Wild boar populations are expanding rapidly across Europe and North America, creating complex welfare challenges at the interface of wildlife management, agriculture, and hunting.
Wild boar welfare in managed landscapes is complex. As highly intelligent, social animals, boar experience fear, pain, and social disruption in ways similar to domestic pigs. Driven hunts can produce high wounding rates and orphaned young. Trapping causes stress through confinement. ASF suppression campaigns in Europe have led to extremely intensive culling operations with less attention to humaneness. The most welfare-positive long-term solution involves restoring natural predators and reducing the agricultural subsidies that create monocultures attractive to boar. Where hunting is necessary, selective individual stalking by skilled hunters is considerably more humane than mass driven hunts.