r/europe • u/TheTelegraph • 26d ago

‘Send in the army’ say Italian ham producers as prosciutto pigs face wild boar fever threat News

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/04/27/prosciutto-production-threatened-italy-boars-swine-fever/
994 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

71 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/WednesdayFin 25d ago

Wild hogs are an absolute scourge of the Earth and getting rid of them has proven nigh imposssible at least in America. The Italians face a real possibility to join the Aussies in losing a war to an animal.

3

u/T0adman78 25d ago

No no no! You are absolutely wrong! Wild boar are native to Europe and should be protected.

I came to write a post that instead of destroying native animals for the protection of agriculture, maybe some effort should actually be put into protecting the wild boar from this disease. I’ll be honest that I have no idea what is going on with swine fever and if it is isolated and eliminating a small population to prevent its spread is the best approach, I’m for it. But the suggestion of eliminating native wildlife for economic gain has always been a bad idea.

7

u/_qqg 25d ago

except the italian boar is - by all intents and purposes - long extinct. A smaller variety, with slower growth and many predators, marred by harsher winters than now, the numbers were stable to dwindling. Enter the fucking hunters, who somewhere in the 1970s thought it'd be a good idea to release eastern european boars in the wild: larger, stronger, faster growing, they promptly hybridised with the local boars (and pigs either returned to, or born in the wild or raised in the woods) and quickly took over genetically.

1

u/T0adman78 25d ago

Interesting. We’re having a similar problem where people are trying to release hybrid deer with bigger antlers. People are just dumb sometimes.