Wild pigs are an invasive species that cause native habitat damage, put native wildlife species at risk, cause damage to farmland and other property, and act as potential carriers of the disease.
The Manitoba Pork Council wants producers and the general public to report all sightings of wild pigs by calling the local Sustainable Development Office or by emailing wildlife@gov.mb.ca
To get a better understanding of the wild pig population in Manitoba and to concentrate eradication efforts in the right areas include these points of reference when sighting and reporting;
*Record the date and time of day the pigs observed
*Legal land description, geo-coordinates, or other specifics of the location (a cell phone photo with location service turned on will automatically include the geolocation coordinates)
*Number and age class of pigs (i.e. number of adults and number of piglets, if applicable)
*The observed behaviour of the pigs (i.e. are they causing any habitat/property damage or displaying aggressive behaviour toward people or domestic animals)
Conventional hunting only increases wild pig populations by encouraging them to spread out and breed further.
“Manitoba Pork discourages the conventional hunting of wild pigs, opting instead for a collaborative and coordinated eradication approach,” states Manitoba Pork. “If you do harvest a wild pig, it is a legal requirement to report it to the local Sustainable Development office within seven days, either by phone or by email.
More broadly, Dr. Ryan Brook, a professor in the College of Agriculture and Bioresources with the University of Saskatchewan, said the increasing concern over wild pigs in Canada has to do with African Swine Fever.
“Back in about the mid-1980s, there was a push to diversify agriculture including the farming of elk, emu, ostrich, and many different species to diversify agriculture, and one of those was wild boar,” he said. “Eurasian wild boar was brought over from, primarily from the UK, but from several other countries as well, used primarily as a meat species. There were and still are some farms that we might call ‘shoot farms,’ where you pay to go inside a relatively sizeable fenced enclosure and shoot one, but the majority were for meat.”
Dr. Brook said all provinces from Quebec, and west, had significant investment in wild boar farms, with significant efforts to help establish them and promote them as an agricultural tool. And indeed, some are still around. Most provinces still have at least some; some have several dozen of these wild boar farms, both shoot and meat farms, and that is where the animals came from. The production of them peaked in 2001, and then really declined sharply after that, to the point now where the numbers have dropped off substantially. Indeed, the Ag census of Canada doesn’t even report data on wild boar farms anymore. It lumps it with other species; there are just too few farms.
“The problem is, these animals are very hard to keep inside a fence. Many escaped across all provinces, and unfortunately, some producers having a tough time with the production, or just not seeing any real income coming in cut the fence and let in some cases dozens, in some cases, several hundred animals go at once,” he said. “So through the ’90s and 2000, and now up until 2019, a massive expansion of those animals moving into the wild and spreading further from those initial sites, and expanding very rapidly.”
Dr. Brook said they had developed maps of the distribution of wild pigs in Canada and overall the spread is 80 thousand square kilometres per year over the last decade by the watershed distribution of pigs across the landscape.
“Importantly these are most hybrids, meaning crossbred with the domestic pig,” he said. “Crossing that wild boar with a domestic pig, you get that extra rib, you get a longer animal, typically you get a bigger animal, higher reproductive rates. While these animals look quite different, your classic wild boar has a long drawn out nose covered with heavy brown to red to even jet black fur, some with pink patches and some spotted are entirely pink.”
Dr. Brook said by hybridizing them, unfortunately, that helped to create them into super pigs that have very reproductive rates.
“We’re talking six young per litter, and they’re breeding almost continuously through the year. There’s not a lot of seasonality to it. These animals have litters, weaning off and then quickly reproducing again,” he said.
Dr. Brook said wild pigs cause extensive crop damage; they push livestock off of feed, impact ecosystems and harbour disease. •
— By Harry Siemens