In the wee hours of an October morning, dozens of dogs chased the hulking figure of an animal scrambling through a forest in northwestern China as a thermal drone whizzed overhead.
“The dogs caught it! Just stab it! Stab it!” a drone operator shouted into his walkie-talkie to the hunter, in a video report by a state-linked news outlet.
The hunter rushed to the spot where the dogs had cornered the 125-kilogram beast, and thrust his spear into it, killing the animal and securing a reward of 2,400 yuan ($330).
He works with one of six “bounty hunting” teams hired by Xiji county in China’s northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region this fall.
Their prey? Wild boars.
In recent years, China has authorized teams of bounty hunters to kill wild boars as part of a pilot program to control a pest that’s wreaking havoc on crops and causing accidents, injuries, and even fatalities. In February, the program was expanded to a nationwide cull.
The hunters are not allowed to use firearms or poison, but the cull has surprised the public in a country where wildlife protection is tightly regulated.
Animal protection groups have criticized the measure as experts debate whether the rise in wild boar attacks justifies killing large numbers of animals, and if hunting is the right solution to mitigate human-wildlife conflict in the world’s second most populous country.
Wild boar attacks
China’s problem with wild boars dates back over two decades, when people hunted so many of the animals to eat that they became extinct in some areas, according to the state broadcaster CGTN.
In response, the government added them to a national protection list in 2000, allowing licensed hunting only in areas where there were too many boars.
Over time, almost free from natural predators, the animal’s population surged from some 10,000 to about 2 million, and so did reports of wild boar attacks.
Boars caused damage to property or people in all but eight of China’s 34 provincial-level regions, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA) said last January.
In Xiji county, where six official bounty hunting teams killed 300 wild boars this fall, the animals inflicted economic losses of over 2 million yuan ($276,200) in 2023 alone, mainly through tearing up farmland, a local official told The Paper, a state-run newspaper.
People have also lost their lives.
In December 2023, a 51-year-old villager from central Hubei province died from blood loss after being bitten by a wild boar, The Paper reported. Three years earlier, a village official suffered a similar fatal boar attack in southwestern Sichuan province, according to the newspaper.
Boars have also been seen in urban areas more frequently as their numbers rise and habitat shrinks from China’s rapid urbanization.
A wild boar burst into the lobby of a four-star hotel in Nanjing in late October, struggling to escape on the slick floor before security captured it, according to state media reports.
Two days earlier, another boar, weighing 80 kilograms, ran amok through a downtown street in eastern Hangzhou, overturning vehicles and rampaging in a local shop.
Is “hunting” the right solution?
Wild boar hunting’s popularity plummeted after the species came under national protection, though some poachers still risked jail time to kill them for sale in wildlife markets.
But demand for boar meat slumped when Beijing imposed what it called an “unprecedentedly strict” ban on wildlife consumption in early 2020.
At the time, the coronavirus pandemic was spreading worldwide and many scientists linked it back to a food market in central China that sold wild meat.
One year after the consumption ban, reports of wild boar attacks exceeded 100 for the first time, according to a tally of human-boar conflicts from 2000 to 2021 published in Acta Geographica Sinica, a leading Chinese geographic journal.
As social and state media reports of wild boar attacks continued to mount, the central government removed the species from its national protection list in 2023, waiving the need for a license to hunt them.
While many welcomed the policy shift to control the pest, recent high-profile bounty hunting initiatives by local authorities have faced some pushback, igniting debate among experts about how the country should tackle this growing public menace.
“Aren’t we supposed to protect animals? Why are we back to hunting again?” said a user on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China.
An animal protection group active in fighting wildlife poaching for over a decade called the nationwide culling a “brutal farce,” on China’s X-like platform Weibo.
Officials have defended the policy. Sun Quanhui, a member of the Wild Boar Population Management Expert Group at China’s top forestry administration, told the state-run China Daily that hunting was the “only way” to manage the wild boar population, given the absence of natural predators.
And based on open data, he said, it was way too early to say the boars were “running rampant” in China.
He added that wild boar attacks are “precisely a fallout of humans disrupting the natural balance.”
“On one hand, we’ve driven their natural predators, like tigers, to the brink of extinction. On the other, while we’re becoming more aware of the need for conservation, many of our efforts are one-sided.”
Among those who agree on the need to curb the wild boar population, opinions vary on how to cull them and what to do with the carcasses.
Members of the state-backed expert group suggested hunters should be allowed to use guns to improve hunting efficiency, as reported by The Paper.
They also proposed changing China’s laws to allow people to consume “captured wild boars,” but only after a quarantine process to ensure the meat is safe to eat. However, the group didn’t provide further details on how this would work.
Both proposals have raised safety concerns among experts outside the group.
China’s top forestry authority said it was working to “optimize firearms and ammunition management” to “facilitate professional hunting,” according to the state-owned People’s Daily.
“Wild boar damage has become a disaster… which actually reflects a certain imbalance in the ecological environment,” the deputy head of the expert group told CCTV.
“Therefore, no matter what methods we use, we ultimately need to restore the flow and balance of the ecological chain to achieve true harmony between humans and nature.”