The case for wild boar in Scotland
Opponents of wild boar point to the damage to the environment they can cause, but there are many benefits if numbers are controlled, writes Chantal Lyons, author of Groundbreakers: The return of Britain’s wild boar
What happens when a big wild animal comes back to a place where generations of people have never known its like?
I first asked this question in 2014 when, for my university degree, I spent the summer in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. My mission: to interview locals about their experiences of sharing their home with England’s biggest population of wild boar.
We drove this species to extinction in the British Isles by about 700 years ago. Then, starting from the 1990s, a series of escapes and illegal releases saw new populations pop up in pockets of the country from Inverness to the Kent Weald. In the Forest of Dean, boar became firmly established in 2004 when a shooting syndicate effected a clandestine (if botched) release. By the time I arrived on the scene, there were an estimated 800 trotting around, all busy scooping out wallows, digging up woodland floors, roadside verges and people’s gardens, and occasionally having run-ins with dogs. Residents were divided. Some people found their hearts beating rapidly in terror at the prospect of meeting wild boar, others embraced the wildness that the boar had summoned. But everyone spoke of a constant, heightened awareness that they might at any moment meet an animal which needed to be treated with the utmost respect. They had all (re)acquired a state of mind that no one else in this country has known for centuries. Not since we drove to extinction every big and potentially dangerous wild animal we once shared our island with. The wild boar were, in essence, rewilding us.
It took eight years following that fateful summer for me to pluck up the courage to pitch a book that would tell that astounding story. I moved to the Forest of Dean, using it as my base of operations to research and write Groundbreakers: The return of Britain’s wild boar. I wanted to explore fully all the impacts that the return of wild boar were having on landscapes, other wildlife, and us – and to learn more about what it was like to be a boar.
Social, intelligent, less aggressive than popularly believed, and bestowed with a powerful snout and equally powerful sense of smell, wild boar are an irreplaceable member of British fauna. No other native animal is nearly as good as they at disturbing the earth and opening up the seedbanks within. They spread the seeds of plants and the spores of fungi far and wide on their fur and in their dung. They spend inordinate amounts of time wallowing and, in doing so, leave ephemeral pools which provide homes for aquatic species and drinking water for all. In the terrible heat and drought of summer 2022, a trail camera I left in front of my local wallow showed just how important this lingering pool of water was for tawny owls, buzzards, sparrowhawks, deer, foxes, badgers, and frogs.
Of course, British landscapes have changed in the centuries that boar have been absent for. This is what much of the argument against the return of the species hinges on: that our embattled natural environment cannot take the extra burden.
Plenty of peer-reviewed scientific papers from continental Europe report that boar are eating or outcompeting other species in places where their populations have grown unchecked (alongside an equal weight of papers about their positive impacts, where there aren’t too many of them). Whether British boar are having similar impacts remains a matter of hearsay, until any rigorous studies are carried out. I have seen bluebells dug up and their bulbs cleanly snipped off. But I have also seen young, brightleaved oak seedlings sprouting in the rootings left by boar. My conviction that boar are a vital force for good – if we and other predators hunt them and keep them moving through the landscape enough – is shared by others such as the team at Highlands Rewilding. This rewilding company discovered soon after purchasing the Bunloit Estate near Inverness that they wouldn’t need to put old-breed pigs like Tamworths onto their new land after all; bands of boar were already occasional visitors. When I visited Bunloit, one of their rangers showed me with zeal how the boar were clearing bracken, and he told me of the wildflowers that had bloomed in the last spring and summer in the old pastures where the animals had been rooting.
Although boar are safe within Bunloit’s boundaries, Forestry and Land Scotland and other neighbouring landowners are gunning for them. In fact, a boar shooting industry is quietly thriving in regions where they exist in large enough numbers, including Dumfries and Galloway, Perthshire, and the Great Glen. On my Scottish travels I spent a night sitting with a seasoned Galloway stalker in his high seat, silently breathing, and waiting. To take a boar is no sure thing. There are thought to be ‘several thousand’ boar in total in Scotland. Great news for shooters – perhaps less so for farmers. Boar can and do dig up pastures. Yet a series of
A boar shooting industry is quietly thriving in regions where they exist in large enough numbers including Perthshire
headlines in 2022 also accused them of killing lambs and full-grown sheep across the nation. I remain agnostic about this claim, which appears to have been extrapolated from two unsubstantiated cases.
Another charge brought against Britain’s wild boar is that they have too much domestic pig in their ancestry; or even that they are domestic pigs with the odd wild boar in their family tree. While I’m unaware of any genetic testing done on Scottish boar, this has been done with samples from boar in the Forest of Dean and in Kent and East Sussex. The results: these animals are indeed mostly wild boar and, at least in the case of the Kent and East Sussex ones, comparably so to wild boar in continental Europe. Domestic pigs were brought there from the Middle East around 8,500 years ago. Ample time to fraternise and mix their gene pool with the locals. There is, perhaps, no longer such a thing as a “pure” wild boar.
The crossing of human-erected boundaries – physical, behavioural, and genetic – are what make wild boar so contentious in Britain today. Their presence is a full-throated challenge to the attitudes we’ve adopted in the absence of so many of the animals that our long-ago ancestors knew and destroyed.
Our new wild boar may yet be destroyed too. The populations of Devon, Dorset, and Kent and East Sussex all appear to have been shot out. If calls to exterminate them in Scotland as well are actioned by the government, that would be a tragic thing. It would be the loss of a chance for landscape-scale ecological restoration, something we desperately need to in order to stem the loss of biodiversity and bioabundance. And it would be the closing of a gate that could otherwise lead us to a better place: a world peopled with all manner of human and wild beings, flourishing alongside each other.