As we all know, Canada's economy is heavily dependent on the United States, and the Canadian government often "looks up to the United States", however, a recent incident has made the United States afraid of Canada, Canada's pigs let Americans scratch! Mad! Finish!
It is well known that pigs are not native to North America, but are aliens. In 1539, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto landed in Florida and set foot on North American soil, accompanied by 13 pigs.
Over the next four years, De Soto, a self-proclaimed "son of the immortal sun," ordered the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans, and finally died of fever on an expedition, leaving behind about 700 pigs across the southeastern United States.
But pigs have become a problem, in recent decades.
The government estimates that there are about 6 million wild boars in the United States, causing $1.5 billion in annual losses. These pigs destroy crops, contaminate water sources, spread diseases, and even kill deer and elk.
In order to deal with wild boars, hunting rifles, poison, and traps were used. In some places, "pig hunting" became an industry, and people paid thousands of dollars for people to kill pigs with machine guns. Others even use undercover agents: first catch a wandering single pig, put on a positioning collar, and let it go to find the pigs. But despite this, the population of wild boar is still growing.
To add insult to injury, the big boss bigger, stronger and smarter than the American boar, the Canadian "Super Pig", is grinding his teeth and preparing to head south.
What is the origin of this "super pig" that makes Americans smell and change? To put it bluntly, in fact, it is the Canadian farmers who have played the whole thing.
Canadians have always been more Buddhist and do not like to dominate the king, but they love to eat and play. So, in the 1980s and 90s, a wave of agricultural diversification was set off, and some farmers imported wild boar from Europe and crossed it with domestic pigs to breed a new breed, the "super pig".
This kind of pig inherits the huge size of the domestic pig and the unruly soul of the wild boar, the skin is solid and meaty, it is a hard dish on the table, and it can be put in the woods to tease the stuffy with hunters, and it is very popular, so it is bred in large numbers in a short period of time and is raised on farms all over Canada. But until 2022, there is basically no problem.
The turning point began in the early 2000s, when Canada's pig market plummeted, because it could not be sold, some pigs escaped from prison, farmers did not bother to catch back, and even some pigs were simply released.
At the time, people thought very simply: with the harsh and long winters in Canada, these pigs must not survive spring in the wild.
But I never expected, "I thought it was bronze, but it turned out to be a king." "These pigs hit humans in the face with strength.
Super Pig is not a waste of fame, it is really talented.
First of all, big head. The average wild boar weighs between 75 and 250 pounds, and superpigs can easily grow to twice the average, with the largest adult found weighing up to 290 kg (about 640 lbs). And to survive in the cold winter, one of the ecological laws is: the bigger the better. Larger animals are better able to withstand the cold and reproduce better in these conditions.
Secondly, smart. The way the superpig winters is to dig a 2-meter-deep tunnel under the thick snow to form a snow cave, which works like the Inuit dome Snow Room. The bottom and top of the cave are also covered with cattail grass as a warm layer. This grass is a common native plant, and wild boars cut the grass with their sharp teeth and dragged it away to make beds and roofs.
The interior of this snow cave is very warm. One of the ways researchers look for superpigs in winter is to drive helicopters in the cold mornings to look for places in the air where hot steam comes out of the snow, which is often the comfort nest of superpigs below.
Again, can eat without being a picky eater. Super pigs eat almost everything, including crops, amphibians, birds, and even white-tailed deer. And their predation is varied: they dig out the nests of waterfowl and turkeys, so every spring, many geese and ducklings are buried in pigs' mouths; Will actively hunt small animals such as young deer; If a blind cat encounters an animal hiding in the bushes, it will unexpectedly put it down and eat it, and even the adult deer will suffer.
Finally, the reproductive ability is strong and fast. A female superpig can produce an average of 6 piglets a year. Ryan Brook, director of the Canadian Owners Research Program at the University of Saskatchewan, called wild boar "the most prolific invasive mammal on Earth."
Due to the huge damage caused by wild boars to agriculture and ecology, Professor Brook has been working to eliminate superpigs in the wild, but around 2019, this effort failed.
Finding the location of the herd is the first step in management and control. But Professor Brook, who has dealt with superpigs for years, believes that these pigs are very intelligent and can be called elusive. After they began to be hunted by humans, they quickly learned to hide their tracks, use jungles and wetlands to get rid of hunters, and even change the rules of life, day and night, so it is very difficult to find them.
The University of Saskatchewan has a research project to map the country's animals in order to figure out the best way to cope with the rapidly growing pig herd.
In Ontario, the provincial government requires people to download an app or use email to report superpig sightings.
In AB province, a licence is not required to hunt wild boars, although the government advises that it is best to seek help from the authorities because these pigs are smart and quickly learn to avoid hunters.
Over the past 20 years, despite all the attempts and efforts made, Superpigs have been killing more and farther and running farther. Canada's wild superpigs are currently distributed over a vast area of 1 million square kilometers and live mainly in AB, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but also in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.
There are indications that Canadian Superpigs are infiltrating the United States farther south.
Professor Brook recorded the location of pigs, some of which were less than 10 miles from the Canada-U.S. border. In fact, he thinks, in the past five or six years, superpigs have entered North Dakota from Manita.
Since the Canada-U.S. border has no physical or biological borders and almost no fences, it is likely that it is only a matter of time before the Canadian wild superpigs, which have surged in recent years, enter the U.S. states.