We have two walls that have holes in them, made by wild boar… so the picture below, is not entirely unrelated to what’s going on in the garden. I was coming home last night from an evening out with friends and drove up the road below ours when a huge wild boar trotted across the road in front of me.

I have seen a family of boar near here before, but not as close as this. He seemed in a hurry to get away from my lights, so disappeared off into the field.

At the end of the road, there are communal bins (we don’t have refuse pick-up from our houses, we all take our ‘rubbish’ to the nearest ‘basura’, and it gets collected from there.

I realised that there were five more, rooting around the bins. These were smaller, but as the picture shows, small is relative! I stayed back, but four ran off, whilst this fellow stayed because whatever he’d found was more interesting than me.

I wonder what they found in the bins? They are omnivorous, and away from the bins, would most likely be eating grubs, grass, insects, bird eggs, small mammals, etc. Knowing that often bags of rubbish get put next to, rather than in, the bins, it’s more likely they found leftover scraps of ‘human’ food.

I was really excited to see the boar, but at the same time, recognise that near the bins, on the outskirts of a village, is probably not the ideal place to encourage them to be.

There are numerous videos of wild boar in urban and highly populated areas, like this one where the police were attempting to round up a boar on a beach.

This close-to-home event has caused me to think deeply about biodiversity and the imbalance that is happening because of the impact we are having on our environment.

Eating our waste is probably not great for the boar. Like most animals (including humans!), boar sometimes attack if they feel threatened or are protecting their young so there’s the added worry about safety when living in close quarters.

In certain areas of Spain, the boar population is kept in balance by the Iberian Wolf, and this, in turn, is keeping the baor from eating the eggs of endangered birds. The biodiversity ‘system’ is a delicate balance that is being disturbed by us humans wherever we look.

The local hunters would, I’m sure, say that they are providing a much-needed service by taking out the boar (a specialty in many restaurants here), but how true is it? For a system to be balanced and functioning well, we need to act holistically, because all our actions impact on all other parts of the system.

Perhaps we could start by drastically reducing or eliminating our waste, so the boar are not attracted to the areas we live in? Is there a solution where we all have fair shares of space and resources?

I’m sure I will be revisiting this topic again!