Boar wars: how wild hogs are trashing European cities | Hacker News Reader

Boar wars: how wild hogs are trashing European cities

theguardian.com

29 pointsoska13 comments

> The arrival of wild boar in town squares and city parks is forcing us to confront a new reality: we are bumping up against the limits of urbanisation. This is a crisis we have largely inflicted on ourselves. City sprawl is driving the species out of its dwindling natural habitats and forcing it to live alongside us.

What? That makes no sense. Increasing urbanization in larger cities means higher average population densities where people live, which means more land available for nature, not less.

It seems more likely that is an issue of a cultural attitudes towards animals being increasingly cuddly, and hesitant to use hunting, or similarly straightforward and lethal methods, to deal with the encroaching animals.

More people moving into and living in large cities doesn't necessarily mean the lesser populated land grows, or the built environment there is shrinking. As it happens, whereever i lived formerly and bicycled far as a child/young adult and knew the territory, when compared to now on something like google/bing/whatevermaps the built environment there has massively grown outwards along the few streets connecting the smaller towns and villages. Unfortunately the applications which incorporate a time slider where you can directly compare this lack coverage, both in time and places. Call it a "dark age" ;-)

In german this is called "Zersiedelung" which means something like urban sprawl, but it's not something only related to cities, but the whole landscape.

Also, we have largely increased the average space per person. So even if people move into cities with higher densities, this might be largely compensated by larger living spaces per person everywhere else (including the City).

Yeah that goes against the trends of urbanization and zero pop growth.

There are other places around the world where increasing human populations will affect nature and wildlife, but it’s not East Asia or Europe.

Would common birds singing louder and longer, an incorporating technical sounds count as affecting wild life? I'm sometimes wondering where the hell this or that sound came from, when walking along lesser traveled paths and know there can't be anything which is making that noise here. After some waiting and searching i can pinpoint some bird, mimicking car/fire alarms, all sorts of beeping noises, and sometimes even sci-fi sound effects. I wonder where they got that from? Television, Ringtones, Computer/Console-Gamers? Anyways, the farther from the cities i go/ride, the less i hear that. Nonetheless, even there it happens.

Boars don't fit your mold. They are pests with no natural predators. They need to be culled or they get out of control.

Boars have LOTS of natural predators in fact.

The real problem seems to be unchecked population growth of wild boars due to the lack of natural predators. They are smart animals and tend to figure out that there is more and tastier food available in the nearby city than in the forest.

Well, they've figured out that hunting is prohibited in the cities. What did you expect?

At least in Berlin, it is not - the city does employ several hunters to limit boar numbers.

An invasive species under attack by human “urbanization”. Sounds good to me.

I say we mount AI controlled weapons on the boar's back to give them a fighting chance against humans.

Boars with friggin lasers....the lasers are controlled by sharks.

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