Wild boar populations are expanding across Europe and North America, creating human-wildlife conflict and raising welfare questions about population management methods including hunting, trapping, and culling.
Wild boar and feral pig management raises welfare questions about both the methods used and the necessity of lethal control. Boars are highly intelligent social animals — shooting, trapping, and other management methods cause acute welfare harm to targeted individuals. The social disruption from removing individuals from family groups (sounders) causes distress to remaining group members. Management is often justified by genuine ecological harm from feral pig populations, but the welfare costs of management should be minimized through humane methods and careful targeting. Aerial shooting, when used by skilled marksmen with appropriate equipment, can achieve more rapid mortality than ground trapping and shooting, but poor execution causes wounding without rapid death. Non-lethal population control remains an area of active research for wild pig management.