more than a dozen wild boars<\/a> were spotted roaming around Pickering. <\/p>\nAt that time, McGee says they borrowed the equipment from Ontario Hydro. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey supplied drones for us and helped us to find out where the pigs were and where they were moving in order to come up with a plan to trap them and remove them off the landscape,\u201d McGee said. <\/p>\n
As of 2024, the province uses its own drones to conduct these searches. So far, McGee says they have primarily used this technology to search for escaped domesticated pigs from small farms. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have a population of Eurasian wild boar on the landscape,\u201d McGee said. \u201cWe\u2019re not in that position yet where we have a breeding population. But, in Ontario, we consider any pig that\u2019s outside of human containment to be a wild pig.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of the 64 reports they received about escaped animals last year, McGee says 40 of those sightings were likely wild pigs.<\/p>\n
The lore behind wild hogs<\/p>\n
In Ontario, wild pigs are considered to be any free roaming domesticated pigs\u2014like pot-bellied pigs, for example\u2014or Eurasian wild boars, or a combination of the two. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere are no pigs that are native to Canada,\u201d Dr. Ryan Brook, professor at the University of Saskatchewan in the department of animal and poultry science, said in an interview.<\/p>\n
Brook says Canada did not have Eurasian wild boars until the 1980s, when there was a push to diversify agriculture. Outside of the introduction of emu ranches and ostrich farms, Brook says wild boars were also being brought in from the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were raised on farms, primarily for meat production originally,\u201d Brook said. Some farmers would crossbreed wild boars with domestic pigs, Brook said, as they would become much larger and would have a higher reproductive capacity.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the market never really took off, and they didn\u2019t build the infrastructure to really support it.\u201d<\/p>\n
After this point, Brook says some wild boar farmers would cut their fences and let these animals out into the wild, because the pigs were considered \u201cessentially worthless.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some cases, as many as 300 go at once, and that happened pretty broadly,\u201d Brook said. He adds that because of their origins and being bred for cold winters, these wild pigs were quite adaptive to the Canadian environment. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey were kind of set up to be successful invasive species,\u201d Brook said. <\/p>\n
Why are wild pigs a concern?<\/p>\n
In short, Brook said wild pigs are an \u201cecological train wreck\u201d to Canada. <\/p>\n
Their ability to eat nearly anything causes massive damage to agricultural crops, Brook said, and they can \u201cdestroy\u201d ecosystems unlike other animals due to their habit of \u201crooting,\u201d which is when they use their snout to rip up the ground. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey rip up the ground to get at insect larvae and roots to eat, and so when they leave the area, it looks like it\u2019s been ripped apart by a rototiller, the ground is torn apart,\u201d Brook said. \u201cThat can help invasive plants take hold, and it takes years to recover.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wild pigs can also spread disease to livestock and other animals because they tend to wallow in water as a way of cooling off. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey (pigs) can carry many different diseases, they can deposit that material into the water sources that they wallow in,\u201d McGee said. \u201cOur native wildlife comes and drink from those water sources, and then they get sick.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wild hogs can also carry African Swine Fever<\/a>, which has not been detected to North America yet. It is a viral disease that only impacts pigs and is spread between these animals either directly or indirectly with other infected pigs or pig products, like farm equipment and feed.<\/p>\n\u201cI think many would agree with me that they\u2019re the worst invasive large mammal on the planet,\u201d Brook said.<\/p>\n
Why hunting does not work<\/p>\n
For one, hunting pigs in the province is illegal. But secondly, McGee says hunting these animals encourages them to scatter and hide.<\/p>\n
\u201cWild pigs that are exposed to hunting pressure flee into new areas, they learn to avoid humans, and while hunting can remove a few individuals from the population each year, they\u2019re quick to reproduce and the populations rebound quickly,\u201d McGee explained. <\/p>\n
Brook says pigs can have a couple of litters per year, averaging at about six young, echoing McGee\u2019s sentiments that hunting this animal would not keep up with how quickly they reproduce.<\/p>\n
While hunting wild pigs is banned, McGee says the province does rely on hunters to report any sightings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ontario is bringing home the bacon, or at least trying to by deploying drones with thermal cameras to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[712,49,48,66,323],"class_list":["post-773328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-apple-news","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}