Presence of Hunters and Other Predators Impact Ability to Locate Feral Wild Boar

The Industry Programs Manager with Alberta Pork says hunters and wildlife, such as bears, add to the challenges of locating feral wild boar.Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation, Alberta Pork and the Alberta Invasive Species Council are working together to locate and eliminate wild boar from the Alberta landscape.

Charlotte Shipp, the Industry Programs Manager with Alberta Pork, says to get a handle on wild boar numbers and distribution in Alberta there are several research programs underway, including projects with the University of Calgary, the University of Alberta, the King's University and Elk Island National Park.

Quote-Charlotte Shipp-Alberta Pork:

At this stage I don't have a firm handle on exactly what the Alberta population looks like or its density.I can tell you that we are receiving sighting reports and based on those sightings we do believe that wild boar are essentially present in northern Alberta through central Alberta down as far south as red Deer area.

We're pretty confident that there's not much of a population south of Red Deer and then, since Alberta Pork came in with our eradication specialist we've captured about 400 animals, is what we have eradicated and all of those have been completed by Alberta Pork's eradication specialist with the exception of the first 60 of them.That was done under the pilot project so we've been very successful.You do see all sorts of different challenges that do arise with eradication.

One of the big ones is hunting season.The presence of hunting pressure can have a very significant impact on our ability to eradicate.We'll actually see that when hunting season opens our eradication stops nothing.We can't find them, we can't capture them, they get the fear and then it's almost like clockwork.As soon a hunting season closes, they come back and we start trapping successfully again.We've also had some challenges with different types of wildlife predators like bears and so forth visiting the traps.That will scare off any wild boar that we're tracking at that time too.

To report a sighting call 310-FARM or email wildboar@gov.ab.ca or for additional information contact Alberta Pork, Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation or the Alberta Invasive Species Council.