The ferocious wild creatures causing chaos in Europe’s cities

As the last light of a sticky autumn afternoon ebbs towards darkness, Carles Conejero counts his syringes. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,’ he whispers to himself, tapping a grubby index finger on each as he goes. ‘Good, yes, that’s good.’ 

We are in a quiet residential street in the west of Barcelona. One side is lined by chic gated properties: the other by rough, unlit shrubland. A few meters away, three tanned, unshaven locals loiter with intent next to a white van. They are all wearing faded T-shirts and denim shorts. One carries a large stick; another an iPad; the third the air of a man who could do with a prop.
Conejero, a wiry 32-year-old veterinarian from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) with a buzzcut, nose ring and owlish glasses, flicks on a head torch and begins filling each syringe with a potent tranquilizer solution before lining them up on the tailgate of his Nissan Navara.

How many will that take down, I ask?
‘I prefer to think of it in terms of weight,’ he replies, ‘and this will kill about 160kg.’
As Conejero fumbles with a bunch of keys the size of a bridal bouquet, Mamba, his adoringly biddable mongrel, leaps from a window to join us. There is a large tusk among the key rings. Is that...?
‘Sí!’ he says, before we join the waiting three amigos. In near-synchronicity, all four men light cigarettes and stare at the iPad. One turns it around to show me. On it, a night-vision camera reveals that a family of four wild boar, the scourge of metropolitan areas all over mainland Europe, are barely 15 meters away.
In the camera’s ghoulish shades of black and green, we watch as the sounder – one large adult female and three piglets – snuffle in the shrubs and into a large rectangular area underneath a net. They do not know this is their last snuffle.
With an unspoken agreement that It Is Time, cigarettes are flicked away. Glances are shared; loins girded. Suddenly a thud, followed by an almighty choir of squeals. And then we run.
In last couple of years, through little fault of their own, boar have become an utter societal menace. Permanent resident on the frequently updated Global Invasive Species Database’s ‘100 Worst’ list, they have been steadily mincing around the forests of Europe for millennia, breeding enthusiastically, bothering their domesticated porcine kin, and being hunted and eaten by humans with zeal. Since the 1980s, though, their numbers have swollen in connection with two other rises: the proportion of people living in cities, and the average temperature.
Boar will dine on anything – including one another, if they absolutely must – and can adapt to almost any reasonable environment. Together with their swift reproductive cycle (three months, three weeks and three days, and one or two litters of four to six piglets a year) and near indestructibility, these traits make them ideal survivors, but as the line between the city and countryside blurs, they’ve not needed any superpowers in order to thrive.

The ferocious wild creatures causing chaos in Europe’s cities