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ARCHIVED - Barcelona activists want wild boars to be put on contraceptive pill
The population of wild boars in urban areas throughout Spain has skyrocketed in recent months
The Commission for the Protection of Animal Rights (CPDA) has urgently called on the City Council of Barcelona to employ humane means of controlling the wild boar population, which has exploded in recent months and led to the animals causing a nuisance in urban areas. The case was highlighted last week by Columbian singing sensation Shakira, who claimed that she and her son were attacked by two boars while taking a stroll through a Barcelona park.
The council currently hires a specialised company to cull the wild hog population, a practice which the activists have described as nothing less than “slaughter”. They have called on the regional government to instead control the boars by injecting the females with contraceptives to stop them breeding, a method that has been successfully used in parrots and pigeons in the past. The University of Barcelona is currently conducting a study on the effectiveness of contraception on wild boars and is obtaining excellent results, according to the CPDA.
The university has claimed that mass culling of a species actually “causes an alteration of the ecosystem and an increase in the population of wild boar pigs” and the experts have been arguing that hunting them is counterproductive and certainly not an effective method of control. In the same way that urban cat colonies were reduced by sterilisation and contraceptives were added to bird feed to control pigeons, the university believes the initiative will be a cost-effective and successful means of reducing the number of wild boars roaming in towns, as well as ensuring that the government adheres to is obligation to employ ethical systems wherever possible.
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