Wild boars in Swiss cities: why hobby hunting makes the situation worse

In the central Italian town of Ascoli, new sightings of entire sounders are causing a stir.

The authorities of the municipality, province and region are reacting with the usual crisis reflex: trap enclosures of the “Pig Brig” type, so-called selection shooters and possible kills. The Lega Abolizione Caccia sharply criticises this approach and recalls that in the 1970s and 1980s wild boars were deliberately released for hunting purposes. The drive hunts and driven hunts broke up the sounders and drove the animals into the supposedly safer settlements. «The wild boars grazing in the town today are animals that have fled from the hobby hunters,» the statement reads. The delegate Sabrina Simonetti speaks openly of a «group massacre» when it comes to the use of trap enclosures. Professor Andrea Mazzatenta, who specialises in animal physiology, also confirms: wild boars approach the villages precisely in order to escape the hunting pressure.

These historical releases are regarded as an important factor in today's population dynamics, which have been further intensified by hunting pressure, fragmentation of the sounders and rising reproduction rates.

The science is clear: hunting increases reproduction

This finding is not a special Italian case but is documented internationally. A French long-term study spanning over 22 years compared two wild boar populations, one intensively hunted in the Haute-Marne department and one barely hunted in the Pyrenees. The result: under high hunting pressure, fertility is significantly higher, sexual maturity occurs earlier, and even piglet sows become pregnant. The mechanism is well known: lead sows suppress the fertility of lower-ranking females through chemical messengers. When hobby hunters shoot lead sows, the sounders disintegrate, the remaining females immediately come into heat and reproduce several times a year. In this way the population grows from year to year. In Tuscany, the number of wild boars has doubled as a result of intensive hunting and has exceeded the mark of 200’000 animals.

EFSA: kills cannot reduce the population at all

A calculation by the European Food Safety Authority shows just how ineffective hobby hunting is as a management tool. With a reproduction dynamic of around 200 per cent per year, more than 67 per cent of the population would have to be removed annually just to shrink it at all. In reality, the kill rate is about 40 per cent. Wild boar reproduction is compensatory: whatever is shot away, the species makes up again within a few years. The Italian environmental research institute ISPRA likewise notes that drive hunts neither limit the population nor solve damage or safety problems, but instead disrupt the social structure and encourage the uncontrolled spread of the animals.

For Switzerland too, killing is no solution

Switzerland shows the same pattern. A study on wild boar management based at the University of Zurich already concluded in 2004 that kills and hunting-related feeding do not sustainably reduce damage and additionally fuel reproduction. While licence hunting without territorial responsibility is practised in around two-thirds of the cantons, the canton of Geneva has demonstrated a functioning alternative since 1974: a complete hunting ban, under which necessary interventions are carried out exclusively by professionally trained game wardens. This model is not an outlier but transferable evidence that wildlife management works without hobby hunting. Anyone wishing to keep wild boars out of towns for good therefore relies on prevention: electric fences, consistent waste disposal, wildlife warning systems and hunting-free safety zones around settlements. Or in the words of the Lega Abolizione Caccia: «It is time to turn to science and not to the hunting world.»

How hunting pressure drives reproduction is documented in the dossier «Hunting activity makes the species multiply», and the ecological ineffectiveness of hunting in the article «Hunters and nature conservation».