I WOULD like to respond to the hunter who believes that lethal pressure keeps boar in the woodland. 

How can this work when the Forestry Commission have been putting lethal pressure on the boar in the woodland for years resulting in the boar coming into the villages?

Friends of the Boar’s solution is to leave the boar in the core area of the Forest alone.

Residents should be well aware by now that the boar seemingly "disappear" in the summer months, not even appearing for a roadside dig. 

The summer is when the boar population is at its maximum, when the piglets are growing.  Yet, they keep themselves to themselves in the core area and leave the villages untouched.

They will regulate their population according to density of numbers, which according to scientists is three to four boar per square kilometre. 

Wild boar are not regulated by predators or hunting. 

This is why all the countries that hunt boar do not succeed in cotrolling numbers but may indeed exacerbate the numbers through compensatory breeding.

Leaving boar alone in the core area relaxes the boar, and the natural behaviour will return.

Each spring when litters of six piglets are born, their safe environmnet will lead to less stress, less abandonment of piglets, and hence less disease and less tameness among the animals.

The surviving piglets, which is usually 30 per cent (or two per sow) inflates the population, albeit upon tiny trotters. 

When they grow larger they start competing for the food and shelter and the urge to leave mounts, until in autumn and winter, they do. 

Each year sees about 50 to 70 boar attempting to leave the Forest.

These boar will move into the wider countryside and onto farmland, where of course they are probably not wanted. 

What needs to happen, therefore, is the use of marksmen here to remove the annual exodus of boar both from entering the countryside and also from re-entering the Forest.

This is not as difficult as it sounds because the boar often use the same exit points each year. 

Shooting too close to the exit points may of course scare them back into the woodland, so a good deal of thought needs to be done as to where to site the highseats. 

Landowners should be encouraged to take part and maybe they will profit by selling the rights to shoot.

What must not be done, however – and what goes on now – is for landowners to bait the boar out of the Forest to shoot. 

This has led to surviving boar fleeing into places like Lydney.

Culled animals should be sold to meat dealers with profits being donated to a social fund.

This is commonplace in Europe whereby victims of boar damage may be compensated.

After researching these animals for 10 years, gaining direct experience of boar habits and movements, we feel this is the only solution. 

To continue hunting in the Forest as the means of population control is a big mistake.

Boar simply breed to compensate losses as has occured in Germany.

The method outlined above is simpy the only way forward if we wish to keep the boar, keep them healthy, and keep them away from people and villages.

– Friends of the Boar.