French hunters go on warpath to stem invasion of wild boars
It is a national icon, immortalised on the heraldic crests of the aristocracy, the favourite dish of Asterix and Obelix, and the target of tens of thousands of hunters in the hills and forests of la France profonde for more than a thousand years. But now French boars have a problem: there are too many of them.
Experts at the French National Office of Hunting and Wildlife say the population of wild boars is for the first time above a million – despite a record 500,000 killed by hunters last year. ‘It’s an invasion,’ said Morel Marleux, of the French Small Game Association. ‘We need a war on boars.’
The population surge has led to an estimated 20,000 car accidents a year involving the animals and hundreds of millions of pounds of damage to crops and property as boars leave their traditional habitat of woods and forests to head into fields.
