Italy has said it will send soldiers across the country to hunt wild boar in an offensive intended to protect its €8.2bn prosciutto and sausage industry from swine fever.
The year-long deployment of 177 soldiers is part of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s campaign to reduce Italy’s wild boar population by up to 80 per cent in five years in a bid to prevent the spread of African swine fever.
An estimated 1mn-1.5mn wild boars roam freely through Italy, where they have long been seen as a public nuisance, munching on the rubbish that accumulates on the peripheries of big cities such as Rome and rampaging though farmers’ fields. They are estimated to have caused about €120mn of damage in rural areas from 2015 to 2021, and are also blamed for causing numerous car accidents.