A German minister has backed calls to drastically cull the number of wild boars in the country to prevent an outbreak of African swine fever, amid concerns it could decimate the pork industry.

The German farmers’ association called for 70 per cent of the country’s wild boars to be culled – including sows and their newborn piglets.

"No hunter would kill the mother and let the piglets run," Werner Schwarz, vice president of the association, told the Rheinische Post.

Christian Schmidt, the German Agriculture Minister, agreed it made sense to lift limits on when the animals could be hunted. “An intelligent reduction of the wild boar population plays an important role in prevention,” he said.

Nobody knows exactly how many wild boars there are in Germany, but the figure is likely to be hundreds of thousands. In Berlin alone there are estimated to be somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000.