Ah here is the issue, feral pig meat isn’t really pork the way most people know it. It’s gamey and often parasite ridden.
I think this might be one of these cases where meat consumption might be ethically sound and good for the environment.
Feral pigs are hard to contain. They are smart, greedy, dangerous. They seem to be very similar to us humans in many regards, just less dominant overall, but the pigs we are talking about here also multiply very fast.
There are very few animals who can fight large feral pigs, and even fewer who have good chances of not getting severely injured. Pigs come in packs and they can assess situations much better than typical prey. They can fight off wolves or scare them away, especially when they have a numbers advantage. So the typical wolf strategy often doesn't work. Wolves might have the stamina and composure, but the risk/reward isn't there.
I don't think the article mentions it, but pigs track the schedule of human hunters. They know roughly at which times they will show up, so they carefully try to pick up the hunter's sent and track where they go in order to plan safer paths through the wild. So even if you hunt them actively, it's not an easy task at all.
Washed down with the alcohol they drink in thee Borneo Jungles, which is a certain leaf fermented in human spit.
An experience, yes. Not one I'd seek out again, but a great memory.
Wild boars here don't have almost any fat, neither does deer.
It really is impressive how well farmed meat does at keeping that out. I don't think many of us have any sort of intuition for just how parasite ridden food was even a half century ago.
And domestic pig meat is tested for parasites nevertheless.
With all that I feel uneasy eating raw meat, although salami and prosciutto are very tasty and sometimes I submit to temptation. Feel like running the Russian roulette everytime although the probability of an actual parasite infestation is extremely low.
Wild pigs would probably be okay if processed into I dunno, pasteurized canned meat. If that's guaranteed to kill parasites it should be okay for human consumption provided the meat is tested before nevertheless.
One thing I'm thinking of is this problem: as far as I know testing the meat is a slow, manual process, where a human is required to take slices of the meat and check them under a microscope. Therefore it's only done on a statistical basis. That's enough for farm pigs, if a pig from a larger culture is parasite free, chances are very high that all are parasite free.
But this is not possible for wild boars. Every pig they shot needs to be tested coze you never know otherwise. This is again feasible for the occasional hunt (here at least). Hunters will send a probe to the lab before consuming the pig and that's doable because it's like ... one or a few pigs. Not really possible if you massacre 1000 of them.
So unless some technology is developed for automating this testing procedure, you can't safely eat the meat of a wild boar mass slaughter.
Wild bear which is a popular hunting game here has a very high trichinosis occurrence, but regular cooking methods render it safe. My understanding is that high temperatures kill all parasites, but if that’s not the case I’d love to learn about it.
If we really can't eat them, the other solution is to use chemistry to make something that feral pigs get addicted to and that they will give up food, sex, and nursing their young in pursuit of, and which is a human controlled substance we can manage. Drop enough of it in their habitats that they can always become dependent. If you just try to poison them, you kill off their own competition for food and just create more resilliant ones, but creating a chemical dependency where they will seek out sources that humans control would provide the lever to manage the population.
This solution is related to one I commented on about the rat population in new york city. Just make something they want. I should do a startup, we could call it Pied Piper.
Also, your goals and the goals of environmentalists seems to be quite different here. You’re suggesting farming them, but environmentalists don’t actually want them there at all.