In China, wild boars are three protected animals, but in the United States, wild boars can be hunted at will. And wild boars in the United States can be said to be a flood, becoming a nightmare for the American people, since the 80s, the United States has always wanted to control the number of wild boars, but in the human-pig war, the United States has been defeated. There are still 6 million wild boars in the United States, and the number is rising.
So why is the United States flooded with wild boars?
Pigs are not native to the United States, and Eurasian wild boars were first found in the Extreme West British Isles. In that year, Columbus brought eurasian wild boars to the Caribbean, and Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto brought wild boars to Florida, and by the 1930s, Eurasian wild boars were brought to Texas for hunting. After that, the wild boar herd expanded northward into the Central Plains, partly because of migration, but also because of the free-range pigs during the high food price period, in the absence of manual intervention in the wild environment, the mane and fangs of domestic pigs will be fully grown, and in just one or two years they will be fellized, and these wild domestic pigs and wild boars will breed, which will help the number of wild boars.
From Florida in the southeast to California on the western coast, wild boars began to erupt in the 1980s after a century of breeding.
Wild boars are short and fat, with strong limbs, generally weighing 55-250 kg, less than 1 meter tall, and their head and body length are within 2 meters. The coat is dark brown in color, with 2 thick layers of hairs, the upper layer is composed of bristles, which is very tough, and the lower layer is covered with a layer of fine hairs, which is very soft.
In addition, the nose of wild boar is not only sensitive, but they can also smell the smell of 11 kilometers away, or 7.6 meters underground, and can also smell nuts 1-2 meters deep under the soil, and even if they smell it with their noses, they can also distinguish whether the fruit is ripe.
And wild boars are not as lazy as domestic pigs, they can run 48 kilometers (13 m/ s) an hour, and under the chase of hounds, they can run continuously for 15-20 km, the endurance is amazing, they have no sweat glands, wild boars are omnivores, see what to eat. They are never picky eaters, mainly eating hundreds of plants, but also eat such as bird eggs, mice, lizards, worms, carrion, and even eat hares and deer cubs, snakes to supplement their diet. In the absence of traditional food, it can also swim in shallow seas and rely on fishing to fill its hunger, so its adaptability is particularly strong, and it can adapt to almost any environment.
Wild boars are very intelligent, there are almost no natural enemies in the United States, in the United States called "World Rankings" belongs to China, pig intelligence ranks tenth among the top 10 animals in the world in terms of IQ, surpassing dogs, as high-IQ creatures, humans want to hunt them is not so easy.
Wild boars are very capable of reproduction, starting to breed when they are 6 to 8 months old, and a sow can produce 4 to 8 piglets or more at a time. Wild boars give birth every 12 to 15 months during a 4 to 8-year fertility cycle. This is also the reason why the United States has not been able to eliminate wild boars, even if the number of wild boars is reduced by 70% in a short period of time, the wild boar population can recover within two or three years, and the United States has not yet reached the goal of eliminating 70% of the wild boar population.
Wild boars ravage 39 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces, causing $1 billion in annual economic losses. Wild boars destroyed historical sites and swallowed large quantities of corn, sugar cane, wheat, pumpkins and other foods, resulting in a reduction in food production. Wild boars also damage land, rivers, water sources, thereby damaging irrigation systems and damaging dike systems along the water line. Sometimes wild boars also eat livestock such as calves and lambs, and also use deer, quail and turtle eggs as food, destroying the wildlife ecology.
And wild boars have the potential to spread disease. Like the famous "poisonous spinach" incident in the United States, which caused more than 200 people in 26 states in the United States to be infected with E. coli, 3 of whom died, and after analysis, it was found that wild boars spread deadly bacteria to the spinach fields in California, causing the poisonous spinach incident.
The United States does not have many effective methods of eradication of wild boars, and in the early years of the United States, a toxic substance containing diluted warfarin was approved for killing wild boars. But zoologists found that warfarin's toxins could harm bald eagles, coyotes and other wildlife, and the plan had to be abandoned.
The United States will also send helicopters to shoot wild boars, and encourage the American people to hunt wild boars. North Carolina hunter Jet Webb hunted a huge wild boar weighing 227 kilograms, almost the same size as a brown bear, which can also see how moist the life of the wild boar is in the United States, he said that the wild boar is enough to provide his family with 1 year of pork.
Farmers are the most active in hunting wild boars, whose super breeding habits and aggressiveness cost local farms millions of dollars each year, and because traditional hunting methods are too inefficient, many American farmers have begun to use new technologies to help fight invading wild boars because of their low efficiency. They use night vision goggles plus magnification mirrors + shooter rifles to eliminate wild boars, and an American farmer successfully killed 100 wild boars at night, but such hardcore characters are a minority after all.
From 2004 to 2009, the meat of more than 460,000 wild boars was processed for human consumption, most of which were sold to Europe and Southeast Asia, but the United States has more than 6 million wild boars, and only 460,000 in 5 years can be processed.
Why hasn't the United States developed a large-scale mature wild boar processing chain to solve the wild boar problem by eating? The reason for this is that on the one hand, the difficulty of hunting wild boar is too high, and the cost of personal acquisition of wild boar meat is at least MORE THAN 30 US dollars per kilogram, which also indirectly leads to the limited supply of wild boar meat in the slaughterhouse to the restaurant, and it is better to directly use artificially bred domestic pigs.
In addition, the U.S. domestic pig breeding industry is very developed, domestic pigs have enough public demand, in 2018 the United States pig production of 134 million heads, pork production of 11.99 million tons, domestic pork demand is only 9.76 million tons, there are 2.71 million tons of pork exports, is the second largest pork producing country outside the mainland.
Finally, there is no definite number of whether wild boars carry toxic substances and pests that may exist in the wild environment, and scientists estimate that wild boars carry at least 30 germs and 37 parasites. Like the discovery of African swine fever (ASF) in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1978. Brucellosis swine is also considered to be present in wild boar herds, and the export of wild boar involves sensitive issues such as animal health, public health, food safety and ecological and environmental security, which is one of the main reasons for the lack of large-scale development of wild boar processing chains.
As the number of wild boars continues to rise, the war between the United States and wild boars will continue, how to control the population of wild boars and reduce the impact on human society and ecosystems will be a problem that the United States will face for a long time to come.