The environmental organisation Quercus today defended the creation of a “structured and comprehensive” plan to control the rising number of wild boars in urban areas, considering the Government’s pilot project to incentivize culling as insufficient.
“The population management of the wild boar in Portugal should be framed, in Quercus’s opinion, through a structured and comprehensive Action Plan, with multisectoral measures that address the root of the problem and deliver long-term results,” the association said in a statement.
The organization’s position comes at a time when problems have been reported in different regions of the country, such as damage to agriculture and road accidents, due to the presence of wild boars.
The association argues that “before paying for the culling of the animals, it is necessary to know if and where there are effectively excessive densities,” stressing that the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF) speaks of “density correction, so paying per head and slaughtering as many animals as possible will not necessarily yield an effective result and a reduction of the damages.”
To mitigate the damages caused by the presence of wild boars, Quercus advances with measures “that can and should be implemented,” such as investment in protecting agricultural crops, the need to ensure that compensation to affected farmers is fair and being paid, and the adoption of strategies aimed at sustainable hunting.
“If hunting is presented as a tool for population management, it is also necessary to evaluate its effect on the population and on damage to the ecosystem and biodiversity, and not only present the total number of animals culled,” said the organization, which also wants to know whether the boar population density will be quantified before and after the pilot project’s implementation.
The Government will launch a pilot project, which is based on an incentive to combat the increasing population density of wild boars in 60 municipalities of the country, by paying for the culling of males (50 euros) and females (70 euros), according to Quercus, a non-governmental and nonprofit organization.
“Paying per head and slaughtering the greatest possible number of animals will not necessarily yield an effective result and a reduction of damages,” says Quercus, stressing that “it views with caution the creation of the pilot project to incentivize the culling of wild boars, to the extent that it ends up addressing the consequence rather than addressing the causes.”
According to Quercus, the “historical decline of the Iberian wolf, a natural predator of the wild boar, across much of Portuguese territory is one of the key factors that explains the apparently higher population density and geographic spread of the wild boar.”
Another factor contributing to the boar’s dispersion, according to the organization, is related to “the progressive abandonment of land management and the decrease in available natural habitat,” since with fewer resources available in natural ecosystems, the animals seek food elsewhere, invading agricultural holdings or even urban waste containers.
