Wild fake news

I am very impressed with how everyone loved wild boar! From few days almost everyone is talking about wild boars. Journalists, radio actors, actors, even Katarzyna Nosowska from the Polish band HEY wrote a short song about wild boars. Many would gladly take the boar on his couch, feed and cuddle. I think it is safe to say – we are all wild boars in these days. Scroll down to the next part.

I must admit that I do not know exactly at what moment and from what source information about hunting 200,000 boars in the next two months has reached us. This news spread like a storm electrifying our society. People were shocked by numbers and the fact that the information provided sought passwords regarding the shooting of sows, which in the coming months will be at the stage of birth of the offspring. This news is obviously fake.

Older hunters remember that formerly the wild boars sows had their protection period, which begins on January 15th. Also for the same reason years ago driven hunting with dogs took place until 15 January. These restrictions were intended to allow sows wild boars to bring up their offspring calmly. Today, sows do not have a protection period. We can not hunt for a whole year, but we do not shoot at all in accordance with the ethics of the sows at this time.

Numbers are also manipulations – someone simply summed up the hunting in the 2018/2019 season which is 185,000, along with the sanitary hunting of 29,848 boars, which gave him over 200,000. This fake news was beautifully sold on the wave of hate. However, this person did not check data from previous years:

2014/2015 – 260 thousand wild boars 2015/2016 – 310 thousand wild boars 2016/2017 – 282 thousand wild boars 2017/2018 – 308 thousand wild boars

The season 2018/2019 has much smaller acquisition and, what is interesting, the biggest media buzz.

A shocked society forgets that a hunter is a kind of farmer who, unlike a farmer, operates on a completely larger area, not blocked by any walls, cages, piggies or stalls. The game is free, it is not fattened and the hunter controls its population. In terms of hunting, we do not differ from a farmer who cares for his herd to turn the animal into food once in a while. Each hunted pheasant, each duck, each roe deer, wild boar, deer or elk is then consumed by the hunter or delivered to the farm, from where it goes to tables throughout Europe. I do not know a hunter who would throw away the hunted venison and waste it. I know, however, a lot of people who throw beef, pork or poultry, and next going to the shop for a new piece of meat. Scroll down to the next part.

All the confusion caused by boars and shooting sows has also a positive aspect. Well, at last the specialists – hunters, came up to the discussion. For a brief moment, we have a chance to explain to the public what hunting, hunting ethics really is, and why no hunter consciously pulls the trigger to the breeding sow.

Many older hunters remember very well times when there were practically no boars. They also remember how much work they cost to rebuild the population of this animal. These people can not imagine a situation when they would be deliberately pulling the trigger to the guiding dungeon. They just do not get it in their heads and talk about it loudly, and the voice is finally heard.

It’s good that they finally started to listen to us and maybe people will start to notice that hunting is more than just shooting animals. Perhaps they have already noticed that hunters have their own morality, their own ethics, and are not fanatical murderers but real friend of the nature.

What worries me, is that on the wave of fake news many hunters fell into the trap of pseudo ecologists sharing the graphics they created, memes, signing various strange petitions.

Let’s check several times what we share, what we sign, who and what we talk about, because in a moment we may find ourselves blocking our own hunts. Please remember that our hunting plans are not just a boar.

Happy Hunting!