Trentino Allows Bow Hunting of Wild Boar – Against a Problem Recreational Hunting Created Itself

The northern Italian region of Trentino plans to permit bow hunting of wild boar from 2027 in order to curb the growing population.

What is being sold as a modern regulatory measure is in truth the next step in a vicious circle that recreational hunting set in motion itself. For the flood of wild boar in Italy is no natural phenomenon, but to a significant extent the result of hunting interventions.

Recreational hunters introduced the wild boar themselves

The origin of Italy's wild boar surge lies with recreational hunting. Because the native population had shrunk drastically at the beginning of the 19th century, recreational hunters deliberately introduced larger, more prolific wild boar from Hungary and other Eastern European countries and released them so that hunting could continue. These Eastern European animals differ fundamentally from the species originally native to Italy.

While a sow of the native Italian wild boar gave birth to only two to four young on average, the Eastern European form produces eight to ten piglets per year and reaches sexual maturity at just six months old. The result of this hunting-driven crossbreeding is a population that is multiplying rapidly and is now estimated at over one million animals in Italy. Within two decades, it has more than doubled.

The irony is obvious, and even Italian media describe it this way: it is recreational hunters who caused this plague. Those who now want to combat the wild boar with even more and even newer hunting methods are fighting a problem that would not exist in this form without recreational hunting.

Why hunting can even fuel population growth

The fallacy that more recreational hunting automatically means fewer wild boars persists stubbornly, even though wildlife biology paints a different picture. Wild boars respond to high hunting pressure with increased reproduction. This compensatory effect is a natural balancing mechanism: when a population is heavily decimated, earlier sexual maturity and larger litters set in.

Added to this is the social structure of the sounder. An experienced lead sow regulates the group's reproductive rhythm and suppresses early maturity in younger sows. If she is shot, this order collapses, and the young sows become pregnant earlier and in greater numbers. Recreational hunting disproportionately targets precisely the wrong animals, thereby unintentionally accelerating reproduction.

A third factor is baiting, that is, luring the animals with feed laid out, usually maize, in order to shoot them more easily. This supplementary food improves the animals' condition and breeding success, directly contributing to population growth. Recreational hunting thus literally feeds its own quarry and creates the very problem it claims to solve.

Ticino proves it with figures: hunting does not regulate, it reproduces

Where the Eastern European wild boars migrate across the border can be observed right here in Switzerland. In the canton of Ticino, wild boar are hunted year-round, day and night, across the entire territory. If intensive recreational hunting actually regulated populations, numbers would have to fall. The opposite is the case.

The kill statistics leave no room for interpretation: while 1,437 wild boars were killed in Ticino in 2015, by 2024 the figure had already reached 2,904, a doubling within ten years. Between 2022 and 2024 alone, kills rose by 73 per cent. In not a single year of this decade did the number of animals killed decline sustainably, despite steadily increasing hunting intensity, and this with around 880 recreational hunters deployed year-round. The kill tally thus grows year after year instead of shrinking. This is not a sign of successful regulation, but the opposite.

The reason is scientifically documented. In 2014, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) calculated that, under favourable conditions, over 67 percent of the population would need to be culled each year to achieve a lasting reduction. In open populations with constant immigration from neighbouring areas, this figure is practically unattainable; the actual kill rate in Switzerland is around 40 percent. Anything below this does not bring about a reduction but merely triggers the compensatory reproduction mechanism, which further drives up populations.

This connection is confirmed remarkably clearly from the hunting side itself. The well-known German wild boar expert Norbert Happ stated in the trade magazine «Wild und Hund» that the surge in offspring is homemade: disorderly social conditions within the wild boar population are solely attributable to the practice of hunting. It is hard to imagine a clearer admission that recreational hunting does not solve the problem but creates it. Our articles on the nocturnal wild boar stalking in Grisons and on the Ticino hunting balance sheet.

Psychologie der Hobby-Jagd im Kanton Tessin

The bigger vicious circle: maize as fattening feed

Baiting is only the smaller half of the food problem. The greater part lies in the landscape itself. In Central Europe, the wild boar population is increasing above all due to the sharply expanded cultivation of maize. Maize fields provide wild boar with cover and an energy-rich, reliable food source for months on end.

A buffer effect is decisive here. In the past, wild boar populations naturally fluctuated with the availability of forest mast: in good acorn and beechnut years there was abundant offspring, while in poor years reproduction collapsed. It is precisely this natural regulator that has been rendered ineffective today. When forest mast fails, it is compensated for by the widespread cultivation of maize. The animals always find food, so both good and bad years alike lead to high breeding success.

And this is where the circle closes with livestock farming. Most of the maize grown is not food for humans but fattening feed for livestock. Around two-thirds of maize production goes into animal feed. Industrial meat production, through its enormous feed demand, thus creates the very landscape in which wild boars can multiply without limit. Anyone who then combats these wild boars with ever-new hunting methods is treating a symptom whose cause lies in the nature of our agriculture and our meat consumption. A vicious circle at whose beginning and end stands humankind, never the animal.

Bow hunting is particularly problematic from an animal welfare perspective

The fact that Bow hunting is now being presented as a gentler alternative to firearms, on the grounds that the noise of gunshots disturbs other animal species, turns the animal welfare question on its head. The arrow does not kill through shock effect but through bleeding out. An animal not hit fatally flees with the arrow still in its body and often dies only after a long time and a long, agonising flight. The chances of killing an animal with bow and arrow are roughly ten times lower than with a rifle.

What may be acoustically gentler for the sounder means, for the individual animal hit, an increased risk of a long, agonising death. The sound of the bowstring can cause the animal to flinch at the moment of the shot, so the arrow often fails to kill cleanly and merely wounds the animal instead; this can lead to "unnecessary suffering". A measure that treats animal welfare as so secondary cannot be considered progress but is rather a step backwards in how we treat sentient wild animals.

The true regulator is being fought instead of protected

The sustainable answer to excessively high wild boar populations lies not in ever-new hunting methods but in functioning ecosystems with intact predators. Wolves and lynx regulate wildlife populations naturally, without triggering compensatory population surges, because they change the behaviour and spatial use of their prey rather than merely reducing their numbers.

Yet it is precisely these predators that are themselves hunted or hindered in their return in many places, as the current case in Valais shows, where lynx are to be shot for the first time in any Swiss canton. Roe deer, chamois and wild boar primarily serve as prey for predators as a food source, not for recreational hunting. As long as natural regulators are persecuted and populations are artificially kept high through hunting, every kill campaign remains a battle against the consequences of one's own interventions.

No benefit, only more suffering

When the evidence is put together, little remains of the supposed regulatory measure. The wild boar glut in Italy arose from hunting-related releases. It continues to grow despite year-round, comprehensive hunting, because culling below the critical removal threshold actually boosts reproduction. Bow hunting changes nothing about this mechanism. An arrow does not raise the removal rate above the necessary level; on the contrary, bow hunting has a shorter range and lower accuracy than a rifle, and therefore tends to kill fewer animals per outing, not more.

What bow hunting does change is the suffering of the individual animal. The arrow kills through bleeding, which in the case of a missed shot means a prolonged death struggle. The argument that the method is gentler because it disturbs other animal species less through noise merely shifts the burden from the surroundings onto the animal that has been hit.

This leaves the decisive question: if a method does not reduce populations more effectively, but only kills more agonisingly, what is the point at all? The obvious answer is that it is not about damage limitation, but about opening up a further activity for recreational hunting. Bow hunting is regarded in hunting circles as a sporting challenge. The wild boar glut, which recreational hunting itself helped to cause, provides a welcome justification for this. In the end, there is no solved problem, only additional animal suffering.