June 9th, 2008
Berliners annoyed with roving boars
Berliners are bored with boars.
The husky beasts are foraging through carefully tended gardens and rooting up city parks in search of food. Angry sows have even on occasion attacked people who strayed too close to their litters of piglets.
Although the city has not called for an outright cull, critics are bristling. They want the animals curtailed, even if it means a gunshot here and there.
“There are too many boars around here because Berlin’s hunters don’t shoot enough of the animals,” said Uwe Neumann, a resident of the Eichkamp Siedlung, a small cluster of homes near Berlin’s massive Grunewald park. It’s not uncommon to stroll the grounds of the Im Dol, a small park in the midst of a residential area in the South of Berlin, or the Schlachtensee, and see boars rummaging in the bushes and shrubbery.
The city estimates that there are now 10,000 wild boars in Berlin. I would guess that if the city is admitting 10,000, the actual number is probably higher.
The city does issue hunting licenses which can be used in a 223,000 acre area. So far, over 1,700 have been taken this year.
June 9th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
The problem is Germany has a really retarded system of hunter licensing. A hunter is licensed to kill a set number of animals in an area … if he doesn’t make his quota of kills, he loses his license. Their government takes what should be a sport, and turns it into a low-paying job.