways of living with them. I keep my chickens safe from foxes by good fencing, not by shooting foxes. But boar are not predators and they are not likely to do anything more irritating than rootle in your lawn, and they are beneficial in woodlands if at reasonable population levels.
At present there is no closed season for shooting wild boar. You can do it all round the year, and there is no protection for sows that are ‘in pig’ or with young litters. As things are, with man taking the place of the top predators, I concede that there is a need to regulate the numbers of animals such as deer and boar because if they become too numerous they can badly damage the environment. The logic, of course, is to bring wolves back to bring the ecosystem into balance, but in the meantime I admit that hunting may be needed. But that sort of hunting needs to be regulated. There should for humanitarian reasons be a closed season, and ideally we need a Forest Service such as they have in the USA, that will survey populations and issue an appropriate number of licences.
If you wanted, then, to make concessions to the farmers while respecting those who want extinct species to return, and to follow the advice of conservationists who know that complex ecosystems are essential, not a luxury, and if you understand the need to achieve a balanced and consensual approach to managing the return of species that we have exterminated in the past, the last people you would put in charge would be ‘them gun boys’.
My four year old grandson was surprised when I told him that farmer's are allowed to own guns, and asked why. He wasn't impressed when I said 'to shoot crows,' and said 'why don't they use scarecrows'. He then added. 'Only policemen should have guns.' I love that boy :-)