Wild about boar
HARRIET ARKELL meets the ( jolly brave) farmers who's...
Not long after dawn on the morning after the General election and I’m standing eyeball to eyeball in a remote Cotswold woodland with a wild boar called Bert.
Bert, who is seven, weighs 20 st, can run at 30 mph and could clear a 6 ft fence if he felt like it. He’s looking at me as though he does feel like it.
thankfully, there are two electric fences and a galvanised wire fence between us, so despite Bert’s snorting, his prehistoric looking tusks and the fact that his bristly hackles are standing on end, I’m not too worried.
But then his owner, wild boar farmer Simon Gaskell, 49, unlocks various chains on the gate and calls me to follow him into the woodland that Bert, his eight lady friends and their assorted stripy offspring call home.
‘Come on in,’ he cries, as he strides into the trees shaking his bucket of boar feed. ‘they want their breakfast — they’re unlikely to charge you. And besides, Bert’s a lover, not a fighter. Come on!’
It is no mean feat to walk into a wood filled with wild boar, let me tell you. I grew up on a farm and feel confident around animals, but these boar are not called wild for nothing, and Simon’s collection of injuries in his decade of farming them is testament to that.
‘once I was charged by Julian, the stud boar we had before Bert,’ he says, wincing at the memory. ‘He ripped through my wellies and jeans to cut my leg through to the bone, leaving a 3 in scar.
‘Another time I had my finger bitten to the bone and when I took off my thick protective rubber glove, half a pint of blood came out — that finger’s still numb today. And there was the time I broke a bone in my hand when one came at me in the corral . . . that was frightening.’
So the photographer and I are less than keen to follow Simon into the woods, but we do, and are soon surrounded by Bert’s extended family, or sounder, to use the collective noun.
SIMon shakes out some nuts and the boar approach at a run, quivering with densely packed muscle. Bert is keen to eat, but the sows are suspicious and protective of their boarlets, who trot behind them, squealing and squabbling.
one in particular takes offence when the photographer trains his lens on her. Snorting, she runs in circles around us, her boarlets in hot pursuit, getting closer and closer until, embarrassingly, I find myself squeaking at Simon: ‘Is she going to attack us?’
‘She might,’ he replies, making shushing reassuring noises at her. ‘But she’s not penned in so she’s unlikely to feel too threatened.’
I understand then why there’s no chance of cuddling a boarlet, much as I’d like to. It’s a relief when feeding time is over and we can put 20,000 joules of electric fence between us. We retreat to Simon’s house with its huge wall of glass overlooking the boar’s 20acre woods, and I ask him about his unusual career over some slices of delicious boar salami.
A former event manager, he and his barrister-turned-yoga-teacher wife, Louisa, 40, spent five years living near the beach in Perth, Australia, before returning to the farm he owned in the Cotswolds. (I can’t be more precise about its location, in case animal rights activists try to liberate the boar, which would put the animals and humans’ lives at risk.)
‘I’d studied agriculture at college, kept pigs when I was younger and the wooded nature of the land meant boar was the only option,’ says Simon.
Boar used to roam the British Isles, but were hunted to extinction twice, in the 13th and 17th centuries. But today there are pockets of truly wild boar around the country, with known sounders in the Forest of dean, Kent and Sussex.
Simon procured his boar, which are of Polish and German descent, from breeders in the West Country, and then set them loose in his huge, heavily fenced woodlands.
they’re free to roam and need little