Open Country

Helen Mark travels to the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire to encounter some of the wild boar who have made a home there in the last ten years. The Forest clearly suits them because their numbers are growing exponentially, with over 1500 feral animals at the last count. The population can almost triple in a year, and with no cold winters or culture of boar-hunting in the UK, the wild boar here have nothing to fear, except the Forestry Commission's marksmen. Adult males can reach twenty stone, run at thirty miles an hour, and can jump or barge through all but the strongest of fences. Also they are not afraid of humans, so unlike deer, you can't just shoo them out of your garden. Helen meets Dr John Dutton of the University of Worcester, who has made a study of human/boar social interaction in the Forest of Dean, and Kevin Stannard and Ian Harvey from the Forestry Commission, who have been landed with the task of managing numbers on their land. Then there's Simon Gaskell of the Real Boar Company, who farms boa