Wild Boars and the Violence of Population Control
In a previous season of the Animal Highlight, Herre de Bondt explored the surprising interconnections between wild pigs and nuclear waste. He looked at the pigs in Chernobyl and Fukushima and offered a fascinating account of how the emptying out of those towns allowed wild animals to reclaim space. It was striking to consider that an environmental catastrophe, and a nuclear one at that, can, in some ways, actually result in a less violent situation for wild animals than the presence of humans.
Wild boars and their relationship to cities is increasingly in focus. These animals are highly adaptable and opportunistic, so as areas outside of cities shrink, they adapt, moving and finding food in urban environments. Unlike some other native Singaporean animals, boars are not always celebrated as urban residents. In Singapore, the native wild boar came to represent numerous urban fears about wildness and the city, and that fear condemns animals to violent regimes of control. In particular, the increasing acceptance of culling wildlife in Singapore undermines the celebrated vision of being “a city in nature.”
The Eurasian Wild Boar (Sus sufra) is the ancestor of today’s domesticated pigs, and the only wild pig species found in Singapore. Wild boars are Singapore’s largest terrestrial mammal, and they are native to the region. They play an important ecological role in spreading seeds throughout the forest which is also where they primarily forage. They can also be found foraging in sparser zones as well as in residential areas, which have become attractive sources of food.
Wild boars are very social animals. Sounders are matriarchal social groups composed of sows and their children, while adult males tend to live alone. Sounders are nomadic, moving frequently and making temporary dens by cutting into areas of thick vegetation and forming bowl-shaped sleeping areas. They also dig muddy wallows near their dens to help cool them off. Wild boars also communicate with each other through a complex language of grunts and snorts.
Wild Boar Migration to Singapore
While some small groups of boars may have been living on the offshore islands of Pulau Ubin and Pulau Tekong, the animals had largely disappeared from Singapore as a result of hunting. Wild boars reemergence on mainland Singapore is believed to have begun in the 1950s and was possibly a result of some pigs swimming there from Malaysia, just north of Singapore. The boars who arrived in mainland Singapore continued to establish themselves in small forested pockets further South. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the boars had successfully recolonized Singapore, meaning that (unlike with Hornbills) their reintroduction was not the result of an official government reintroduction program. By 2010, the boars had become a sustained population in the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, an interconnected network of parks at the center of the island that functions as the heart of Singapore’s wildlife corridors and water systems.
As the wild boars once again began to make a home for themselves in Singapore, conflict with humans emerged. In 2023, at least 19 wild boars in Singapore were trapped and killed by the National Parks Board, following an attack on two people. They were, to use a source’s words, “put down humanely.” To be fair, the injuries the two people faced were serious. In two separate attacks, a 34-year-old woman suffered multiple wounds and cuts on her right calf, buttock, and arm, and a 40-year-old man needed more than 20 stitches on his left leg. However, that there could be a conflict with two people and that 19 boars were killed seems grossly unjust and disproportionate. This is in marked contrast to how otters are perceived and speaks to some of the ways in which animals are hierarchized in urban imaginations.
Calls for Culling and Other Control Measures
The two main justifications used by officials for culling boars are public safety and ecological damage. Urgent calls for culling began back in 2012. Wild pigs were villainized for their potential to degrade soil and vegetation. Singapore has a precise population threshold it tries to maintain to categorize boars as good neighbours. Five to six pigs per square kilometer is considered a healthy population, whereas any more is thought to be a problem. These population dynamics mean that boars are not only killed when there is human-wildlife conflict, but that culling is a matter of course in official population-control measures.
Officials in Singapore have used some nonlethal alternatives to culling to control wild boar populations, though these raise their own questions of efficacy and ethics. Unlike the otters in the previous episode, who have been given some freedom to expand their territories (although now in 2026, even otters are being considered for population control measures), the movement and expansion of boars is tightly regulated. At the edges of Zhenghua Nature Park, part of the Central Catchment area, “cattle grids” (gratings with large gaps unsuitable for boars to walk across) are used to prevent them from leaving the area. This is an infrastructural disruption in the continuity of wildlife corridors and it is not completely clear how effective fencing and trapping will be in preventing human-wildlife conflict in the long term.
Another non-lethal method is the removal of palm plants from forests, a key wild boar food source. Oil palm plants contribute to wild boar population increases in places like Singapore and Malaysia. While food source mitigation within city centers, such as in hawker centers, is considered a commonsense measure to reduce conflict, removing palm plants from within the forests patches themselves, where boars are restricted to live within, is a solution that carries its own kind of injustice.
Since the calls for culling and population control in 2012, Singapore’s wild boar population is now considered “stable.” However, it is inconclusive whether that is due to the regimes of culling, as it is likely owed more to the removal of palm plants from forests. This gets even more complicated when the reported incidents by ACRES involving wild boars increased between 2020-2022, after the population was stabilized. One possible explanation is that new residential developments have brought more humans into proximity with forests. If this is the case, it highlights a troubling pattern: human development encroaches on nonhuman denizens’ spaces, conflict arises, and animals suffer the consequences in a human-dominated city.
African Swine Fever
Adding to the fear of wild pigs is the emergence of African Swine Fever. African swine fever was first spread through domesticated pigs during the colonial period in Kenya in 1910, and became a global issue by the 2000s. Colonial farmers and traders spread it ruthlessly, and after World War II, the intensification of meat consumption and animal farming worsened the problem further. Due to its highly contagious nature, it spread rapidly via ticks, wild pigs, and the global movement of domesticated livestock pigs.
For the pigs themselves, the disease is awful: it causes bleeding from the nose and rectum, high fever, skin reddening, weakness, and loss of appetite, before death occurs a few days after infection. The fear around African swine fever is less coming from empathy for the pigs who suffer from this disease, but the devastation it has caused to the global pork industry and economies related to it. Currently, there is no widely used vaccine or treatment. The complexity of biosecurity control measures and culling that livestock are subjected to during disease outbreaks is a topic that deserves an entire podcast series of its own to cover, and the Animal Turn's Biosecurity season is a great place to start.
It was only in 2023 when Singapore reported its first African Swine Fever case from a wild boar carcass. Singapore does not have a pork production in the country, and the fever cannot be given to humans. Yet, the threat is still considered significant and puts the presence of wild boars under further scrutiny.
Culling "problem" animals
Population control measures, especially lethal ones, carry many ethical and scientific complexities. The public is generally more comfortable with using lethal measures to curb "problem" invasive species than native species. Wild boars are native to Singapore, and despite having a balanced, stable population, they are still treated as a population problem. Media also plays a crucial role. Animals who attack tend to make the news and are sensationalized, whereas those with whom urbanites have long co-existed rarely do. Co-existence is typically not a newsworthy story, and sensational reporting of human-wildlife conflict has the potential to increase anthropocentric fears around urban animals.
We must remain critical of how we problematize animals, and especially of the actual efforts enacted to control population and movement of animals. 'Endless culling', in particular, is increasingly in the spotlight and is highly contentious in Singapore. It is often done in the name of public safety, yet it remains an incomplete solution if it fails to address the deeper causes of human–wildlife conflict and multispecies urban relations. It also overlooks the social and physical violence involved and the violation of animals’ right to life. If we are to take seriously the culturally celebrated idea in Singapore that animals are neighbors, we will need to take on the challenge of conflict mitigation at a broader, more systemic and cultural level. Which is why centering the animals' stories, the goal of the work at The Animal Highlight, can help to provide important and nuanced insights to this topic.
Of interest:
Rebecca Shen a landscape designer, artist, and animal activist. She is inspired by design to advance interspecies justice and imagine more anti-speciesist spaces. Rebecca graduated with a Master in Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 2023. There, she completed her design thesis, Sanctuary State: California’s Cowscape in Transition, which envisions the transformation of an 800-acre industrial cattle feedlot into a cow sanctuary in the San Joaquin Valley. Rebecca contributes as an assistant content creator for the show.
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