Learn from Japan's high tech boar captures: LegCo Secretariat

A “smart capture” technology is one of the wild boars control measures adopted in Japan that Hong Kong can learn from, said the Legislative Council Secretariat in a latest report. 

The research published on Thursday says each Japanese municipality is offered an annual subsidy of up to 3 million Japanese yen (about HK$203,400) for purchasing new and innovative technologies for pest and wildlife management. 

The gadgets included remote and automatic capture equipment, animal sensors, drones and monitoring systems, the report said. 

But killing the animal remains the most common measure taken to tackle nuisances caused by wild boars in many advanced places including the US, Germany, Singapore and Japan. 

Japan updated a policy regulating wild birds and beasts in December 2013, aiming to reduce the number of wild boars by 50 percent to 520,000 within 10 years. 

Apart from new technologies, the country also allows hunting and carries out targeted culling operations. It also makes scientific estimation of boar population and how many of them are culled a year.

The Japanese government also amended the law last September, expanding the ban on wildlife feeding to over four-fifths of areas in national parks. The law is scheduled to take effect in April, after which offenders will be fined up to 300,000 Japanese yen (about HK$20,340). 

The report added that the approaches appeared to have contained the growth of wild boars, whose number dropped by one-third to 800,000 between 2014 and 2019. 

The annual crop damage caused by wild boars also dropped 17 percent to 4.6 billion yen (about HK$312 million) during 2014 to 2020. Injury cases also dropped from 49 in 2016 to 38 in 2021, while three fatalities were reported over the past five years. 

In Kobe, where more active measure were adopted, injury cases even plummeted 86 percent in four years to just two cases in 2020. 

The report also offered the quick recap on Hong Kong's wild boar situation since the government decided to allow killing of animals which wander into city centers since November 2021. 

Sixty six boars were killed as of February this year. 

From 2019 to March 2021, 803 wild pigs had been captured and over three-quarters of them were relocated to the countryside far away from residential areas. One-quarter of the captured pigs were vaccinated or sterilized and nine-tenths of them did not get pregnant again. 

Citizens who feed the wild animals in banned areas like Kam Shan and Lion Rock country parks may face a fine of up to HK$10,000.