You know, I just don’t know what to make of this WSJ story on the boars of Berlin.
Major cities in the US have a problem with feral cat colonies. Rather than wholesale slaughter of the animals many organizations run Trap-Neuter-Return programs. You can make arguments for & against returning cats to live in questionable conditions in large urban areas. However, this way the population is presumably at least controlled.
There are also increasing numbers of urban coyotes—across the US. We had them in the DC metro area.
Mixing wild predators with urban humans is just a recipe for unhappiness all around, so I find it interesting that the Germans seem to have taken a computer-language approach: either kill the pigs or invite them in to dinner.
Frankly, the idea of having your toddlers on the park swings when a sounder of boars shows up gives me a major case of the jim-jams. I don’t get the Berliners’ laissez-faire attitude when it comes to this sort of thing. Do they just not make the connection between the idea of "wild animal" & "defenseless child"? Has none of them ever seen what happened when their kid pulled a dog's or cat's tail?
On the other hand, I can see where they’d be put off by the experience of having a guy show up & blow away an entire family of mama & piglets (shoats, boarlets, whatever) in front of your cocktail party or bar mitzvah crowd.
This will be a story worth following.
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