In the beginning, there were pigs. Domestic breeds, such as Duroc, Landrace and Yorkshire have been staples of the Prairie Provinces for more than a century, and while plenty escaped their resident farms over the years, few survived their first Saskatchewan winter.
Then came European wild boar, a species imported gleefully throughout the 1980s to diversify Canada’s livestock sector. For meat, and for “shoot farms,” boars materialized in most Canadian provinces, but especially in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. When these escaped their resident farms, the result was a slow-moving catastrophe.
