Hunt Lake Manitoba Narrows

They are not wildlife, strictly speaking, but wild boars are about as wild as it gets.

They are big, mean, tough, smart, fast as lightning, potentially very dangerous and they’re likely to appear almost anywhere in rural Saskatchewan. Adults often weigh 200 pounds or more, with long black hair and tusks that can disembowel a horse. How much more wild do you want?

“I tell people to treat a mother boar with her young as you’d treat a mother bear with her cubs,” says Brad Tokaruk, a wildlife technician with the provincial Environment Ministry.

Wild as they might be, wild boars nevertheless are not considered wildlife under provincial legislation. Rather, they are deemed to be stray livestock, even when they’re loose and breeding in the wild, as they can and do whenever they get the chance. Then they become dangerous, invasive pests that landowners and wildlife authorities try their best to exterminate.

With credentials as both a wild and a domestic animal, the wild boar’s exact legal status is a grey area, according to Tokaruk. A grey area that extends across Saskatchewan. More than 70 rural municipalities have reported wild boar on the loose.

Raised domestically for exotic meat, boars routinely escape and breed prolifically in the wild. The species is well-equipped to survive Saskatchewan winters, originating as it did in northern Eurasia. They eat almost anything, animal or vegetable, above or below ground. They even will scavenge a carcass.

Among their favourite foods is cattail tubers, with frogs, salamanders, birds’ eggs and nestlings on the side. Ground-nesting birds are especially vulnerable to their predation. The effect they have on prairie wetlands, all too rare as it is, is similar to that of multiple Rototillers. Farmers aren’t thrilled, either, to find their fields and crops rooted up after the cattails are all gone.

The worst of numerous infestations has been around Moose Mountain Provincial Park, southeast of Regina. More than 300 animals have been destroyed in the area in last few years from systematic hunting and trapping. Tokaruk thinks the local population might finally be under control, if not eradicated. Three crafty males apparently have slipped through the net, but they are likely to remain lifelong bachelors. Unless a female boar should escape, that is, in which case they are back in business. And boars escape all the time.

Meanwhile, new breeding populations have materialized elsewhere around the province: Near Yorkton, Melville, Tisdale, Beechy, Spiritwood, Arborfield, Carrot River. . . . It’s like playing whack-a-mole, but with wild boar. The other difference is that a mole is not as dangerous when cornered or wounded.

Once established and breeding, boar are exceedingly difficult to control. Females can reproduce in their second year, with four to six piglets in a litter and no natural predators to bother them. Coyotes, says Tokaruk, are not up to the job. Wolf packs reportedly prey on boar in Russia, usually by distracting the mother long enough to seize a piglet, but in Saskatchewan, wolves as yet do not range this far south. You have to wonder how much longer this is going to last, with deer and now moose as abundant as they are on the grain belt, and now with a chance of pork.

Human hunters find wild boar to be the wariest of prey, quickly learning to avoid snares and traps. If they are hunted, they become nocturnal. Hunters who trail them into the bush, they easily evade.

“You could compare them to rats,” says Tokaruk. Two-hundred-pound rats with tusks like linoleum knives.

About the only tactic that works to significantly reduce their numbers is to surround them. It’s more like a military operation than it is like hunting.

Because they are not native to the province, wild boars are not protected by any environmental legislation. They are, however, protected under agricultural law as stray farm animals, except where rural municipal councils have officially declared them a nuisance. In these RMs, anyone can hunt boars year-round, whether deliberately or opportunistically.

Elsewhere in the province, hunting boars is not strictly legal, but neither is it actively discouraged. Aside from the linoleum-knife tusks, the risk is that someone might shoot a boar that escaped just a day or two before. Apparently they still can be recaptured at this stage because they’re used to being fed. A hunter who shot it first would invite legal liability similar to that of shooting a rancher’s escaped cow. Not so in Manitoba, however, where it is always open season on boar, recently escaped or not, or in Alberta, where cash bounties have been offered. Still the plague persists.

Marv Hlady, a senior provincial wildlife specialist, regards boars as an enemy of Saskatchewan wildlife. Much as he admires their intelligence and resilience, he resents their intrusion.

“I’d like to see every last one of them removed from the landscape,” he says.

He is unlikely to get his wish.