Machine guns versus Swedish boar.
Another crazy idea to get rid of boar.
Swedish property owners could soon ask the Swedish army to practice the use of machine guns on Swedish boar. A Swedish army Major and the property manager of a large estate sent a written proposal to 43 property owners suggesting that the Swedish army be allowed to take their machine guns into the forests and on agricultural lands to practice machine gunning. According to Major Jan-Olof Ohlsson this would achieve two things simultaneously:
Train Swedish soldiers in the use of machine guns and reduce the number of Swedish boar considerably.
And bring variety to the menu of Swedish army field kitchens, I would add.
Swedish property owners decide who and how game can be hunted on their property as long as hunters have a hunting license and are using proper equipment. The Swedish Secretary of Agriculture did not define whether machine guns are proper hunting equipment.
In the decade of 1980 Sweden had only very few boar left. Today their numbers have increased to an estimated 300,000 animals. Yet the number of Swedish boar are currently declining again because of increased hunting. Farmers complain about the damage done by Swedish boar to agricultural crops. The demand that boar be hunted more vigorously and with fewer restrictions.
The proposal to use machine guns on boar is reminiscent of a similar suggestion made in Germany. After boar stuck their noses too deeply into cultivated land, upset victims of boar raids on their gardens and orchards demanded that the German army roll out their heavy equipment and engage the boar in pitched battles.

This suggestion drew a great deal of ridicule. Readers of the California Hunting Post may remember the picture of a machine gun mounted on a battle tank. It is pointing down a forest lane purportedly waiting to gun down fleeing boar.

Suggestions of using the army against wild boar, whether Swedish or German or boar of any other nation for that matter, are symptomatic of the fear of boar. The animal is dreaded because injured or cornered boar are known to attack humans. And who has not heard of a sow vigorously defending her piglets against any perceived thread?
This fear is more imagined than real in most cases. Boar and wild pigs flee upon the first indication of human presence. Most hunters and hikers have seen a boar only as a small, fleeting shadow flitting across an opening in the forest or a road.
Most hikers and visitors to the great outdoors have therefore never actually noticed a boar. They will most likely will never sight one.
Is it therefore surprising that Swedes fear Swedish boar more than wolves?
At least this is what the agriculture department of the University of Uppsala, Sweden, found in a recent study. They attribute this uneasiness with the significant increase in Swedish boar populations.
The war against boar and wild pigs in Sweden and in other European countries is fueled mainly by the damage the animals do to agricultural fields and products. Thus farmers are the driving force in the battle against boar. There is no orchestrated campaign against "non-native, invasive wild pigs" by extreme environmentalists and anti-hunting forces like here in the United States. Boar are native to Europe, the Middle and parts of the Far East.
In European countries hunters and their insufficient kill rates of boar are instead the main target of criticism. In the extreme this leads to insane proposals that cannot be taken seriously: Machine gun practice on living boar.
What about farm animals, livestock and humans that just so happen to get into the way of a scheduled machine gun practice?
Man should never trust crackpots, zealots and the lunatic fringe of environmentalists.
PJJ