French farmers furious as wild boars run amok

SAINT-MALO, France: With a gaping hole in the ground and tangled corn stalks strewn across Yves Rolland’s field, it looks as if it has been hit by a tornado. He already knows who the culprits are.

“Every year it gets worse. They destroy everything,” the French farmer fumes, striding through what’s left of the crop.

“The boars come every night, in a pack.

“They nibble a little bit over here, a little bit over there, trampling on everything.”

Like farmers across Europe, Rolland is suffering the consequences of an explosion in the wild boar population over the past three decades, venturing off woodland in search of food.

They have already ravaged eight hectares ( 20 acres) of his land this year — 10 per cent of his farm on the edge of the Paimpont forest in the northern French region of Brittany.

As well as the valuable crops lost, the large bristly pigs have munched through feed he was growing for his livestock, which he will now have to buy.

“My father never saw boars when he was a farmer. Now we’ve been invaded,” he says.

The number of boars shot by French hunters gives an idea of how their numbers have soared.

Some 150,000 were killed in 1990- 91, according to hunting authority ONCFS, but by 2016-17, the figure had swelled to 700,000.

“The animals are very fertile, reproducing quickly and adapting to pressure from hunting,” says ONCFS researcher Christine SaintAndrieux.—