They gang up and roam the rural countryside at night, digging up farmers’ fields and terrorizing livestock. They are so cleverly elusive that they’re rarely seen. They eat whatever is in their path.

They are feral wild boar and recently they have become a rowdy nuisance in the normally peaceful Saskatchewan backcountry.

Originally brought to the prairies by exotic food farmers, many of the tusked hogs escaped and are thriving in the wild despite the harsh winters. They have also been introduced to the region by ranch owners looking to turn a profit through the controversial practice known as canned hunts — where game is tracked down and shot within a fenced-in area.

“A lot of people in the province are now talking about feral wild boar,” said Ryan Brook, an assistant professor in the college of agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan. “I see this as a big issue for the province.”

Brook has been studying the impact of wild boar on agriculture and has been using wildlife cameras with motion sensors to monitor their movements and numbers around Saskatoon.

He is warning rural municipalities and the provincial government that the wild boar population has the potential to skyrocket.

Wild boar have virtually no natural predators in Saskatchewan and breed about two times a year with an average of four to six piglets per litter. They take cover in dense brush along rivers and streams and usually only come out after dark.

Over the last 30 years in the U.S., wild boar have spread from just Texas and California to nearly every state in the U.S. mainland. State governments are now scrambling to find ways to eradicate them.

And in Europe the problem is even worse.

“Last year in France they killed one million wild boar,” Brook said. “If you’re walking in city parks in Germany you will see wild boar. It’s incredible.”

Further growth in the population of wild boar in Saskatchewan would — like most invasive species — severely damage the ecosystem and potentially cost the province millions to manage.

For instance, feral wild boar are riddled with diseases that can easily be transmitted to humans.

“Wild boar can be host to a whole long shopping list of disease and parasites, and those can jump to people and be especially risky to livestock operations,” Brook said.

Diseases carried by wild boar include — among other things — influenza and rabies. Two years ago, a massive outbreak of E. coli in spinach from California was linked back to wild boar.

In addition, the animals can do a devastating amount of crop damage to standing fields, like barley and wheat. They dig up stocks by the root, making off with whatever food they can scavenge and leaving fields flattened.

“One of the reasons why they are so successful and such a concern to Saskatchewan is they will eat absolutely anything,” Brook said.

In Saskatchewan, they have a big impact on nesting waterfowl, who lay their eggs close to the ground. But wild boar will eat anything from insects to rodents to acorns to bigger animals, like deer and young livestock.

“They will survive in virtually any habitat, from deserts to coastal areas to farmlands and into woodlands. And they disperse really well. They really have the potential to be a massive pest,” Brook said.

“I’m not entirely certain why the government is sitting on their hands, for the most part, and ignoring it.”

Currently the only program to combat wild boar in the province is administered through the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities. If a farmer or landowner is having trouble with the irksome critters, they can contact SARM, which has funds from the provincial government to discharge experienced groups of hunters to kill entire cells, or groups, of wild boar.

In two and a half years, about 700 wild boar have been taken out by the program, mostly through areas surrounding Moose Mountain in the southeast and Nipawin in the north of the province.

There have also been reports of them harassing cattle just outside Saskatoon near Pike Lake.

But since wild boar are generally nocturnal and dark in colour, the only time to hunt them effectively is when there is snow on the ground.

“We want to make sure people are aware of the potential seriousness,” SARM Executive Director Dale Harvey said.

“Down in the Southern States, it has passed the point where they can eliminate them. They can only try to control them. And it’s spreading across North America.”

In the U.S., hunters have used baited traps, shot automatic weapons from helicopters and even used military-grade night vision sniper rifles to try and eradicate wild boar. And although hundreds will be killed in a day, it doesn’t dent the overall population.

“All that does is reduce the population [in the short term]. Elimination is effectively impossible anywhere boar become established in the wild,” Brook said.

“It’s either take them all out or have a minimal impact.”

Brook believes Saskatchewan needs to take an aggressive multi-pronged attack to try and eradicate wild boar before they cost the province millions in disease control and crop damage.

He said the government needs to spend the money to implement a good monitoring program that could say exactly how many wild boar are in the province and where they are distributed.

“At the end of the day it’s really what kind of outcome the people of Saskatchewan and the government of Saskatchewan wants to see,” Brook said.

“Texas and Saskatchewan are the same size, and Texas has somewhere between two and three million wild boar right now. So certainly the potential for a very large number of boar is there.”

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Photo: Supplied