Authorities euthanised over 700 wild boars last year as population halves since catch-and-kill policy reinstated

Hong Kong authorities euthanised over 700 wild boars last year, with the population halving since the government reinstated a capture-and-kill programme in late 2021, official figures have shown.

A wild boar in Hong Kong. Photo: Kelly Ho/HKFP.

According to a Legislative Council (LegCo) document issued on Monday, boar populations have plunged since November 2021, when the government reinstated culling over a sterilisation programme that was “far from catching up” with the rate at which boars were breeding.

“Wild pigs inhabit Hong Kong’s countryside widely. Because they may attack people when frightened, damage farmland and spread a range of zoonotic diseases, their management has long been a major task for the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD),” the document read.

The sterilisation policy, dubbed the Capture and Contraception/Relocation Programme (CCRP), ran from 2017 to 2021. During that period, 1,198 boars were captured, 458 of which were given contraceptive vaccines or surgically sterilised, while 885 were relocated.

Population halved

According to AFCD figures, the estimated boar population has halved from 2,000 in 2021, when the euthanasia policy was reinstated, to 990 last year. In 2021, 64 boars were “humanely dispatched,” with that figure rising to 723 last year.

“The expanded use of this lethal measure appears to have driven down the recent population of wild pigs,” the LegCo research office said. However, it also noted that some animal welfare groups advocate for greater reliance on preventive habitat management policies such as fences and buffer areas rather than hunting operations.

A graph showing number of capture operations and boars euthanised from 2020 to 2025. Photo: Screenshot via LegCo research office.

The decision in 2021 came under fire from 13 animal rights groups, which drafted a petition to urge the AFCD to withdraw the policy, calling it “extremely unreasonable.”

Boar-culling operations were not mentioned in the Ombudsman’s animal cruelty report in April.

After reverting to the capture-and-kill policy, nuisance reports fell by a little over a fifth from a 2021 peak to around 1,100 in each of the following years, while reports of human injuries plunged from 36 to just four in 2025, “reversing the steep rise seen over 2020 to 2022.”

The AFCD also spent an annual average of HK$20.6 million over the past six years on boar management, the research office said.

Last year, boar nuisance reports were most common in Sai Kung, Tai Po, and Southern district. Such reports are more common in urban areas close to country parks, according to the AFCD. Since 2021, the number of reports recorded in the six districts with the most cases fell by about a quarter to 773 cases last year.