Okay, I just don't get this

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justplainpossum

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Apparently in England wild boar are considered beloved creatures who deserve respect and protection (and what they call a 'proper' hunting season). One hunter said that using a night scope to kill boar is considered murder, and he only shoots them when they have a sporting chance. I even got a link to a group called something like the British Society to Protect Wild Boar (they consider us Americans uncouth and overly aggressive towards the species, and highlight a picture of a granny bending over to talk to a wild pig on a country lane). There is a huge disconnect here that's so interesting. I don't know if they feel differently because their boar are considered native, or because there aren't millions of them roaming about destroying the land and attacking people. But this video just blew me away. So, so strange to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvSk86kR0qU
 
Because the boar is native to Europe, Asia, and Africa, those areas harbor diseases and parasites to control its population. We don't have those diseases here. We don't want them.

And the British (and many Europeans in general) have hunted just about anything living out of existence centuries ago, so they like seeing wild animals. And bending down to coo at a piglet along a hedgerow is cute, a full-grown hog not so much.
 
Oh, that is interesting. I didn't think about diseases that control their boar populations, but that does make sense. I also didn't realize that the Europeans and British have over-hunted their game. I guess that's the difference between attitudes towards native vs. invasive species; it certainly is a surprisingly sympathetic piece.
 
According to my Austrian and German boar hunter friends; the wild boar population of Europe is exploding out of control. The boar population of Asia is also getting out of control.

You can't control the hog population by imposing bag limits and hunting seasons.

This is a good article:

There is plenty of game of all sizes – deer, hares and pheasants – for the most recent hunting season in about 40 départements south of the Loire in France. But once again, for sheer numbers, nothing can compete with the wild boar. Despite a nationwide drive to check their numbers, launched last year by the environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, and despite a tenfold increase in the number being shot by hunters over the last 30 years (more than 560,000 were slaughtered in 2009), the boar population is still rising steadily.

The problem is not restricted to France. In Germany, Italy and across almost the whole of Europe, wild pigs have seen a spectacular population boom in recent decades. They now pose a wide range of problems: damage to crops; rising tension between farmers and hunters; road accidents (20,800 collisions with vehicles in France in 2009); in Germany, wild boar are still feeding on mushrooms, truffles and berries contaminated with caesium from the Chernobyl disaster nearly 25 years ago; and the animals are carriers for parasites and infectious diseases.

.................................................................................................

The females seem to be reproducing increasingly young and the conventional pattern for reproduction, with a pause in the summer, is often no longer valid," says François Klein, who co-ordinates research into deer and wild boar at the agency. Could this be a response to global warming or changes in crop cycles, or a form of "social destructuring" due to the shortage of adult males?

Whatever the answer, culling guidelines for hunters must make allowance for the animals' reproductive precocity. Greater support is also needed for the development of tools to monitor the spread of populations, perhaps following the example set by the ONCFS, which has modelled population distribution in terms of sex and weight.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/19/france-wild-boar-numbers-rise

England has its share of hog problems too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/05/hundreds-wild-boar-cull-forest-of-dean
 
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Remember that England is far worse about a "city people" attitude about hunting in general; about guns in general.

Recall the outlawing of fox hunting, for instance. And Ingrid Newkirk, founder of PETA, came to the US from England.
 
There isn't the same amount of habitat in England and those areas are cut off from each other by heavily populated areas.

Here in the US the hogs are in places where urban areas are the exception.
 
Art Eatman is right. "Animal rights" got its start in England.

Theres a local couple who raise irrigated organic veggies. They thought it was darling when a small sounder of hogs showed up on their place. Told them what hogs would do but lady claimed the "little pigs are so cute; who would want to harm them"? Then the hogs tore into the tomatoes and sweet corn. One morning i got a frantic call to "help with these hogs". They stipulated the hogs must be "relocated". We took the live hogs out of the traps, loaded them into the toter, hauled them off, shot and field dressed same.

Every year we set traps on that place, catch 10-15 wild hogs and "relocate" them.
 
In the Davis Mountains of west Texas, some developers bought the McGuire Ranch and subdivided it into small tracts for residences on these "ranchettes". It is indeed a nice setup. But as part of the Property Owners' Association deed restrictions, no shooting "or other noxious noises".

So, protected critters did as protected critters do, and made more critters. This includes javelina. Heaps, gobs and bunches of them.

One lady walked out onto her front porch one morning to discover many quite-happy javelinas and far fewer flowers. She swelled up like a toad and demanded of the POA folks that they "Do Something!"

Heh.
 
I have never seen a wild boar in this part of the UK so its not a issue. But you will find most of the population in the UK would be against hunting of any sort the same goes for firearms. If you were hunting them it would be full bore rifles no handguns or bow and arrow that would be illegal.
 
Those English chaps obviously don't have to go out on a regular basis and fix hog holes in two miles of barbed wire and net fence to keep the goats in like I do. Kill all hogs by any means possible!
 
I guess it's the difference between hunting and eradication; the latter is really what we are striving for, at least here in Texas. Of course, we now have roughly between 2 and 5 million wild pigs in our state alone, so, as they say, we're not going to be able to barbecue our way out of this disaster.
 
So, protected critters did as protected critters do, and made more critters. This includes javelina. Heaps, gobs and bunches of them.
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Javelina are apparently still expanding their territory in the US. Some say there is no skeletal evidence that javelina were north of the Rio Grand river in ancient times. They also say there were few javelina in AZ 100 years ago. We now have javelina in SW Oklahoma. Some have been killed around Snyder, OK. i saw one at a pond on Ft. Sill several years ago.

A species like javelina that have lived in a hard scrabble environment could multiply quickly in an environment with lots of food and water. :eek:
 
Manta, that's so interesting. I thought "stalking" and owning "a bit of shooting" was a way of life in England. I'm so surprised. Guess I thought it was still like Rebecca and Downton Abbey. :o
 
It helps to look at land areas and populations. Europe in general has a much higher population density than the US, and much less open space.
 
Art, as much as it pains me to say it, I might have to disagree on the lack of open space, at least for the UK, Germany, Northern Italy, Spain, and a few others. Although the population per acre might give that impression, having flown over most of it and lived in the area for long durations, the population is concentrated in the cities and there is a pretty good amount of open ground. Unlike the US where suburban sprawl extends from the cities for miles with everyone owning somewhere between 1/4 to 1 acre of land, row homes are common over there as well as dinky yards where I've been and from what I've seen.

I just returned from a week in the UK. Drove from Birmingham to London, back to the border of Wales, and back to Birmingham. Lots of open ground once outside the cities and you see dead pheasant on the sides of the road as often as dead armadillos in Texas!
 
Dead armadillos on the road make me sad, cos they are such a trippy critter to watch as they run around. But on the other hand, they ARE the Official State of Texas Hood Ornament.
 
globemaster3 said:
Although the population per acre might give that impression, having flown over most of it and lived in the area for long durations, the population is concentrated in the cities and there is a pretty good amount of open ground. Unlike the US where suburban sprawl extends from the cities for miles with everyone owning somewhere between 1/4 to 1 acre of land, row homes are common over there as well as dinky yards where I've been and from what I've seen.
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Very true, and in a lot of ways, it's a far better use of land than the kind of suburban sprawl we have here. Housing tends to be very concentrated -- which means, among other things, that people can walk to shops, are more likely to know their neighbors, etc. And outside big cities, it generally means that anyone can walk a short distance and be in the countryside -- great for dog-walking, etc. One reason this works is that small-scale farming is economically viable in Britain and Europe in a way that it isn't here, any more. Because people can actually make a living this way, smallish chunks of agricultural land are worth enough to keep farmers from selling them off to developers.
justplainpossum said:
Manta, that's so interesting. I thought "stalking" and owning "a bit of shooting" was a way of life in England. I'm so surprised. Guess I thought it was still like Rebecca and Downton Abbey.
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Only if you're the Queen. :D
 
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