Wild boar hunt in China: formerly protected animal becomes a plague
Wild boar hunt in China: formerly protected animal becomes a plague
In the early morning hours of an October day, dozens of dogs chased the imposing figure of an animal that hooked through a forest in northwestern China while a thermal drone hovered above them.
"The dogs caught it! Stuck it! Stuck it!" called a drone operator into his radio to the hunter, as in a video view of a state -close news service see.
Bounty Hunting for wild boar control
The hunter hurried to the place where the dogs had circled the 125 kilogram animal, and pushed his spear tip into the animal, killed it and secured a reward of 2,400 yuan (about $ 330).
He is part of one of six "Bounty Hunting" teams who were employed this autumn in the XIJI district in the autonomous region of Ningxia Hui in northwestern China.
Your goal? Wild boars.
In recent years, China has authorized China teams of bounty hunters to kill wild boars, as part of a pilot program to combat a pest that causes considerable damage to the harvests and causes accidents, injuries and even deaths. In February the program was expanded to nationwide killing actions.public reaction and animal welfare
The hunters are not allowed to use firearms or poison, but the killing campaign caused a surprise in a country in which animal protection is strictly regulated.
animal welfare groups have criticized this measure, while experts discuss whether the increase in wild boar attacks justifies the killing of large animal populations and whether the hunting is the right solution to reduce human-animal conflicts in the most populous country in the world.
wild boar attacks in China
China's problem with wild boar has existed for over two decades. Years ago, so many animals were hunted that they were extinct in some regions, reports the state broadcaster cgtn .
In response to this, the government added the wild boars to a national protective list in 2000, which only allowed licensed hunt in areas where there were too many pigs.
over time, almost without natural enemies, the population of these animals rose from around 10,000 to around 2 million, as well as reports on wild boar attacks.
The wild boars caused damage to property or people in all out of the eight of the 34 provinces of China, as the National Forest and Grassland Administration (NFGA) reported in January.
in the XIJI district, where six official bounty hunting teams killed 300 wild boar this autumn, the animals alone caused 2023 economic losses of over 2 million yuan ($ 276,200), mainly by devastating arable land, as a local civil servant reported to the state newspaper The Paper.
increasing frequency of wild boar attacks
human life was also lost. In December 2023, a 51-year-old villager from the central Chinese province of Hubei died of blood loss after he was bitten by a wild boar, as The Paper reported. A similar fatal attack on a municipal officer in the southwestern province of Sichuan occurred three years earlier
wild boars have also been increasingly being spotted in urban areas because their numbers rise and their habitat shrinks through China's quick urbanization.
challenges in the management of wild boar population
The popularity of wild boar hunt decreased after the species was put under national protection, even if some poachers continue to take the risk of a prison sentence to hunt them for sale on wildlife markets.
But the demand for wild boar meat dropped as Beijing in early 2020 as "Unsimeless strict" hunting ban. At that time, the Coronavirus pandemic spread worldwide, and many scientists linked it to a food market in Central China.
One year after the ban on consumption, the number of reports on wild boar attacks exceeded the 100, according to a Conflicts with wild boar from 2000 to 2021, published in the leading Chinese geographical journal Acta Geographica Sinica.
When the reports on wild boar attacks further, the central government removed the type of its national protective list in 2023 and thus raised the need for a hunting certificate.
public debate and future measures
Although many welcomed the political turn to control the plague, the recent top -class bounty hunter initiatives of the local authorities came up with resistance and sparked a debate among experts on how the country should deal with this growing public annoyance.
"Shouldn't we protect animals? Why do we return to hunt?" Asked a user on Douyin, the Sister app from Tiktok in China.
An animal protection group that has been active against wildlife ideas for over a decade, described the nationwide killing campaign as a "brutal joke" on China's platform Weibo.
civil servants defended politics. Sun Quanhui, member of the group of experts for the wild boar management of the Supreme Forest Authority of China, told the state of China Daily that hunting was the "only way" to check the wild boar population because it lacks natural enemies.
Nevertheless, Zhou Jinfeng, General Secretary of the Foundation for Biodiversity and Green Development of China, expressed that hunting as a human intervention was only justified if the animal population really overwhelm local ecology.
Based on open data, it is much too early to say that the wild boars in China "run around".
he added that wild boar attacks were "the result of human intervention into natural balance".
various opinions on wild boar fighting
Among those who recognize the need to contain the wild boar population, there are different opinions about how hunting should be carried out and what should be done with the killed animals.
Members of the state -supported group of experts suggested that the hunters can use weapons to improve hunting efficiency, as The Paper reported.
You also recommended that you change China's laws in order to allow people to eat “captured wild boars”, but only after a quarantine process to ensure that the meat can be consumed safely. However, further details about this implementation were not given.
Both proposals were classified as questionable by experts outside the group.
The Supreme Forest Authority of China said that she is working to "optimize" the management of firearms and ammunition to "facilitate professional hunting," said the state -led People’s Daily.
"Wild boar damage has become a catastrophe ... This actually reflects a certain imbalance in the ecological environment," the deputy head of the expert group told CCTV.
"Therefore, no matter what methods we use, we ultimately restore the river and the balance of the ecological chain in order to achieve true harmony between man and nature."
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