French farmers furious over wild boars

Saint-Malo: 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,” the French farmer fumed.

“The boars come each night. They nibble over here, a little bit over there, trampling on everything.”

Like farmers across Europe, he is suffering the consequences of an explosion in the wild boar population over the past 30 years, venturing off woodland in search of food.

They have already ravaged eight hectares of his land this year – 10% of his farm in the northern French region of Brittany.

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

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

“The animals reproduce quickly and adapt to pressure from hunting,” said ONCFS researcher Christine Saint-Andrieux.

Various factors have encouraged the pigs to multiply and to leave the woods, she said, notably urbanisation and climate change.

In the Ille-et-Vilaine area where Rolland lives, 3,000 boars have been killed this year, but farmers say recreational hunting is failing to keep their numbers in check.

A large part of the problem, said regional hunting chief Andre Douard, is that hunters are “getting older and rarer” as rural France empties out towards the cities.

One farmer warned that the boars could be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” for French farming, an industry already in crisis due to rising costs and falling prices. — AFP