GROUNDBREAKERS

The return of Britain’s wild boar

Chantal Lyons

Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2024, 288 pages

Hardback: £20 | ISBN 978-1-3994

Review by Peter Taylor

This engaging book mostly follows the author’s encounters with characters from the rewilding and forestry fraternity, the Forest of Dean human inhabitants, and the wild boar themselves. Boar can seem scary but are usually flighty and unobtrusive, apart from their rooting signs.

Lyons takes the reader into the midst of Britain’s boar country. There is an impassioned argument for accepting the ecosystem effects and the minor frisson of risk that this mammal presents in our woods and countryside.

The author discusses coexisting with boar, including the question of culling, effects on farmland, and risks to people such as dog walkers, of which there are hardly any incidents throughout Europe. In France, there is some considerable risk of being shot by hunters mistaking humans for wild boar. In one such a man was shot while hanging out his washing.

Britain’s fragments of boar populations are in Galloway, the Forest of Dean and small pockets of woods in South-East England. Their main threat is undoubtedly Defra, which is worried about reservoirs of ‘swine fever’ despite few English pigs getting much outdoor time.

For those who are visually orientated, the book lacks photos and illustrations, so we are deprived of examples of boar track and sign, rooting effects, and other habitat dynamics of boar. 

I would like to have seen more treatment of the long-time efforts of the British conservation and rewilding community, and in particular references to ECOS, where discussion on species re-introductions in Britain go back now more than 30 years. But these are mere slight moans on what is a helpful and well crafted book.