University of Saskatchewan researchers have recently updated their mapping system for locating wild pigs in the province.

Associate professor of agriculture and bioresources Ryan Brook is leading his team on the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project that started 11 years ago.

Brook said from Meadow Lake to Melfort is the area that is most dense with wild pigs in the province. There are also pockets of feral pigs in the Battlefords region and in other parts of Saskatchewan.

“Wild pigs are widespread in the Battlefords area. To the North, there is a high concentration of them there that is spreading quite rapidly as well,” he said.

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The large majority of wild pigs in Canada are in the three Prairie provinces, with Saskatchewan seeing 53 per cent of all of our occurrences.

“We are the hot spot in Canada by far,” Brook said.

To view the latest mappings online, people can download Google Earth on their computers, then apply any one of the layers available on the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project Facebook Page to see what the overall distribution of wild pigs looks like for any location, including rural municipalities.

“It gives you the ability to see what is going on on the ground,” Brook said.

As part of his team’s research work in the project, they used trail cameras, GPS trackers and conducted many interviews of first-person sightings to gather information.

“We have many thousands of photos, past 40,000, in our database,” Brook said.

The project has been funded largely by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some funding was also received from the Saskatchewan Fish and Wildlife Development Fund, as well as the University of Saskatchewan.

Brook reports wild pigs have been increasing in population “exponentially” in the province.

As of Friday, he said he has 53,841 locations in his wild pig occurrence database for Canada since the project started, of which 53 per cent are in Saskatchewan.

“The exponential growth is typical in wild pigs and has been greatly supported by the crossing of imported European Wild Boar with domestic pigs that have larger body size, larger litter size, larger young,” Brook said. “Wild pigs in Saskatchewan have six young per litter, and multiple litters per year.”

The animals are quite destructive to crop land, can carry disease, and can be a threat to livestock and people as well.

“The largest [wild pig] animal we have handled in our program was 638 pounds. So these things can be very large,” Brook said. “It’s rarely that big, but many times we have seen wild pigs that are 400 pounds or larger. They have absolutely razor-sharp tusks, and they can be aggressive. Usually they avoid people.“

The goal of the project is not just to track them, but to help control their numbers.

About two years ago a Rural Municipality of Meadow Lake area business owner was concerned after a wild boar sighting near her establishment. Michelle Burnard, who owns Moose Country Service, told battlefordsNOW Friday a customer saw two wild boars on Turtle Lake Road that fall, not far from her business. But Burnard she is not aware of any recent sightings near her business since then.

Saskatchewan Crop Insurance has a program in place, called the Feral Wild Boar Control Program, to manage numbers. People are asked to contact their local crop insurance office to report any sightings.

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angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsNOW