HOUSEWIFE-TURNED HUNTER TAMES BOAR MEAT WASTE
In Japan, it’s a familiar scene on the evening news: a wild boar ventures out of the woods looking for food. It wreaks havoc on a countryside town, spurring local authorities to arm themselves with nets to catch the rogue animal. Boar populations in the country have tripled from the early 1990s and reached 900,000 in 2017, according to the Environment Ministry. That partly reflects a decline in the number of hunters, increasing the frequency of encounters between man and beast. In the year to March 2018, 76 people were injured in boar attacks, up from 64 a year earlier. Amid a government push to stop overpopulation of the animal, which can also hurt the ecosystem, hunters have been capturing boars in record numbers. But what happens to all of that meat? “Skinning and taking apart a specimen is hard work, especially for ageing hunters. So what often happens is that they won’t even take it home. They’ll just catch it, kill it and bury it on the spot,” says Etsuko Nishikiori, a hunter in Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture, a seaside hot-spring resort about a two-hour drive from Tokyo. To put a stop to the wasteful practice, Nishikiori and a group of her friends in October 2017 set up a facility to process game meat for consumption. They pooled together ¥1.3 million (US$11,815) to buy a motorised winch to lift carcasses, making it easier to drain blood and remove internal organs, and refrigerators and freezers to preserve the meat. The meat is prepared into cuts or turned into sausages or jerky to be sold at local shops or online. People who bring in a carcass can collect ¥2,000, or if they choose, half of the meat, but “most are just happy to have it taken off their hands”, says Nishikiori. The facility, which is named Yama no Megumi (Bounty of the Mountain), accepted about 80 boars and a few deer in its first year of operation. The biggest specimen was a 120-kilogramme behemoth that Nishikiori likened to something from the anime film Princess Mononoke, which features a giant 500-year-old boar that is worshipped as a god. Most specimens were caught in the surrounding forest, but sometimes hunters have brought in carcasses from far away, keen to avoid a hefty disposal fee. Nishikiori, a 48-year-old former nurse from Tokyo, started hunting four years ago after the chickens she had been raising were ravaged by a wild animal. The incident prompted her to get a trapping licence in order to “understand my foe”, she says, but it wasn’t until a neighbour offered to cook her some boar meat that she caught the hunting bug. “It was so delicious. I thought, if they can be caught around here I should do it myself.” She got her rifle licence about a year ago. Nishikiori and colleague Hiroko Yamaguchi, who helps run the meat-processing facility, are unusual sights in the local hunters’ club, which comprises mostly elderly men with an average age of around 70. There were 190,100 licensed hunters in the country in 2015, the overwhelming majority of whom were 60 or older, and male. But the number of female hunters more than quadrupled to 4,200 between 2000 and 2015. Nishikiori says women may be drawn to hunting because of the growing popularity of game meat, which has spread in Japan in recent years under the French word gibier and is considered a leaner, healthier alternative to meat from domesticated animals. Ultimately, she aims to encourage younger people to take up hunting. She wants to ensure the local ecosystem is not threatened by overpopulation of wild animals, which leads to overfeeding on vegetation. Not only does that rob other species of food, it also makes mountainsides prone to landslides because some wild animals eat tree bark, causing trees to die and leading to fewer roots to anchor the soil. “In five or 10 years, all of the older hunters will retire and then who’s going to do it? We have to keep the culture alive,” she said.
“In five or 10 years, all of the older hunters will retire. … We have to keep the culture alive” ETSUKO NISHIKIORI