In April 2009 the Standard described a nasty attack. A 77-year-old man was hospitalised after a boar pinned him to the ground and bit him in the groin, it said.
According to the paper the boar got stuck in a fence earlier at a nearby house, a fairly common occurrence here. The pig freed itself after a struggle and shot off along a drainage ditch until it was blocked by a dead end that it was forced to high jump out of. It then ran up a hill, away from the village, but an outdoor rest area was in its path, where a group of pensioners were playing cards. It charged towards one man who fended it off with a bicycle, and then turned on another. The second man fought the animal off with a stick and held it at bay for a minute until the boar knocked him to the ground and sank its teeth into his groin. 
A boar charging towards a group of men sounds unusual. Was that the full story? I checked with CT Shek at AFCD and this is what he told me:
“In the past five years, only three incidents of minor injury of people caused by wild pigs have been reported and the most recent case was an elderly man slightly bitten by a wild pig when he was chasing the animal in his village in April 2009.”
Shek's version of events was a lot milder than reported, casting blame also on the actions of a man who was going against AFCD advice to leave wild animals well alone. But of course “beast mauls man in groin” makes for a better story than “man chasing boar slightly injured.”
Nine times out of ten the boar will come off worse in an encounter with a human, and yet we remain scared of them, because they look damn scary. In fact, when a hundred and fifty kilogram pig crashes out of the undergrowth to run wild in the streets, it is scary. You don't want to get in its way, especially when it is frightened, and if you can see it, it will be frightened.
But there are hardly ever any unprovoked attacks by boars. They have an unfortunate habit of crashing into us by accident, and that can lead to an entanglement, a panicked charge and a nasty nip. But that’s no more of an attack than a bird crashing through the window of an apartment, and smashing up ornaments in a panicked bid to escape.
Compare the three minor boar injuries in a five year period with Hong Kong road accident statistics 2008 - 2013: more than 85,000 people injured, nearly 12,000 seriously, 636 people killed
Now take a closer look at official boar data.
446 “cases” were reported to AFCD in 2010, of which 40 percent were regarded as mere sightings or duplicates. 268 were considered “potential nuisance cases,” and of those 96 cases were judged to merit hunting operations. The numbers were lower in 2013, but still 56 wild pigs were shot that year after 260 “cases” were reported, that’s more than one boar execution a week.
We can safely conclude that cars are much more dangerous than boars, but while we seem to accept a high level of deadly collateral damage from drivers, we have a very low tolerance for even slightly leery wild pigs.
Recent incidents include a boar shot by a policeman with a hand gun on a housing estate after a tranquiliser dart failed. Another was shot after a five-hour rampage in a village house ended with the boar locked into a storage room, repeatedly charging the walls and door.
One died after police cordoned-off a neighbourhood of North Point district following the early morning discovery of a pair of sleeping hogs. The pigs stampeded after an officer tried to shoot one with a dart gun and missed.
Boars with their heads rammed into roadside crash barriers are not exactly a common sight, but they’re not far off a yearly occurrence. Usually firemen cut them free, but not all of them make it through the ordeal after sustaining self-inflicted injuries from a frantic struggle to prise free.
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| Boar in mainland China meeting the same fate as many of its cousins in Hong Kong |
Considering the hazards, it is a wonder the animals come so close to the human environment, but they always have.
Wild Boars are the largest truly wild, land animals that live and breed in Hong Kong. Feral cattle are larger but they are basically domestic animals left alone for several generations after economic changes made them redundant. We've got feral dogs too, but they are also the descendants of pets gone astray.
A proper wild boar is a beast born in the forests, from stock never domesticated by humans. They're often referred to as the ancestors of domestic pigs but they’re more like their wild, never domesticated cousins. The two forms of swine are the same species sharing the same Latin name sus scrofa. There are different breeds of pig, just as there are different breeds of dog, ranging from your pink cuddly porkies to the low slung pied-coated pot bellies, but they’re all sus scrofa and they all had ancestors that looked as ragged and wily as a Hong Kong boar.
Wild boars should also not be mistaken for feral pigs, often hunted in North America and Australia, the descendants of domesticated pigs that have escaped from farms or been let loose for sport. If these variations are all the same species you might wander what is the point of distinguishing between them, but there are differences.
Recent research in domestication of wild animals suggests genetic roots at the start of the process that brought a select group of species closer to humans. Boars, wolves and cats are thought to have all undergone a similar process. One theory is that a mutation of DNA prevented some individuals from being afraid of humans, and that gave them the willingness to take greater risks while scavenging on the waste by-products of settlements. There was something about human habitations they liked, most probably food and a degree of security from other predators. They followed us from a distance, the bravest coming closer and getting more food, while risking spears and other ways in which humans could suddenly turn on them.
As the most human-friendly animals interbred they passed on the genes that brought them closer to us. They were in effect breeding a domesticated strain of themselves. There were physical as well as behavioural changes. Their coats became less shaggy and ears flopped down, as did their tails. The process in pigs was likely accelerated around 10,000 years ago when humans took note, actively encouraged the relationship, and then started selectively breeding for the traits most useful to us. Docility and meatiness being two qualities sought in pigs, while cats for example were probably selected more for rat-catching skills, and the wolf-dogs fanned out into all sorts of services.
The wild ones in the meantime stayed clear. They didn’t trust us. They chose a different path through the forest, but still on the fringes of the world we built. It is the descendants of the wild strain that appear out of Hong Kong’s woodlands to charge into the oncoming traffic, and get trapped in concrete drainage ditches.
Like macaques, boars live in matriarchal family groups. Boar groups are called sounders, with up to 20 individuals. They sleep together in tightly packed rows, in territory marked by trees rubbed with their mud-caked bodies. Females with young aggressively defend their patch from any threats including hikers on the wrong path. Adolescent males get kicked out of sounders when they mature, to become solitary foragers, mostly avoiding each other’s company, until mating season, when violent showdowns are unavoidable for access to females.
Wild boars in Hong Kong are part of an ancient stock of primeval fauna that survived the territory’s centuries of deforestation, according to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Foundation. They are on an elite list of only nine species considered aboriginal, including esoteric specialists like the Chinese pangolin and the crab-eating mongoose. Their numbers had dropped by mid 20th century for them to be rated a rarity in the 1950s, but they survived the lean years to gain current official status as “very common and widespread.” There is not an official count of the animals, but they were the fourth most often spotted species in the 2002 -- 2006 camera trap survey, after porcupines, muntjack deer and Indian civets.
A decade ago on Lamma Island there were no reports of wild boar, but slowly sightings became more common. It’s believed the first returnees swam across the channel from Hong Kong island, successfully negotiating one of the busiest shipping channels in the world. I came across one at rubbish bins about 200 m from my flat. A huge black pig had come down a steep wooded hill and was poking its snout in plastic bags, it stared me out for a second and then backed off into the woods. It waited for me to pass and then came out again, not concerned that I was still lingering to watch, having deduced that I had got to the side I wanted to be on. Since then I’ve seen the aftermath every few days, plastic bags torn open and dragged in to the forest, the access path worn into a muddy channel of churned soil.
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| AFCD |
The general belief is that the animals are fairing well in the territory, as they are reportedly doing so in many places around the globe, including Britain where they have been reintroduced, and Germany where recent invasions of the suburbs had led to calls for anti-pig fencing to be erected. Official sightings in Hong Kong climbed from 150 in 2006 to 446 in 2010. Mainland China also recorded a recent spike in the eastern provinces, including in the city of Hangzhou where swine were entering hospital dormitories and college kitchens. The total number in the province had risen five-fold in a decade according to the mainland press, to 150,000. The rise in eastern China has been blamed on the fall in natural predators such as wolves, as well as demographic changes emptying the countryside, as farmers head to cities for work
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