Change Everything No 9: Midweek special on Chantal Lyons's Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain's Wild Boar

Human problems: ecological tidiness disorder, landscapes of fear, and inability to socially distance

Living boar

Several years ago in the depths of rural France, in the headlights of a car, I saw what seemed to be an amazing gathering of wild boar. Several large adults, perhaps six or eight slightly smaller ones, and a veritable flood, maybe 20 boarlets. It is only on reading Chantal Lyons’s Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar that I realise the correct term for this group is a “sounder”, that the striped youngsters are known - at least in the New Forest - as humbugs, and that all of the full-grown adults in the group, and probably the mid-sized adolescents, would have been female. And that living this way is perfectly normal for wild boar. A matriarch would have been leading the group (had they perceived the car a threat she probably would have stood her ground on guard while the others fled), while the adult mothers, which would have all given birth more or less simultaneous, would be sharing nursing and rearing duties, and the adolescents providing support.

Young wild boar - you can easily see the origins of the “humbug” label Photo by Gabor Vereb on Unsplash

I’ve also learnt from Lyons’s text about the intelligence of boar, although that comes as no surprise, having many years ago carried out occasional feeding duties on a small extensive piggery, interacting with what were clearly extremely intelligent animals, entirely comparable to the experiences I’ve had with dogs. I also had the misfortune to briefly work as a student in an intensive piggery, the sows in farrowing crates, and the distress that caused (including cannibalism of young) will never leave me. Given domestication usually involves breeding down the intelligence of species, accounts of what the wild boar can learn and understand outstrips even those experiences, and they probably are, as Lyons says, “the most intelligent of all land animals native to Britain”. Some of the tales are truly spectacular: in a Czech Republic nature reserve in 2020, where boars were being trapped to have tracking collars attached, monitored by cameras set to take a photo every two minutes:

“One night, two young boar were trapped. Hours later, the rest of their sounder arrived, led by a single adult female. In the first image of her, she sniffs at the thick logs holding the trap door in place. She looks interested, her ears held high. In the next two images, she is transformed: the hair on her shoulders and back has bristled into a great crest, her ears are flat against her skull, and in the infra-red light her single visible eye gleams bright white. The camera has frozen her in the act of charging the log. She arches, mustering her strength. She looks like a forest god. In the final few images, neither she nor the other free boar are in sight. But the two logs keeping the trap shut have been pushed out of place and one door is ajar… I may not even have been the first time she’d done it; before they started to use cameras, on two separate occasions the researchers had received an electronic alert that a trap had been triggered, only to find it empty when they arrived.” (p. 144)

Yet this lively, informative, engaging text is not really, or at least primarily, about wild boar. Nor is it primarily about the vital ecological services boar provide for the systems in which they live, although there’s plenty about that too, from shifting around plant seeds, bryophytes (mosses, liverworts and hornworts) and fungi, and soil organisms on their coats and caught in their hooves (and sometimes, as Lyons’s academic work established by passing alive through the boar digestive tract - p. 84). Then there’s the crucial place of boar wallows as a water source for multiple species when others run dry. The historic loss of wild boar may be a cause of the extreme rarity in the UK of the natterjack toad and tadpole shrimp, Lyons reports, despite the latter’s extreme hardiness as probably the oldest surviving animal species.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

What Groundbreakers is really about is the relationship between humans and boars, particularly the difficulty the UK has in coming to terms with the return of the species, with a comparative study of the different ways in which other countries live with them. Genuinely wild boar were probably hunted out of Britain in the 13th-century, the occasional reports after that probably escapees from hunting estates that had been imported from the Continent. That too was the origins of our current day populations, so that by 1998 MAFF (now DEFRA) declared there were two populations in the England (in west Dorset and on the Kent/East Sussex border), in 2004 a Forest of Dean group joined the list, and there are two officially IDed populations in Scotland.

Yet their status is legally murky, as Lyons outlines in careful detail, and the human reaction to them clearly, despite her carefully neutral, scientific and indeed sympathetic approach to their enemies, often totally over-the-top. As I’ve often reflected, there is a particular pathological concern in parts of British society with tidiness - Lyons notes the identification of “ecological tidiness disorder” - and she goes further in identifying an inability to cope with risk, to acknowledge and live with the tiny potential dangers, while at the same time we expect people in other parts of the world to live with vastly more dangerous big cats, bears and bison.

Conversely, while these wild animals (and humans) are safest when they are allowed to remain wild, some people are unable to resist actions that will semi-tame them, from self-taking to home feeding. As Lyons hears from a vet in Barcelona charged with managing its (significant) population, humans are the problem, not boar. These humans “have a social distancing problem with boar,” he sighs. “They have a lack of human contact and they prefer to establish relationships with the boar.” (p. 219)

Re-balancing our place in the UK as human animals in a hugely depleted ecology is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, and on which we are making little progress. (The fate of wild boar has considerable similarities with the - illegal - treatment of wild raptors.) Groundbreakers is in content, and its accessible tone, an important addition to thinking about the routes forward.

Bonus: How to survive in the Eastern Roman Empire

Sometime soon you’ll probably get a similar Change Everything special edition on Anthony Kaldellis’s mammoth and wonderful The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium, whose thousand pages I’m going to somehow get through despite a London Library recall notice. But as a sample taster, here’s Cyrus of Panopolis. My bolding, and a typical early Church event I can’t stop chuckling about.

“He was simultaneously prefect of Constantinople, praeatorian prefect (of Oriens) and consul for 441. A capable poet, he was popular because he adorned the City [Constantinople] with buildings, provided it with night-lighting, and completed the circuit of the sea walls. To make government more accessible, he issued his decrees in Greek rather than Latin…. But one day in 441, the people in the hippodrome chanted ‘Constantine built [the City], Cyrus renewed it! Make room for him, Augustus.’ This was too much for Theodosius [Emperor, if in name only] and Chrysaphius [the eunuch chamberlain], who removed Cyrus from his positions and confiscated his property. He was accused of paganism and, paradoxically, packed off to be bishop of Kotyaion in Phrygia. The townspeople there had already murdered four of their bishops and were ready for another. But Cyrus won them over by delivering the shortest Christian sermon on record: “Brothers, let the birth of God, our saviour Jesus Christ, be honoured with silence, seeing as he was conceived in the Holy Virgin through hearing alone, for he was the Word. To him let there be glory for ever. Amen.” After Theodosius’ death in 450, Cyrus resigned from his see and returned to private life in the City until his death in ca. 470.” (pp. 191-2)

Now there’s a life really crying out for novelisation, or being made into a film, probably you have to suspect a comedy, possibly as a wry commentary on the state of our politics today.

Hagia Sophia in what was Constantinople: Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

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