My Take | Extinction? Time has come to give our diminishing boars a break
With a back-of-the-napkin calculation suggesting animals will be no more within two years at current rate of culling, a wildlife action plan is needed
Hong Kong has been culling wild boars at a rate much faster than they reproduce, and at the current rapid pace, the population is on track to disappear completely sometime in the first quarter of 2026.
This clearly hypothetical back-of-the-napkin forecast comes from crunching statistics on the “Wild Pig Nuisance” page of the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) website. It assumes the programme of capturing and culling is not changed or put on hold.
At the start of 2023 there were an estimated 1,830 wild boars roaming the city parks, islands and, from time to time, the streets. By the end of the year, a department spokesman said, there were 1,360, or 470 fewer. A total of 489 of the animals were captured and euthanised, according to the AFCD data for 2023.
The culling accelerated this year. Another 614 of the beasts were put down from January to the end of November, department data shows. A new population count was under way and would be released by the end of the year, the AFCD spokesman said. But simple subtraction takes the population under 750 this year, not including 22 culled in the first week of December or any marginal population growth to offset the decline.
Look back to the napkin and it gets worrying. Cull another 600 in 2025 and the herd would be around 130. At that rate, the last boar in Hong Kong would be killed sometime in March of 2026.
Now, let’s presume that extermination of the entire herd of wild boars is not the end goal. If so, changes are needed, some of them urgent and others for the long-term.
First, the catch and cull policy arose after a leap in the numbers of animals in urban areas and the number of people who were injured as animals scavenged for food. Boars were seen entering shops, restaurants, residential areas and even riding on the MTR. The population swelled to between 2,000 and 3,000 by the early 2020s. A programme started in 2017 to capture, sterilise and relocate the animals to the countryside had moved 800 of them but failed to keep up with the rapid pace of reproduction. Many of those relocated simply returned to urban areas in search of food. Seven people were bitten or injured by boars in November 2021 alone, the month the department adopted the new policy.
