China has a new environmental menace in its crosshairs: wild boars.

Wily, aggressive, and weighing up to 200 kilograms, they have become a serious problem for communities across the country in recent years, with a herd able to lay waste to a field of crops in a single night.

And until recently, there was little that locals could do to stop them. Listed as a protected species, wild boars were able to rampage across the countryside almost with impunity.

Farmers saw their fields devastated again and again. Schools and bubble tea shops suffered hog attacks. In 2021, a local official in the southwestern Sichuan province was even killed by a charging boar.

But Chinese authorities have now decided it’s time to fight back.

In 2023, the central government removed wild boars from its list of protected species. In February, it announced a plan to kill boars that “cause harm,” and dispatched over 100 teams of hunters to affected areas.

Local authorities are also taking their own measures. On Sept. 23, a county in the northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region caught public attention when it announced plans to hire bounty hunters to cull its wild boar population.

It’s lucrative work: Hunters involved in the program will reportedly be paid 2,400 yuan ($340) per head. That’s around half the monthly salary of a local private-sector employee.

According to the announcement, the county plans to eliminate 300 adult boars. Hunters are allowed to kill the hogs using traps, hunting dogs, or several other methods, but the use of firearms or poison is prohibited.

The government is also offering a 200-yuan bonus for the “harmless disposal” of each carcass.

Many other local authorities are taking similar steps. Provinces including Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Anhui have also offered their own bounties for wild boar killings, according to domestic media.

The news from Ningxia has become a trending topic on Chinese social media and sparked a heated debate, with many users expressing surprise at the government’s sudden change of stance.

“Weren’t we supposed to be protecting wildlife?” asked one user on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. “Not long ago, people were jailed for electrocuting wild boars. Now there’s a reward?” another commented.

China first banned the hunting of wild boars in 2000 as part of an effort to protect local biodiversity. Though not listed as a “nationally protected species” like tigers or giant pandas, wild boars were given protected status as an animal with “beneficial, economic, or scientific value.”

That classification meant that anyone caught hunting wild boars without permission could face up to three years in prison. In 2020, the introduction of even tighter rules on hunting and trading wild animals also prevented farmers in many areas from using traps to protect their fields.

But the wild boar population quickly spread out of control. Each sow can give birth to up to 16 piglets in just over a year. Within six years, the male piglets grow into hulking brutes able to run at speeds of up to 40 kilometers per hour and overturn entire tree trunks with their snouts.

As the boars multiplied, so did the number of hog attacks. In recent years, 26 out of China’s 31 provincial-level regions have reported incidents of wild boars menacing the public, according to the state-owned Xinhua News Agency. Local governments have had to spend millions of yuan compensating farmers for damaged crops.

And as they learned not to fear humans, the animals even started venturing into urban areas. Hogs have wreaked havoc in the eastern megacities of Hangzhou and Nanjing on several occasions, invading schools, charging down busy streets, and smashing up bubble tea stores.

These incidents appear to have convinced the government of the need to develop a strategic approach to managing the species. But the decision to remove the boars’ protected status and call in the hunters has received some pushback from animal rights activists, with one group labeling the culls a “barbaric farce.”

Xu Binrong, a conservation specialist, told domestic media that the wild boar problem “reveals gaps and shortcomings in our conservation efforts.”

Wild boar overpopulation is also an issue in other countries, including the United States and Germany, Xu pointed out. But in those countries, authorities employ supplementary methods such as fencing and relocation to minimize contact between the animals and local communities. Culling is only part of a wider strategy.

“The only sustainable approach is an ecological conservation approach that aims for systemic balance,” Xu said.

Xinhua News Agency echoed this sentiment, calling for officials to adopt “scientific policy measures” to tackle the boar problem. “Otherwise, we risk falling into a vicious cycle of overhunting, population decline, conservation, overpopulation, and then more overhunting,” it added.

Wild boars are not the only species causing issues for communities in rural China. With authorities taking stronger measures to protect wildlife, there has been a growing trend of animal populations recovering and increasingly moving into built-up areas.

Recent incidents include a Siberian tiger wandering into a village in the northeastern Heilongjiang province, a snow leopard strolling along a school fence in the northwestern Qinghai province, and a herd of elephants trekking 500 kilometers across the southwestern Yunnan province

(Header image: IC)