Piggies in the middle of German capital

Berlin's teeming ethnic mix of Germans, Poles, Czechs, Gypsies, Hungarians, Romanians, and Russians is being overtaken by swarms of hungry thieves striking fear into the hearts of suburbanites and city dwellers alike.

Now when the bell rings at lunch time for children in the upmarket Grunewald area of town the new residents are often at the front of the queue looking for their first square meal of the day. A population explosion of bristling wild boars sparked by a long, hot summer is driving the tuskers from their natural woodland habitats into the parks, gardens, graveyards and playgrounds of the new capital.

Flowerbeds are being ravaged by the snorting, snuffling "wildschweine". Graveyards, too, are being desecrated as they smash monuments and topple over headstones in their quest for mice and worms. Even the hallowed Olympic Stadium, home to league champions Hertha BSC, on some mornings looks more like a ploughed field than a football pitch as a consequence of the nocturnal visits of the uninvited guests. The unwelcome arrival of the pigs has triggered fear and anger in a population used to seeing its wildlife safely behind the bars of the famed Tiergarten.

Recently, outraged vet Martina-Rauch-Ernst, 38, wrote to local government officials saying: "I do not live in Africa where I must live with wild animals but in the heart of a modern capital. This morning I was unable to get to my car due to a family of pigs surrounding it. Time has come for action."

Klaus Eichstaedt, 59-year old mayor of the Zehlendorf district of Berlin, has declared war on the boars. "I call on the police and hunters to band together to drive the wild pigs from the city. Clapping, whistling and screaming to try to frighten them away does no good whatsoever. These boars only recognise the threat of real hunters."

In Grunewald, the city's most exclusive residential area with the most woodland, the pigs have proved themselves as clever as their fictional counterparts in Animal Farm. Knowing that schoolchildren get fed from Monday to Friday at noon they swarm into school playing fields begging for tidbits as frightened staff do their best to shoo them away - without success.

But while hunting would provide the quickest solution to Berlin's boom in boars, it's against the law. Wild pigs are protected and only the police may open fire on them, and only then when they think someone's life is in danger.

And dangerous they are. The pigs have gored several domestic pets with their fearsome tusks, killing three. Last week an Alsatian called Baron, who bravely tried to protect his mistress from a wild sow, was seriously injured, needing an emergency operation to save a leg. Families who moved from the crime-wracked city centre neighbourhoods to what they thought were safer suburbs can no longer let their children play alone in parks and gardens. Yuppies heading off to the office in their BMWs and Mercedes now find themselves surrounded in the morning by groups of the begging, ravenous beasts.

The fearlessness of the pigs is fuelled by misguided old ladies. Once content to feed park pigeons with bags of breadcrumbs they embolden the wild porkers by throwing them great bags of food, despite risking fines of #3000. By some estimates there are as many as 20,000 wild pigs encroaching on city life.

Yet the old ladies are not alone in thinking the pigs are cute. Recently animal rights activists formed a human chain around a wild pig that was captured by a forester and was about to be turned into crackling. The 120 kilo pig lived to roam another day.

The problem facing environmentalists in tackling the pigs is that, instead of following the rhythm of nature, they have now adopted the ways of city life, no longer frightened by the noise of trains, planes, cars and people.

Before the summer, authorities hope to come up with a strategy to defeat the boars. Until they do their bacon is as safe as it ever was.

Copyright 2000
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