Feral boar have been running across the Prairies, with sightings in Alberta’s Elk Island National Park.
One of the country’s foremost hog researchers believes Prince Albert National Park (PANP) is likely to be next for the invasive species.
The University of Saskatchewan’s (USask) Ryan Brook said wild boar have made central Saskatchewan their home and will likely be in different pockets of the country for at least a thousand years.
He said without a plan of attack to remove the invasive species, not a lot is expected to change.
“If you went out today and found a hundred pigs and removed them, that’s great. I would support that and it’s wonderful, but we also can’t pretend that that is making any real long term difference,” said the associate professor in the college of agriculture and bioresources.
He has been researching wild pigs for more than a decade and said the invasive species can have serious effects on the ecosystem — whether it is tearing up vegetation or spreading disease in water bodies.
Brook said because wild pigs don’t have sweat glands, they roll around in water and mud to cool off, which spreads E. coli and salmonella through water.
He also said a drift of pigs could also prey on larger animals on top of tearing through crops and roots.
“(That includes) declining water quality (and) reduced populations of many waterfowl. We could see major and quite rapid declines in waterfowl populations. We could see impacts on everything as big as white-tail deer and elk,” he told Global News.
Brook’s team has used GPS tracking on several dozen hogs and found they can travel over long distances.
Their data says a boar’s home range can reach 400 sq. km. over a summer, which means PANP is a very likely location for them to set up a habitat.
“We’re working with our counterparts in Elk Island with how they’re dealing with wild pig presence there and also keeping communication open and working with our provincial counterparts,” Parks Canada Acting Resource Conservation Manager for PANP Dustin Guedo told Global News.
Parks Canada staff have yet to encounter a feral pig or evidence of one in PANP, but Brook and the team at the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project have seen images of one on the golf course in Waskesiu from several years ago.
He compared simply removing part of a full sounder group as cutting your lawn because female boars can generally have multiple litters of six annually.
Brook says it’s far too hard to say how many feral pigs roam the province, but it is in the thousands.
At this point, he said eradication is virtually impossible and it’s about finding spaces that are pig-free and trying to keep them that way.
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