THE NORTHWEST TERRITORIES READY FOR PACK OF WILD BOARS.
PROPOSAL WOULD ALLOW PEOPLE TO KILL PESTS WITHOUT NEEDING A HUNTING LICENCE
Rob Gau was having one of those Mondays at work where, aside from being a Monday, he had been away from the office for a week and returned to a crush of paperwork and assorted headaches and, well, life could be worse. He could be dealing with an actual wild boar epidemic instead of making plans to deal with a theoretical wild boar epidemic.
“Wild boars are ecological train wrecks,” says Gau, manager of biodiversity and conservation with the Northwest Territories department of Environment and Natural Resources. “They destroy habitat by wallowing, by digging up roots, and they breed so fast — up to three litters in one calendar year — that once they are on the landscape you can’t get rid of them.”
And now they are on the march, says Gau, moving north through Alberta, tracking the course of Highway 35 to within 300 km of the NT frontier, a proximity that convinced the government to propose a new regulation that would classify wild boars (and feral pigs) as “pests,” meaning residents would be free to kill them without a hunting licence.
“They are in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan — and they are moving north — and we don’t want them here,” Gau says, adding wild boars are carriers of brucella and tuberculosis, diseases that can be transmitted to other animals and humans. “We want to make sure if they do appear, that people can eliminate them as quickly and easily as possible.”
In the 1980s, the boars weren’t viewed as pests but as potential money makers, introduced on Alberta farms to be raised for their meat, a dark, succulent delight, high in iron content that tastes — if one can imagine — like a pork-beef hybrid. Some of the introduced boars broke free. Once free, they proved adept at surviving Prairie winters, and bred prolifically. The Alberta government responded in 2008 by putting a $50 bounty on the pests. But the boars, smart enough to escape from farm enclosures, were likewise clever at avoiding getting themselves shot.
“If they only catch or kill one, the rest of the group will disperse and go elsewhere — they’re smart enough to know,” Perry Abramenko, an inspector with Agriculture and Forestry Alberta told Postmedia in 2017. (The bounty program produced 1,135 confirmed kills as of March 2017.)
If the wild boars actually make it to the Territories, among the first human outposts they will encounter is the 60th Parallel Visitor Information Centre and campground. Christian, an impeccably polite summer employee, answered the phone there Monday.
“I haven’t seen any wild boars,” Christian reported. He noted that the area is currently home to a bear, and not much else, but promised to call back if there are any wild boar sightings.
Meanwhile, Jim Lancaster, co-owner of Lancaster Family Hunting, an outfit that operates in the Mackenzie Mountains south of Norman Wells, predicted the boars arrival wouldn’t increase his bottom line, but could pose a serious threat to the established wildlife order.
“Wild boars are all through Texas and other parts of the United States, so there is no real market for a wild boar hunt up here — we wouldn’t make any money off it,” Lancaster said.
“But from an outfitter’s perspective, the boar present a real risk to disrupt the native wildlife in NT, and I’ll fully support any measure to take the boars out.”
Texas’ wild boar population now exceeds 2.6 million, costing ranchers and farmers hundreds of millions of dollars annually in damaged crops and livestock. Restaurants statewide feature dishes, such as Texas style wild fried boar, while hunting entrepreneurs offer clients novel ways of killing the beasts — which can weigh in excess of 200 kg — including with a machine-gun from a helicopter.
Kelly Readman, owner of Wild Boar Adventures in North Battleford, Sask., believes Canada’s wild boar epidemic is fiction. He raises and releases boars for hunting on a specified tract of land. His clients are mostly hunters from Western Canada — who keep hearing about the boars of Alberta — but never actually see them — or get a chance to shoot them.
“People take the paradigm of Texas and try and apply it to Canada, but Texas is entirely different,” Readman says. “Six months of the year our ground is like asphalt, it is rock hard. But down there, the boars can root around in the dirt all winter. Boars got these short little legs — and they can’t handle deep snow — and up in the Northwest Territories, I think they’d just get licked up by the bears and the wolves.”
Readman’s advice? Don’t panic.
Back in Yellowknife, Gau was not panicked, just plowing though his Monday work pile, confident if the worst-case scenario unfolds, and the wild boars breach the frontier the people of the north — including government employees — will respond with impunity.
“I’m a former hunter,” Gau says. “I don’t have the time to get our there and hunt like I used to in my youth but, yes, the opportunity to get some wild pig on my table, that sounds pretty appealing to me.”