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Saskatchewan Amends Regulations to Help Address Feral Wild Boars

Saskatchewan's Minister of Agriculture says amendments to the province's Wildlife Regulations and Stray Animals Regulations will make it easier to deal with free ranging wild boar while allowing legitimate wild boar producers to continue to operate. [Source: Farmscape.ca, July 4, 2016]

Free-ranging wild boar have been reported in more than 60 rural municipalities across southern Saskatchewan. In response, the province has amended the Wildlife Regulations and the Stray Animals Regulations to clarify the status and hunting requirements for feral wild boar. Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister Lyle Stewart says, while wild boar farming remains a legitimate enterprise, free ranging wild boar are becoming a nuisance.

Clip-Lyle Stewart-Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister:

"Under the Stray Animals Regulations we're going to continue to allow wild boar inside fences to be farmed but no longer consider escaped wild boar to be considered strays with potential owners and also improve the minimum requirements for a lawful fence to contain wild boar. The Environment Ministry is moving in concert with us and allowing free ranging wild boar to be hunted year round without licensing.

Free ranging wild boar pose a danger to native wildlife and wildlife habitat. They can also cause crop, forage, pasture losses and damage and there's potential for them to pass diseases on to domestic livestock. We think a lot of it came about by inadequate fencing for wild boars and a number of escapes, mostly I think early in the earlier days of wild boar farming in the 1990s I would say, when most of the experimentation with different ways of fencing them in took place. Generally we think the producers that are still in the business have adequate fencing but we're going to make sure that everybody is up to a minimum standard at least."

Stewart says farms that don't meet those minimum criteria will have to come up to those standards to maintain permitting but he's confident they can get there without too much difficulty.