Wild boar populations are expanding across Europe and North America, increasing human-wildlife conflict. Managing this conflict in welfare-conscious ways requires evidence-based approaches to population management.
Wild boar management presents genuine welfare tensions. The animals causing conflict are sentient, social beings whose expansion is partly a consequence of human landscape changes. Lethal control causes the obvious welfare harm of death and potentially painful injury. Trap-based control causes significant stress and fear. Indiscriminate poisoning causes prolonged suffering. A welfare-conscious management framework minimizes unnecessary lethal control through coexistence strategies like exclusion fencing, adjusts timing and methods of necessary culling to minimize suffering, and evaluates non-lethal alternatives seriously. The intelligence and social complexity of wild boar means that effective management also requires understanding their behavior and social dynamics.