Meet the Japanese farmers and hunters defending their homeland from the ruthless hogs that—by the way—may have wandered over from Fukushima
If you want to strike fear into the heart of a Japanese farmer, just utter these two words: wild boar.
The aggressive, hard-headed animals are some of the most destructive in the world, not only devouring crops, but destroying fields and root systems with their sharp teeth and trowel-like hooves from Kobe to Chiba City.
It wasn’t always like this. Boars are a native species in Japan, but you could go years without seeing one there for most of the 20th century, thanks to diseases like cholera in the 1920s. Then, in the early 2000s, the animals began descending on cities and farmland in an almost plague-like fashion.
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And sometimes, they’re radioactive. In the contaminated area in and around the site of Fukishima’s 2011 nuclear meltdown, the boars’ voracious appetite and prolific breeding has led to an indeterminate number of animals (thousands? Tens of thousands?) becoming contaminated with radiation. Many of them are journeying into nearby prefectures. People have even stopped eating a kind of boar stew that used to be a specialty dish in some of these places, for fear of radiation contamination. The impetus for eradication is at red-alert levels.
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Since no set national policy for wild boar control exists, protecting produce from wild boars has become something of a trial-by-error practice—and cottage industry—across the country.
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In the Chiba Prefecture, 5,900 hunting licenses (including firearms, wire traps, and box traps) have been issued to date, while in the more northern Myagi Prefecture, 1,876 licensed hunters brought in a whopping 4,964 boars in 2015. Government officials in Myagi, which borders Fukushima, have seen increasing public support for hunting boars since 2011, but that stance is less popular in the rest of Japan.
“After hunters bring in the boars, we help them test to see if they are radioactive,” says Mr. Satoshi Kimura, a government official from the adjacent Myagi Prefecture. “If the levels are too high, you can’t eat them.”
Culinary woes aside, post-capture nuclear pig disposal is much more complicated. Burying boars in mass graves—a common practice in most places—is too risky to the soil and groundwater when they’re radioactive. In response, in March 2016, government officials constructed the first-ever incineration facility specifically for wild boars in Fukushima, just outside the town of Soma. Most of the hogs headed for the fire have at least marginal levels of radiation.
Read more at Attack of the (Radioactive) Wild Boars!
