Wild boars in the city: hobby hunting is the problem

In the central Italian city of Ascoli, new sightings of entire sounders are causing alarm.

The municipal, provincial and regional authorities are responding with the usual crisis reflex: catch enclosures of the "Pig Brig" type, so-called selection marksmen 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. Drive and driven hunts, it says, broke up the sounders and pushed the animals into supposedly safer settlements. "The wild boars now grazing in the city are animals that have fled from hobby hunters," the statement reads. Delegate Sabrina Simonetti openly describes the use of the catch enclosures as a "group massacre". Professor Andrea Mazzatenta, who specialises in animal physiology, also confirms it: wild boars approach settlements precisely in order to escape hunting pressure.

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

The science is clear: hunting increases reproduction

This finding is not an Italian peculiarity but is documented internationally. A long-term French study spanning 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 oestrus and reproduce several times a year. As a result, the population grows from year to year. In Tuscany, the wild boar population has doubled as a result of intensive hunting, exceeding the 200,000 mark.

EFSA: Kills cannot reduce the population at all

A calculation by the European Food Safety Authority shows how ineffective hobby hunting is as a management tool. Given 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 reduce it. In reality, the kill quota lies at around 40 per cent. The reproduction of wild boars is compensatory: whatever is shot away is made up for by the species within a few years. The Italian environmental research institute ISPRA likewise notes that drive hunts neither limit populations nor solve damage or safety problems, but instead disrupt social structures and promote the uncontrolled spread of the animals.

The same applies to Switzerland: killing is not a solution

Switzerland follows the same pattern. A study on wild boar management conducted at the University of Zurich already concluded in 2004 that culling 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 who wants to keep wild boars out of towns in the long term therefore relies on prevention: electric fences, consistent waste disposal, wildlife warning systems and hunt-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 causes the species to multiply», and the ecological ineffectiveness of hunting in the article «Hunters and nature conservation».