Denmark is building a 'wall' on its German border. To stop pigs

Ryan W. Miller | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Denmark is building wall to keep boars away amid swine fever fears Another controversial border wall. With a reported 12 million pigs in Denmark, government officials don’t want anymore coming into the country, so they are building a wall.

Denmark is building its own border "wall" – but this one is meant to keep out pigs.

On Monday, the Danish government began construction of a more than 40-mile fence along its German border aimed at preventing the spread of African swine fever.

Crews began working in the border town of Padborg, and the roughly 5-foot tall fence is scheduled to be completed this fall, the Danish government said.

"We have 11 billion good reasons to do everything we can to prevent African swine fever reaching Denmark. And now we can finally get started on erecting our wild boar fence," the country's Minister for Environment and Food, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, said in a statement. "The fence and our increased efforts to hunt wild boar will break the chain of infection so there is less risk of African swine fever spreading to Denmark."

However, no cases of African swine fever have been reported in Germany, according to The Associated Press. The Local, an English-language news outlet, reported that the first case spotted in Poland came in 2014 from a wild boar from Belarus and that Belgium saw its first case in September near its border with Luxembourg and France.

The virus is highly contagious for pigs and can be spread through a variety of ways tied to the animals, but it is not a risk for human health, according to the intergovernmental World Organisation for Animal Health.

Exports from Denmark's pork industry account for almost half of its agricultural exports and 5 percent of the country's overall exports, according to its Agriculture and Food Council.

In fact, pigs outnumbered people in Denmark by over 2 to 1 in 2016, according to the European Union's Eurostat.

"Even though African swine fever is harmless to people, we have to protect our pork exports," Orla Osterby, agriculture spokesperson for the Conservative People's Party of Denmark, said in a statement Monday.

The government said it has also increased other efforts to curb the potential spread of the virus, including making it easier to hunt wild boar at the border.

Critics of the border barrier, though, say it would be ineffective and is largely symbolic.

It’s "likely not ... a practical way to keep the African swine fever; beyond the fact that wild boar are extremely powerful animals and likely they can make their way through or under it," Viorel D. Popescu, an Ohio University biology professor who studies Eastern European forest ecology, wrote in an email to the Daily Beast.

"The fence will prevent rare and endangered species from moving freely between Denmark and Germany. The fence will go through protected areas, and that is a very bad idea," Denmark's World Wildlife Fund general secretary Bo Oeksnebjerg said, per the Local, when the barrier was being considered in the parliament in June.

Some Danish officials themselves have admitted that boars could pass through the gaps in the fence where it will cross roads and waterways, the AP reported.

The fence will cost $4.6 million, according to the AP.

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