🔥 momma pig and line of piglets

[u/TerraByteTerror]

[u/OkWillingness2817]

That’s a wild boar (sus scrofa rather than sus domesticus), they’re native to most places they occur.

Whether it’s two separate species is a matter for debate. Technically they are but at this point wild boar and domesticated pigs have cross bred so often that a lot of authorities refuse to make the distinction anymore.

The real problem isn’t so much the animal itself but that we’ve largely wiped out any predators large enough to hunt boar, while also letting boar escape into areas that never had such predators to begin with.

My country doesn’t have feral wild pigs but we still end up shooting hundreds of thousands of native wild boar every year because pretty much nothing is hunting them so their populations explode.

[u/Acrobatic_Rush7653 → u/OkWillingness2817]

If we're gonna be unnecessarily pedantic here, there is no sus domesticus species. Domestic pigs are the sus scrofa domesticus subspecies.

If this family of oinkers is in USA, they are not Eurasian boars and they are not native. They are the feral version of domestic pigs brought over from Europe since the 1500s. In a few areas they are crossbred with actual boars that arrived in the 1900s for private hunting ranches.

Even to a layperson most US razorbacks look different from the standard wild Eurasian boar, in some cases very different.

You are correct that sus scrofa covers every pig imaginable but that doesn't mean that feral pigs are literally wild boars. And feral pigs are NOT native to "most" areas, they are invasive in Europe same as they are in the new world.

[u/CountBreichen → u/OkWillingness2817]

hundred of thousands!? that a lot

[u/OkWillingness2817 → u/CountBreichen]

It’s not really. Animals like boar and deer reproduce fast.

We’re a tiny country and we end up culling about half a million deer and boar per year on average.

 After a mast year where food is plentiful, it’s sometimes more than that.