Pig hell: Italian soldiers will gun down wild boars that can spread African swine fever

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Canada has raccoons tearing into backyard garbage bins. In Italy, the uninvited guests are wild boars; they are everywhere.

The animals – cinghiali in Italian – are considered a public nuisance. Prolific breeders with binge-eating habits, the boars are infiltrating cities, where they gorge on food scraps.

They can disrupt traffic and terrorize children, pedestrians and bikers. The adult males can weigh 100 kilograms or more. Running into one with a bike or even a car can be like hitting a brick wall. In February, a driver in southern Italy was killed when she crashed into a van that stopped suddenly after ramming into a boar.

To the list of dangers, add African swine fever. The boars can spread the viral disease with alacrity, killing otherwise healthy farm pigs, though swine fever is harmless to humans. An outbreak in Italy has triggered panic among the producers of prosciutto – cured ham – and sausages. On Monday, the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni responded to the outbreak by ordering the Italian military to take up arms and kill as many of the animals as it can.

As many as 1.5 million boars are thought to be running wild in Italy, having infiltrated every part of the country, and their numbers are expanding. The government’s goal is to eliminate 80 per cent of them over five years. Rome fears that the €8-billion prosciutto and sausage industry – prosciutto, like Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, is a global symbol of Italian cuisine as well as a lucrative export – could get wiped out unless the fever is eradicated.

Wild pigs are invasive, destructive and dangerous, and their populations in Canada are exploding out of control. How can we fight back?

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Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, in upstate New York, recently said that the hemorrhagic (bleeding) disease “had killed more than half of the world’s pigs since 2007.” The school said that a Cornell study, done with Uganda’s Makerere University, “confirms that a species of tick is responsible for maintaining and spreading infections” among domestic pigs in Uganda.

The tick, known formally as Ornithodoros moubata, at first infected African warthogs and later killed domestic pigs brought in from Europe. The infected pigs pass the disease to each other through direct contact or indirectly through contaminated pork in their food (pigs are omnivores and some farmers use pork in the feed). In crowded, industrial-farming conditions, the disease can spread quickly. One study in South Korea found that farm pigs usually died four to nine days after infection.

The disease was first detected in mainland Italy only two years ago (it was found on the island of Sardinia in 1978 but contained there). The culling of pig herds began shortly thereafter. In September, 2023, alone, some 34,000 pigs were slaughtered in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, around Milan. The rising number of boars has triggered fears that millions of Italy’s estimated 8.7 million farm pigs could get infected. There is no cure and no vaccine for the disease.

The European Food Safety Authority says African swine fever “has serious socio-economic consequences for affected countries. In recent years, it has spread across Europe and worldwide. … Areas affected by ASF suffer significant financial losses due to the loss of animals.”

Some foreign buyers of prosciutto have already banned imports. Canada last month halted the sale of the product from certain areas of Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy.

So far, the disease in Italy has been largely limited to the northern part of the country but its spread appears inevitable. Fausto Venturi, a farmer in the central Italian region of Umbria, says wild boars have become ubiquitous in his area and some are monstrous. “Two or three years ago, hunters killed one here that was more than 200 kilos,” he told The Globe and Mail.

Besides being a swine fever threat, they are voracious eaters, munching on everything from cereal crops to small animals. “The only way to control them is to kill them with hunting rifles or bring in wolves,” Mr. Venturi said. “The wolves will eat the small boars.”