Poland plans to kill thousands of boars to control disease outbreak

WARSAW — Poland’s battle to control highly contagious African swine fever (ASF) is turning into a political problem for the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.

Since Saturday, hunters have been out in force across the country gunning for wild boars — many of which are carriers of the deadly disease that the Polish government wants to stamp out to protect domestic pigs.

It’s the scale of the cull that’s causing the trouble.

A total of some 20,000 wild boars will be killed over the next few weekends — bringing this season’s overall cull to about 190,000 — the government estimates the total wild population is about 214,000.

The plan has galvanized a coalition of environmental groups, scientists and the political opposition. Polish Facebook pages are filled with cute pictures of boar piglets while the next few days will see protests in several Polish cities. An anti-hunt petition sent to the government has gathered more than 300,000 signatures.

The outrage recalls protests a couple of years ago over the government’s earlier policy of cutting down trees in the protected Białowieża forest — arguing it was needed to control an outbreak of beetles. That got Warsaw in trouble with the European Commission.

It’s yet another headache for the government, already struggling to contain controversies like a pay scandal at the central bank or a looming nationwide teachers’ strike.

As a result the government is backpedaling a bit. The scale of the hunt has been slightly curtailed, and Environment Minister Henryk Kowalczyk on Friday clarified that hunters should spare pregnant sows and those caring for piglets. The government’s defenders argue that there were also large hunts in previous years, but they didn’t raise protests.

Arguments for culling

But the bigger issue is whether the cull will do much to rein in ASF, which is lethal to pigs but does not affect humans. There is no known treatment or vaccination. Pigmeat accounts for half of the EU’s meat production and is one of the bloc’s largest agricultural exports, so both the Commission and member countries are keen to prevent it from spreading.

There is no debate that boars are carriers of ASF, but it’s more questionable if they are the leading vectors for transmitting the disease to domestic pigs. Some scientists caution that a mass killing of wild boars won’t help.

“Mass collective hunts across vast areas could cause wild boars to move from where they’re threatened and spread the ASF virus faster and further,” said Rafał Kowalczyk, director of the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. “It’s also unlikely that the local hunting associations tasked with culling will take care not to spread the virus by disinfecting clothes or cars and dealing with the carcasses properly.”

Last year, Wallonia banned boar hunts when ASF was detected — aiming to prevent the faster spread of the disease.

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Polish hunters insist that the cull makes sense and they will take care not to spread the virus.

“Culling wild boars is one of the ways to fight ASF. Not the only one but that’s what we were tasked with and we will do it,” said Rafał Nowicki, a member of the Polish Hunting Association‘s management board.

Animal scientists still hope the government will change its mind. They wrote to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki earlier this week, asking him to cancel the cull, arguing such measures haven’t worked in the past. “Nearly 1 million wild boars were culled in 2015-2017 and yet the number of cases among those animals kept rising,” they wrote.

A spreading disease

The ASF outbreak in Poland began in 2014 when the first carcasses of infected wild boars were found close to Poland’s border with Belarus, from where they had likely crossed.

It has steadily moved westward. There were just 44 ASF cases in wild boars in 2015. That skyrocketed to over 3,300 last year, according to the Poland’s General Veterinary Inspectorate. Outbreaks on pig farms are also on the rise, with 213 registered since 2014, including 108 in 2018, the inspectorate said. That resulted in culling of some 43,000 pigs in 2014-2018.

Poland’s state audit body NIK suggested last year that poor sanitary conditions at pig farms could be more important to the spread of ASF than infected wild boars roaming Polish woodlands.

Poland spent 203 million złoty (€47 million) fighting ASF in 2018, a 17-fold increase compared to 2014, according to the agriculture ministry.

The scale of the problem and its potential EU-wide ramifications are buying Warsaw more sympathy in Brussels. Unlike its fierce reaction over logging in Bialowieża, the European Commission is much more circumspect about Poland’s hunting plans.

Fighting ASF is a “priority for the Commission,” spokeswoman Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said Friday.

“Sanitary killing of wild boars is one measure,” she said. “It can be used to reduce the wild boar population provided it is done in the right place and in the right manner, and according to our information, this is what Poland is doing.”

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