Farmscape for October 6, 2014

The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities says the public needs to be made more aware of the potential risks posed by feral wild boar.
The board of directors of the Saskatchewan Pork Development Board has identified gaining control of the province's feral wild boar population as a top priority issue.
David Marit, the president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, says SARM administers a wild boar fund established through the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture to fund a group in the Wawota, Moose Mountain, Moose Mountain park area to hunt wild boar.

Clip-David Marit-Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities:
They usually go in in teams.
They spot them by plane and then they go in with teams and do the hunt that way and that fund helps cover the costs of those folks doing that job for us.
That is about the only thing we have right now in the province of Saskatchewan and we're trying to do more.
I think there's more we can do in the education side and I think that's going to be important because there is still wild boar being ranched or being farmed in Saskatchewan on wild boar farms.
We've had resolutions with concerns about that but we have met with their organization and they're good people.
They're making a good living at it but our concern there is the ones that are in the wild and the ones that have the potential for more in the wild.
I think it's an education process that we really have to do and work with to make sure that the public know what these animals can do and if we're going to hunt them just what they have to do to do that as well.

Marit says because Saskatchewan is such a huge province and so sparsely populated you could have a huge increase in the population of wild boar doing a lot of damage and not know they are there.
He says we don't want to see anything like what has happened in other jurisdictions such as Texas where feral wild boar have become uncontrollable.
For Farmscaspe.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council