Kill or Conserve: Hong Kong’s Wild Boar problem
By Icy Chen
Brown and black figures wag their thin, short tails as they walk through the forest, either alone or in groups. They just focus on the road, looking for food on the way, and do not pay attention to the humans around them. This is a familiar scene for the 35-year-old hiking enthusiast Anja Wang.
The wild boar is the largest land mammal in Hong Kong, with thick, coarse gray-brown to black short hair. Adult pigs can weigh up to 200 kilograms and reach 2 meters in length. There are about 2,500 wild pigs, distributed throughout the local country parks as of November 2021, according to data from the Agriculture, Fisheries, and Conservation Department.
"I've seen many wild boars on Hong Kong Island while hiking," Wang said. "I was quite scared the first time I saw them. But after I got used to it, I was not afraid."
Pigs on hiking trails are normal in Hong Kong but recently, more and more have been leaving the hills and wandering into the city for food.
The city responds by killing more wild boars than ever before as the pigs venture into urban areas, causing nuisances and occasional danger for Hong Kong residents.
Hong Kong has identified more than 60 black spots across the region. Pigs have long been a part of Hong Kong’s local wildlife, but last year, police changed their strategy from catch and release to outright culling with 80 pigs killed since November, causing a public outcry and experts to ponder the question: how can Hong Kong live with its pigs?
The wild boar walks around the campus of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology towards his dinner, the trash can. (Video from HKUST student Ennka)
CHANGING POLICY
As early as the 1970s, the city adopted a culling strategy for feral pigs. Teams of civilian volunteers were granted gun permits by the police and AFCD to hunt wild boars when there were reports of damage or attacks caused by wild boars, with about 40 to 60 boars being killed each year.
But the act was suspended in 2017 when the government started the Pilot Capture and Contraception/Relocation Program, a two-year wild boar contraception program, and gradually regularized the program starting in 2019-20.
Action 1: Manage wild pig nuisance
Action 2: Monitor distribution, population density and movement
Action 6:Reviewing and Strengthening the management strategies
Action 1: Manage wild pig nuisance
Pilot CCRP: multi-pronged approach has been implemented since 2017, including stepping up education for the public not to feed wild pigs, stepping up the fight against illegal feeding, and designing and replacing some garbage bins to prevent wild pigs from finding garbage or foraging for food, thus reducing their incentives to enter the urban areas (Source from AFCD).
Contraceptive vaccinations and sterilization to wild boars is thought to be the more compassionate approach to managing the boar population.
The effort involves a team of veterinary surgeons, nurses, and AFCD officers providing monthly contraception, sterilization, and relocation of wild boars. The pigs are sedated, weighed, and microchipped. The females are scanned to see if they are pregnant.
As of June 2021, the program successfully sterilized or gave contraceptive treatment to 350 wild pigs, according to a report released by AFCD in June 2021.
However, after a part-time police officer was attacked in a failed roundup of wild pigs in Tin Hau on Nov. 10 last year, the "conservation and release" policy for wild pigs that had been in place in Hong Kong for over four years was declared ended and replaced by a return to the policy of culling all wild pigs found in the city's urban areas.
As of April, 80 wild boars have been captured and killed, AFCD data shows.
Cases of wild pigs injuring people have been reported since 2013, which has made the sudden turnaround in the government's attitude toward wild boars unacceptable to some people, particularly among animal welfare organizations.
10 animal organizations, including the Hong Kong Wild Pig Concern Group, launched a joint petition in November to push the government to reverse its decision.
The Hong Kong Animal Post reported that an online petition begun alongside other groups in November had received 78,000 signatures demanding that the AFCD's "death order" be withdrawn.
Other important objectives of the petition include restoring the capture and sterilization program and allowing Hong Kong residents a cooling-off period before changing their habits of feeding wild animals.
"Wild boars are not dangerous animals. However, due to their nature of being easily frightened, they will undoubtedly come into conflict with humans when they walk into cities and out on the roads," said Wong Ho Yin, the Hong Kong Wild Boar Concern Group Director.
Responding to the public's criticism in November (link in Chinese), Dr. Leung Siu-fai, Director of AFCD, said in the statement that the contraception and release policy has been carried out since 2017;" however, looking back at the past few years, the results are not really satisfactory."
From 2011 to 2021, there were 36 cases involving wild pigs injuring people, of which 80%, or 30 cases, occurred from 2018 to October 2021, AFCD data shows. The number of nuisance complaints has also been increasing. From 2009 to 2020, there were more than 1,000 nuisance reports per year, a significant increase from the previous few hundred, Leung said in the statement.
“Wild pigs in the countryside belongs to the natural environment, and we do not need to and should not take action to influence their daily lives,” Leung said in the statement. "But for wild pigs in the urban area, we will stick to the strategy to remove the risk, especially in the serious black spots."
WILD BOARS
IN THE CITY
In the case of the wild boar biting the police officer, some local wildlife capture experts said the attack was the result of the officers' improper behavior.
"The police were inexperienced in dealing with wild animals and that the capture task would have been very dangerous for them," said Ken Lee. He has over 13 years of experience in helping police capture and releases wildlife venturing into human settlements.
The police mistakenly cornered the boar in this case, Lee said. The wild boar subsequently fell to its death from a height of 10 meters as it tried to escape.
"When a wild animal is cornered, whether it's a wild boar or a dog, their only way out is to attack you. It's a training issue for police, not just a problem with animals showing up in urban areas," Lee added.
Local animal welfare organizations emphasized that the nuisance caused by wild pigs entering the city is mainly caused by humans feeding the animals, as well as poor hygiene issues.
In February 2018, a video of a giant pig rummaging through a dumpster in Shatin, went viral on social media. The video features a wild boar as big as a grizzly bear, which has earned it the nickname "Hogzilla".
In the video, the "Hogzilla" surrounded by three piglets, is standing on his two legs, searching for food for his family. Although wild boars are common in cities, they are usually much smaller than this one.
In the Hong Kong Island area, many people do not put their garbage in the garbage cans, but just put it next to them, said Lee. The garbage often sits for a long time until collection.
"For example, a garbage collection station will not be cleaned up until 4 a.m. the next morning even though it might be already full at 7 or 8 p.m.," Lee said.
"The time in between will attract wild boars to come down and eat, which will change their original ecological habits of eating plants and bugs on the mountain," Lee added.
Feeding is another problem.
The animals had become a nuisance, according to experts, because their behavior is altered when people feed them or when they find waste bins easy to scavenge.
"Feeding a boar reduced the animal's natural dread of humans and automobiles," said Paul Crow, senior conservation officer at Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden.
"It will merely draw them out more into conflict with people," Crow added, "and discourage them from staying in the forest."
"Everyone likes easy food, and this is true for pigs too," Lee said.
Lee also said that feeding wildlife helped to artificially increase their population.
"Animals will control the number of their offspring, depending on the environment. They tend to produce more offspring when they think there is enough food," Lee said.
To Lee, the sudden decision to kill all the wild boars that appear in the city because of one or two incidental events is not fair to other wild boars either. "How about thinking of some policies to make some changes? How can we throw the garbage well and not attract the wild boars?" he said.
Of the 42 cases of wild boar injuries that occurred between 2013 and November 2021, 19 were due to wild boar grabbing food or biting people in the mistaken belief that food was available, according to AFCD’s report.
Feeding bans exist in some regions, such as Lion Rock and Shing Mun country parks, but not at Lung Fu Shan country parks on Hong Kong Island.
The penalty varies between HK$200 and HK$100,000. As of August 2021, the AFCD reported 81 prosecutions, with fines ranging from $200 to $1,000. There were 38 prosecutions in 2020, with fines ranging from $300 to $2,000.
The government is also looking into expanding the places where feeding is prohibited under the wild animal protection code.
"As long as you do not take the initiative to feed, or to provoke him, I have not heard of incidents where wild boars hurt hikers," said the hiker Wang.
It is true that the government needs to protect the public, but the pig culling order does not address the problem, and it is difficult to effectively control the wild pig population, Lee said.
He hopes that the public stop feeding wild pigs to avoid them out of the city for food.