Bring Back the Wolf - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 94

organs in their snouts. Close to the fence the earth was churned and
gouged; throughout the twelve hectares of the enclosure there were
ruffles and furrows in the ground. This was why the boar had been
brought here: to grub out the rhizomes of the bracken, which prevent
tree seedlings from reaching the light, and to disturb the soil so that
seeds could germinate. Though the remaining trees, now ancient,
rained seed upon the ground here, none survived, because the bracken,
released by heavy grazing from competition, had swarmed the bared
land beneath them, creating an impenetrable barrier.
I would struggle to describe these boar as wild: the Dangerous Wild
Animals Act forces their owners to act as zookeepers. The boar, like the
beavers I saw in Wales, live behind high fences and electric charges. But
elsewhere in Britain, they are starting to re-establish themselves, with-
out permission from the authorities. The first major escape from boar
farms here took place during the great gales of 1987, when trees crashed
down on the fences. Since then they have continued to escape from
farms and collections, and they have now founded at least four small
colonies in southern England and possibly a fifth in western Scotland.
They breed quickly. The government says that unless determined efforts
are made to exterminate them, they will become established through
much of England within twenty or thirty years. 11 It is a prospect that
delights me, though I accept that not everyone shares this view.
Their reputation for ferocity has, like that of many large wild ani-
mals, been greatly exaggerated. It is true that they will attack dogs
that chase them or people who corner them, but researchers who
investigated this question concluded that, though they live through-
out continental Europe, 'we have been unable to find any confirmed
reports in the literature of wild boar making unprovoked attacks on
humans'. 12 The government believes that the chances that they could
transmit exotic diseases such as swine fever or foot and mouth to live-
stock are low, but they will cause damage to crops. This, it says, 'is
likely to be small in comparison to agricultural damage from more
common wildlife such as rabbits'. 13 They can also break into pig pens,
kill the domestic boars and impregnate the sows.
On the other hand, the boar will catalyse some of the dynamic
processes missing from our ecosystem. They are another keystone
species, shaking up the places in which they live. The British wood-