LETTER FROM HONGKONG
Two or three times a week, around 6 p.m., Mme Lam used to dump food scraps in the small park on his street in Wong Chuk Hang, an industrial district undergoing redevelopment in the south of Hong Kong Island, to bring down the wild boars from their neighboring hills. And they were pretty loyal to the date. She was therefore shocked to learn that at least seven animals, including perhaps some of her regulars, had been neutralized with a numbing gun, before being taken away to be stung.
Not far from there, teams from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Nature Protection (AFCD) had baited them with food a few days earlier. This operation inaugurated the new strategy of the authorities to stop the invasion of Hong Kong by wild boars. Since then, other similar beatings have taken place.
A month earlier, on October 12, 2021, Leung Siu-fai, the director of AFCD, had sounded the alarm in front of the Parliament of Hong Kong, affirming that the control measures in place for four years, which consisted in catching, sterilizing and then relocating the animals to uninhabited areas was no longer sufficient. He asked for permission to eliminate the most invasive or aggressive animals. « People like wild boars too much. No matter how hard we do everything, we can’t stop them from feeding them. We have to come to the big means », he had declared.
Rising complaints
Because complaints related to wild boars, whose official population is estimated at 3,000 heads for the entire special administrative region, have increased significantly: 562 during the first six months of 2021, against 401 for the same period in 2020. animal specialties: breaking down trash cans, even the most firmly sealed in sidewalks, plowing flower beds, interrupting road traffic… A few attacks have also taken place recently. In October 2021, a police officer was run over and bitten by a wild boar he was trying to catch in Tin Hau. And in September, the mother of famous pop diva Coco Lee, 83, was seriously injured by a specimen weighing between 100 kg and 150 kg, as she was walking down her street, Barker Road, in the upscale Peak district.
Mid-December, the online journal Stand News also portrayed a farmer whose cornfields in Ngau Tam Mei (Yuen Long district), within the new territories, had been devastated twice in a week by a horde of wild boars. His losses amounted to 60% of his harvest, preventing him from purchasing the barbed wire necessary to protect his fields from future incursions.
You have 50.57% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.