Forest officials can gun down wild boars, but strict norms remain

Thiruvananthapuram: Though the state government has issued an order allowing forest officials to gun down wild boars, strict norms stand in the way from saving farmers and crops from the attacks.
While forest officials say that procedures are practical, farmers and people’s representatives believe that animal should be declared as ‘vermin’. Apart from hilly areas, wild boar attack menace is there even in suburban areas of cities, they assert.

“The guidelines cannot be amended as they are formulated as per relevant sections of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. But, we have written to the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, which is already entrusted to conduct a study on man-animal conflict, to include the threat to life and property posed by wild boars in their study and to give a special emphasis on the need to declare them as vermin,” said a forest official.

Besides, the new government order has authorized the chief wildlife warden (CWW) to delegate divisional forest officers (DFOs) and wildlife wardens the authority to arrange for killing the crop-raiding animals. The delegation will speed up the procedures and make the guidelines much more practical, the official added.

“We will have to wait and watch if this will work out. But our demand is to declare these wild pigs as vermin so that there can be a scientific decimation,” said Thiruvambady MLA George M Thomas, who had raised the issue in the assembly two years ago. In fact, not a single wild boar was killed under the earlier order (expired in 2016)— that allowed farmers to kill the boars—due to impractical clauses, he pointed out.

Wild boar is already a ‘vermin’ in Goa and Odisha, Thomas said. “Vermin status is required for at least certain periods for protecting crops, mainly plantains and tubers like tapioca,” he said adding that farmers are being killed in wild boar attacks.

As per the statistics, the wild boar population increased from 40,963 in 1993 to 60,940 in 2002. The population, however, dipped to 48,034 in 2011 (with ratio of 5.1/sqkm), and according to the figures given in the assembly by forest minister K Raju, quoting a survey held in 2014, there was around 47,000 wild boars in the state.

It was in 2011 that the state government gave special permission to farmers to kill the crop-raiding animal under most stringent of conditions aimed to prevent any misuse.

However, farmers and people’s representatives had been repeatedly raising complaints against the ‘impractical conditions’.