Should you shoo or shoot wild boar?

If you think we have a deer problem in Scotland, consider the wild boar problem in France. There, despite manic hunting parties armed with doubtful weaponry and dressed in yellow hi vis gilets, the population has exploded to upward of two million animals. Families of wild boar have appeared on Riviera beaches. But it is in the vineyards that they have proved the greatest menace, grubbing up vines with their snouts and particularly favouring grapes just as they are “au point” ready for picking.

The sanglier is not naturally vicious, but like any wild animal it can get very cross if frightened. The best way, I am assured, of dealing with a sanglier at close range is to stand still and go, “Shoo”, preferably in French. And unless you are blocking its escape route it will trot off to savage someone else’s vines and veg.

We have been much beset with sangliers in the Haut Languedoc these past few weeks, not admittedly in search of grapes which haven’t appeared yet, but in the neighbour’s kitchen garden. He has so far kept them out largely with fencing (hardly high tech) but they are persistent animals and we were woken the other morning by a huge crash which was a herd of sanglier attempting a frontal attack from the ravine below on his fence, managing to destabilise the rotted roots of a vast mulberry tree.

“C’est insupportable,” declared our hostess and we all nodded sagely. The animals had two days earlier gone through the electric fence around her vines. By way of “action direct” we had even sat up, more in hope than anger, at a well-known sanglier cross roads with a dodgy single barrel shot gun in the slightly ludicrous belief we might get one; which we might have had we not talked, smoked and knocked over a bottle of wine, and been beset by midges.

In the village the latest sanglier assault was treated with the normal sangfroid reserved by country people for things you can’t reasonably do much about. Some years ago, a joint village effort had, quite illegally as we are in a national park, snared a huge boar with fencing wire which was butchered with much ceremony and turned into hams, chops, sausages and pâté under the direction of Jean Pierre, a retired farmer who regaled us (again) with the story of how as a young man he had launched himself through a window, onto the back of a sanglier in the garden below, clutching a kitchen knife.

He had been dragged through the tomatoes and aubergines and across a road before managing to deliver the bloody coup de grace. At least I think that was the jist. The tale is always greeted with much hilarity. Frankly I would have been inclined to follow official advice and confine myself to a fierce, “Shoo”. n