While shopping, we can sometimes meet bad people.
In a video available on social networks and relayed by many media, including the
Guardian
, a woman can be seen followed by a group of wild boars in a supermarket parking lot.
She tries to resist for a while, then abandons her shopping bag, on which the animals take control, under the dumbfounded eyes of the other customers.
Read also: Hunting: two illegal wild boar feeding sites identified in the Gard
If on the images the wild boars do not seem particularly aggressive, more generally, their invasive presence begins to pose many problems in the Italian boot.
Several demonstrations have already taken place in the country to demand measures against their proliferation which devastates crops and causes many road accidents.
At the end of 2019, the agricultural organization Coldiretti estimated their number at 2 million in the country.
Wild boars at the origin of several deaths
In January 2019, one person died and a dozen others were injured in a traffic jam near Lodi (north) caused by wild boars that had ventured on the main north-south motorway axis of Italy. Families of suidae have also been seen, especially during the summer, in the northern districts of Rome, attracted by the piles of uncollected rubbish.
In Italy, hunting is open from the end of September to the end of January, although the dates vary according to the regions and if ad hoc elimination measures can be taken.
But, according to the Italian site Urgence sangliers, linked to the League for the Abolition of Hunting (LAC), hunting wild boars is not the solution.
It is based on a study which showed that injecting a vaccine (designed in the United States) into 30% of the Tuscan wild boar population could reduce it by 60% over five years.
Read also: Vendée: a dozen wild boars roam around a residential area
A presence that can also be good. In November 2019, the Italian outlet Tosacana Media News reported that a group of wild boars had dug up jars of cocaine, which they then scattered. The losses for the traffickers would amount to 20,000 euros.