Just realised I wrote about this upthread in 2016 - sorry. I'm at the age when you do tend to repeat yourself...


As mentioned in the link, animal activists in 2005 set free over a hundred wild boar from a farm in North Devon. Only about forty were ever recaptured. The South Molton Six-ty, as they were known locally, were sighted all over the place, and we were warned - should a wild boar be spotted snuffling about in our shrubberies or on our lawns - that it was not advisable to approach it, wave our arms about in a discouraging manner, or by any other means try to shoo it away.

Who in their right mind would approach an uppity wild boar in order to persuade it to move on?

Temperance wrote:

Just realised I wrote about this upthread in 2016.

I wouldn't worry, I was about to post a short youtube of a family of boar enjoying the last of the summer sun on the beach at Cerbère (which has been recently mentioned on the railways thread) ... only I then realised that this was also from 2016 and I'd already posted a photo of the same group of piggies. But it's a nice happy clip so I'll post anyway.



I'm pretty sure this was filmed in September so as the little ones still have their baby stripes I think they must be a second litter, the first usually being born in mid Spring. Little wonder then that we now have so many sangliers in the south of France.

Meles meles wrote:

And how do you smuggle a beaver into the country? Via the ferry from Stavanger, hidden in the car-boot under boxes of garish scandinavian knitware, and with the smell masked by smoked-fish products?

The Scandinavian dimension with regard to wild boar is also worthy of note. The Sheffield University article mentions that the extinction of wild boar on the Scandinavian peninsular followed a similar pattern and timescale to that in the British Isles. It says that as numbers decreased on the peninsular, they could only be replenished by wild boar coming in via ‘the far north’ (i.e. Lapland). It goes on to say that this would have been problematic for boars because of the ‘deep snow conditions’. One is left envisaging boar on the Finnish isthmus (i.e. Finland and Russian Karelia) heading north but giving up due to unfavourable terrain and weather and thus being unable to round the head of the Gulf of Bothnia before heading south again. The only problem with this is that the Finnish isthmus also had no boars for hundreds of years. The following article from York Central Science Laboratory and the Sofia Institute of Zoology suggests that boar were also absent as far south as Estonia until they re-colonised that country in the second half of the 20th century.    

The Environmental Impact of Wild Boar

With boar disappearing from northern climes in the 13th Century but retuning in the 20th Century suggests a timescale which roughly coincides with the Little Ice Age. It could merely be a question of climate and latitude.

Proposal to re-wild half a million acres of the Highlands, centred on Glen Affric;

Affric Rewilding

and a similar rewilding project for East Anglia;

Wildeast

It’s interesting to see how those rewilding projects play down the subject of wild boars. In fact they don’t mention them at all. This could be because, once in situ, boars need very little help from humans to flourish. There is also controversy around boars rooting up crops and tree saplings, spreading disease in livestock and worrying sheep etc. Denmark recently constructed a fence to try to stop wild boar entering Jutland from Schleswig-Holstein. This was ostensibly because disease-spreading boar are considered a serious threat to Denmark’s important pig farming sector. It also implies that boars are extinct in Jutland which is not that surprising considering that it's a low-lying, agricultural area.
 
The distinction between boar and wild boar (raised by Meles upthread) is an important one. Just as boar were being raised domestically in England in the 16th century, a study by the University of Aarhus suggests that domesticated boar were being fed by humans on the Jutland peninsular as long ago as 2,500 BC. This was deduced by studying bone samples of boar from the Late Mesolithic period which showed that the boars’ diet included a ‘substantial amount of marine food’. The boar bones were dug up near Fannerup which today lies about 8km from the sea. The conclusion reached was that humans must have been feeding seafood scraps to the boars which were presumably penned.  

In the mind’s eye, genuinely wild boar tend to be associated with the very mountainous and heavily forested regions of southern, central and eastern Europe such as the Pyrenees, the Cevennes, the Alps, the Apennines, the Carpathians and Transylvania etc. In western Europe they also exist in places such as the Ardennes, the Jura and the Harz mountains but even in those areas not without controversy. History suggests that boars which have been reintroduced to Scandinavia and the British Isles are likely to have varying degrees of success depending on local conditions.

These bods were on television tonight, Mangalitsa (or Mangalica) pigs.

wooly pigs:



The breed originated in Hungary in the 19th century.

wiki:

The blonde Mangalica variety was developed from older, hardy types of Hungarian pig (Bakonyi and Szalontai) crossed with the European wild boar and a Serbian breed (and later others like Alföldi^]) in Austria-Hungary (1833). That year, Prince of Serbia, Milos Obrenovic sent 12 pigs of the autochthonous Serbian Šumadinka breed, ten sows and two boars. Pigs originally grown at the Prince's Topcider farm near Belgrade were used to create the Syrmian black lasa breed, also known as the black mangalica. Prince sent the animals to the Archduke Joseph, Paltine of Hungary, on whose estate the new breed was to be created.


The breed was nearing extinction by the early 1990s, with only 200 left Since then, they have undergone a revival and are a popular pork choice, their meat is described as the pork equivalent of Kobe beef.