kill all the wild boars that were in the country

In summer 2020, German authorities found the first wild boar infected with African swine fever. The world was distracted by anemia, but the global pork market shook. Germany was the largest pork producer in Europe and, if we had learned anything from the disease, it is that its voracity knows no limits.

With the plague in the heart of the Union, it was a matter of time before it reached everywhere and, however, one small country said no: Denmark.

68 kilometers. That is the length of the border between Denmark and Germany. It seems like a purely colorful piece of information, but in this context it has a very concrete meaning: in Christiansborg they came to the conclusion that the spread of the virus could be stopped.

In fact, the Danish government had already started to build a fence one and a half meters high to stop the intrusion of wild boars into the country in 2019. Detections of infected animals in Poland began to make them nervous.

However, they quickly realized that it was not enough.

And they decided to eradicate them one by one. It is true that in the Danish case this was also relatively acceptable. After all, although eradicating a species is difficult, the Scandinavian country was only home to just over a hundred specimens.

The effort was extensive and exhaustive, but by the end of 2021 the government announced that the species was exterminated. In December 2020 they had finished with the last copy, number 157.

Denmark is, in fact, one of the countries where the swine fever virus has not yet been detected.

Is it viable to do it in Spain? The truth is that no. Spain, according to the Hunting Resources Research Institutehas 1,200,000 wild boars roaming its mountains. It is no longer that the effort necessary to exterminate them would be immense, but that the socioeconomic consequences would also be immense. Dozens of ecosystems would be unbalanced and we would enter a more than swampy terrain.

However, things can be learned from Denmark’s decision. Above all, when we talk about this type of illness, the measures must be drastic and proactive. We have been waiting for this to happen for years and we have been extremely lucky that it has happened days after signing the agreement with China that allowed us to ‘regionalize’ the outbreak.

Otherwise, the problem would have been enormous.

8,000 million. That is the number, which according to expertsis at stake due to the outbreak of African swine fever in the Sierra de Collsarola. And, for now, it is not at all clear whether we will be able to get out of this quagmire unscathed.

Image | Markus Winkler | Danny Kroon

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