Boars on the fairway - part 2

  One reason boars have survived well through the centuries is the sheer tenacity of the species. One of the most successful large mammals on the planet, the Eurasian boar is tough as hell and a force to be reckoned with. Its natural range spreads from western Europe to South East Asia, including across northern Europe, central Asia and into Japan, as well as north Africa. Feral pigs also roam North America and Australia, where they provide much sport for gun toting hunters. The biggest hogs in the world are domestics, or their descendants, some of which have been recorded well above 500 kg, but it’s unlikely that truly wild boar reach such gigantic proportions. Hong Kong’s largest specimens weigh in at around 200kg, though the average described in reports on sightings is around 100kg. But that is surely big enough, with a body length of up to 2m and standing above a meter at shoulder height.

    Their ragged fur bristles up along the spine exaggerating a shaggy outline, a feral effect further multiplied when long upwardly curving tusks show. The tusks are elongated canine teeth, growing both from above and below. In male boar the bottom set are the weapons, constantly sharpened against the upper pair. An attacking male charges with head down, calculated for a lethal jab upwards at the moment of impact. The evolutionary arms race has, however, provided a stout defence against such stabs, with a plate of thickened skin on their bellies. The tusks double as digging tools when not used in fighting.

Credit: Daily Telegraph

    Set against the lean hunters of the world the plump boar seems a vulnerable target, every carnivore’s porky treat. But they shouldn’t be mistaken for sitting ducks, they’ll give any big cat a run for their money, fighting back with surprising force. I’ve seen black and white footage of a little forest pig fending off some kind of a leopard attack. The boar exploded into a ferocious defence, moving with the speed and agility that matched the lightening strikes of the big cat. After a few seconds the leopard gave up, licking its wounds. Witnesses have also claimed that boars can kill attacking tigers. 

    Part of the success of the species must also be in their diet. They have a cast-iron constitution and will eat pretty much anything organic. They plough their way through forest flora, and hoover up any carrion in their way. They will kill small deer and lambs sometimes, but they are more opportunistic than predatory.

    Opportunism leads to a wide palette, which in the case of pigs means eating anything, including human flesh. One infamous account from 1494 describes the tragic mauling of a baby left alone in a cradle. A pig wondered into a house and “ate the face and neck of the said child.” The case gained fame not just for the horror of what the pig did, but because the animal was brought to trial and sentenced to death by hanging, in a strange medieval practice of inflicting human justice on animals.

    More recently a Canadian pig farmer was sentenced to life in prison after a grisly investigation into the serial killings of more than 50 Vancouver prostitutes. Prosecutors could only piece together DNA evidence of six different women on the man’s farm, but up to 40 others are thought to have been murdered by the same person. During the trial a witness for the prosecution testified that the accused said he had strangled the women and fed the bodies to his pigs. Neighbours who might have bought pork from his farm were warned against tainted meat, invoking disconcerting thoughts of cannibalism by proxy, or even actual involuntary cannibalism, depending on what the killer did with all the human flesh.

Timm Schamberger/DDP

    Before emotions turn too hard against the porkers for their complicity in murder, it is as well to remember that the killer was human, and when it comes down to sheer scale we are definitely the planet’s biggest predators.

    The only people in Hong Kong outside of the police and army allowed to carry guns are members of the Hong Kong wild pig club, a group of volunteers charged by the government with the task of hunting problem boars. Many of the group are ex-police who admit to liking guns, and by the look of their photographs they are fond of camouflage, bullet belts and hats too. They operate in response to specific complaints made to AFCD. The department prioritises preventive measures such as boar-proof fencing and bright lights, but if that doesn’t work they’ll bring the hunters in. With night-vision goggles, army boots, and big guns, pig club members fan out along hillsides to flush out a targeted pig. According to Secretary for Environment Wong Kam-sing,  20 percent of the 1,500 wild pig nuisance complaints of the past 5 years have resulted in the deployment of hunting operations, which works out to about 60 callouts a year, or 5 a month.

SCMP

    Boar hunting is not unique to Hong Kong of course. Plenty of gun lovers do it all around the world. Even in Britain where the boar only made a comeback in the wild a couple of decades ago, a cull was sanctioned in 2008. In Japan’s Okinawa islands the government pays a bounty for each boar killed, and in France and Italy the wild population is culled back by up to 50 percent each year. It is easy to see people killing feral pigs on Youtube with many a triumphant account closely detailed by shooting clubs. You can see and hear proud parents teaching their children to kill boar. 

    Hunters in Germany kill about 50,000 boars a year, where the meat of the wild swine is particularly prized. But every year thousands of hogs in southern Germany are yielding radioactive flesh, and the government has made it illegal to sell the contaminated meat. The problem goes way back to the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe that contaminated a large swathe of Europe with radiation. Boars are susceptible to accumulating the damage, mainly because of their talents for sniffing out prime fungi beneath the soil in deep forests. The mushrooms store radiation, which enters the body of the pigs. 

    Radioactive or otherwise they offer good sport to gun lovers, but how necessary is a large cull? In Hong Kong their record for actual damage to people and property is minimal, while their contributions to ecology, especially forest regeneration, are gaining recognition.

    Like many animals, boars are agents of seed dispersal by eating fruit and moving on. European studies have also noted that the shaggy coats of wild boars work through forests with a double action. First with bristly hairs that dislodge seeds from plants, and second with an undercoat of curly hair that can lock the seeds in to be carried for many miles. Seeds can also be picked up from muddy puddles by a wallowing hog, only to be dropped from the fur on dryer ground when the pig scratches against a tree. They also help to speed up forest floor decomposition and soil nutrient turnover by ploughing up the ground with their snouts.

    Wild or domesticated, our record of managing, tracking, breeding, cultivating, killing and eating these animals is so ancient and rich, intertwined with so much of our history, that it seems justified to say that our relationship with sus scrofa is symbiotic. We share environments with these animals, we share our food, and we share diseases. We eat them, as they would eat us.  For centuries people in the know cleaned their teeth with boar bristle toothbrushes. The most popular sport in the world, football, was invented with a pig-bladder ball. Hogs provide the rich with truffles, the exclusive gold standard of fungi that can only be harvested from beneath forest topsoil with the aid of swine, and their superb sense of smell. Pigs have provided insulin for diabetics for decades, and they are on track to grow us organs for transplant too. 

    Theses animals really are close to us. We love having them around but they also reflect, however unjustly, much about ourselves that we don’t like, such as greed and laziness. But doesn’t your family do that also?  

    “Without attachment, and incapable of instruction, it continues, while it lives, an useless, or rather rapacious dependant,” wrote Oliver Goldsmith in the 18th century. Who hasn’t got a friend, a cousin or uncle a bit like that?

    Polynesian cannibals were said to call human flesh “long pig.” Indeed we are not far off an elongated, skinny, hairless version of our porky companions.

    It is interesting to note that Goldsmith, like many of his contemporaries, had a baffling tendency to judge animals with the same criteria his generation of writers judged foreigners and criminals. They had keen powers of observation, but a skewed moral filter blinded them from more interesting insights. Here is a fascinating description of swine empathy, surely years ahead of its time in the field of animal behavior.

    “When a hog is caught in a gate, as is often the case, or when it suffers any of the usual domestic operations of ringing or spaying, all the rest are seen to gather around it, to lend their fruitless assistance, and to sympathise with its sufferings.”

    But the conclusion by the author is depressing, instead of taking this for intelligence and complex emotional processes the hog is judged “by nature, stupid, inactive, and drowsy.” 

    Today we know better, pigs aren’t stupid any more. In fact we think they are pretty clever. At Penn State university in the US, researchers taught pigs to use modified joysticks, to manipulate cursors on a screen. That in itself is clever enough for an animal that snorts. But the study authors went further by using this ability to show that pigs can recognise abstract shapes, and express their understanding of the difference between shapes they have already seen and new ones that appeared on a screen. Not bad for an animal noted for its bad eyesight, with little piggy eyes set on two sides of their elongated skulls.

    Other studies have uncovered quick learning, unexpected powers of recall, and even powers of deception by pigs with secret food stashes unwilling to share with equally clever companions who have deduced their secret. On top of that they can do a whole set of circus routines like standing, bowing, and “speaking” on command. They can open and close gates and use mirrors to locate food.  

    Authors of a recent study at Britain’s University of Newcastle made the astonishing suggestion that pigs may experience optimism as well as pessimism. They devised an experiment where they put one set of pigs in a “happy” place, a roomy comfortable sty with lots of toys to keep them stimulated. Another set of pigs was kept in a boring no-fun, cramped environment. Researchers trained the pigs to recognise sounds that either preceded a treat, or an unpleasant experience -- the rustling of a plastic bag. Once the hogs learned the positive and negative signals, the researchers introduced a new neutral sound. The pigs in the happy place acted like they expected a treat, hence showed optimism, while the pigs in the unhappy place expressed pessimism by showing that they expected something unpleasant.

    Some studies suggest that they even “talk” to each other using snorts, sniffs and whistles, and mother pigs know their individual offspring by their voices.

    When Hong Kong’s island golf course off the coast of Sai Kung became subject to regular wild boar raids some years back, authorities put it down to intelligence and good communications. The fairways at Kau Sai Chau proved to harbour grubs or fungus that boars loved. The discovery of the fairway bonanza is assumed to have begun with routine food explorations by individuals swimming across from the mainland.

    These pioneer pigs then “told” friends and relatives about the stash across the sea channel, and led the way back for nightly expeditions. Pigs ploughed over hundreds of square meters of turf each night. The damage became so bad that at one point the popular public golf course was threatened with closure. Every morning staff desperately worked to patch up the damaged greens before golfers reached affected holes. In the end staff resorted to nightly patrols of the fairways, on noisy maintenance vehicles to scare off the boars. They also made traps, saying just a few would be sufficient: “The plan is that if we trap one, word will get around,” one official explained.