No, really, people should read more (Day 4)

As I've said, my preferred media is books, but to keep up-to-date, I subscribe to The Economist, as well as keep up with the Joongang Daily and my local public radio websites (and On the Media). The Economist is a much better publication than it was fifteen years ago--I will never forget their cover trumpeting the growth potential of Southern Europe, less than two years before the default debt crisis that effectively claimed Europe, but they are less filled with wishful thinking than they were before.

They also cover a breadth of topics, including science (or science-adjacent) news that doesn't always make it to national outlets. So I was not surprised to see them cover a the rise in feral boar hybrids yesterday. I was, however, shocked by the story itself.

Apparently, Canadian pig farmers in the 1980s decided to breed their stock with British boars to improve their stock, getting meatier animals they could, I presume, get more of a profit from. But when the price of pork fell in 2001, some of them released their pigs into the wild when they couldn't sell them.

My dear reader, I would have known the punchline to the story even if the subtitle hadn't given it away. Of course parts of the Canadian countryside were going to be infested with wild boars over twenty years later, and of course some of them are starting to make their way to Minnesota. This has happened before. I know this because I read about it in a book less than two years ago. Ecological Imperialism by Alfred Crosby is a classic that was published in 1986--you know, around the time the pig farmers started cross-breeding.

Like other European imports of fauna, particularly the horse and cow, pigs did extremely well when they got to the Americas, and by the 18th century there were so many that farmers released them into the wild. Fun fact: it takes about two generations for a domesticated pig to revert to a feral state, complete with sharp tusks. The colonial versions were not a joke--they're not called razorbacks for nothing. If anything, we should be grateful that these modern Canadian wild boar hybrids are relatively tame, and that their population hasn't exploded.

(This would normally be where I would post a picture, but I just can't.)

I don't blame individual farmers as much as I do local and regional governments. What did they think was going to happen to all of those pig farmers when the prices dropped?

Deb in the (wonderfully razorback-free) City