1. Introduction
Wildlife holds significant value to mankind, comprising ecological, economic, scientific, and spiritual dimensions [
1]. However, simultaneously, wildlife may cause damage to human properties and incomes. Any species causing economic losses is usually referred to as a pest animal. This undesirable feature of wildlife is the basic element of the hostile confrontation between humans and wildlife—known as human–wildlife conflicts (HWCs) [
2]. HWCs mostly occur in rural areas and are primarily manifested in agricultural areas [
3]. A large human population depends on the agricultural areas in developing parts of the world, such as those in African and Asian countries. The populations that exclusively rely on agriculture as their main source of income may lose up to 10–15%, or even more, of their total agricultural output to wildlife [
4,
5]. Some farmers even face periods of hunger because they produce only enough food to bridge the period until the next harvest [
3]. For these communities, wild animals are vermin, resulting in these communities’ generally negative attitudes towards wildlife, thus leading to a decreased cooperation between the agro-pastoral communities and wildlife services.
Pakistan is an agricultural country, accounting for 22.04% of Pakistan’s gross domestic product (GDP) and providing 35.9% of its employment [
6,
7,
8]. In Pakistan, almost 62% of the population is rural—directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. Due to Pakistan’s rich biodiversity, several wildlife species are causing damage to agricultural commodities, including crops and livestock [
9]. Subsequently, such happenings are typically answered with significant retributory wildlife killings [
2,
10].
The wild boar (
Sus scrofa) is a broadly spread ungulate species with remarkable reproductive rates and adaptability [
11]. Wild boars are usually involved in causing damage to crops and properties, for which they are referred to as a pest species [
12]. Being omnivorous, more than 400 plant species have been identified in its diet, which includes more than 40 agricultural crop plants [
13]. As a general image of the agricultural demolition resulting from wild boars, injury events mostly occur in agricultural fields, orchards, forests and pastures, and nurseries [
14]. The most alarming aspect of the damage caused by wild boars is the destruction of crops at all stages, from seedlings to mature crops [
15]. The exponential increase in wild boars’ numbers and corresponding crop damage caused by them possibly adds much to farmers’ food losses, and this is one of the primary reasons for HWCs [
12]. Moreover, in addition to crop damage, wild boars may cause a hostile attitude in the public towards wildlife, in general [
2].
In recent years, due to the enormous harmful effects attributed to the wild boar, scientists and wildlife managers have been probing to find effective stoppage and mitigation strategies [
16]. Yet, determining the nature of losses and their subsequent economic impacts on the affected rural communities is of the utmost importance. Therefore, the current study was designed to investigate the patterns of crop damages and monetary losses caused by the wild boar in some rural areas of north-western Pakistan and to suggest control measures.
4. Discussion
In the current study, we estimated the financial damages caused by the wild boar in two districts of north-western Pakistan. The results showed that the wild boar is a very common species in the area, with significant numbers, as evidenced by the total annual counts (13,141 per year) reported by the respondents. In Pakistan, the wild boar is hunted neither for meat nor for trophies because of strict religious proscriptions [
2]. In addition, the number of apex predators in our study areas is very limited [
2,
17]. We believe that the reasons mentioned above are contributing to the rapid increase in the wild boar population in the area, and thus compromising the economies of the poor communities.
Wild boars, having large bodies and being highly dependent on plants as a chief component of their opportunistic diet, have great tendencies to trample and consume crops [
18]. In addition, when digging and rooting for invertebrate prey and underground plant parts, wild boars cause substantial damage to orchards [
18]. The major crops grown in our study area included maize, wheat, different types of vegetables, sugarcane, and fruits. Of all the crops damaged by wild boars, maize had the highest percentage (40.24%), followed by wheat (24.95%), vegetables (22.65%), and sugarcane (6.29%). Overall, these results are in line with those from other studies conducted in Pakistan and across the world, revealing that maize is always a top priority plant for wild boars, followed by wheat [
2,
14,
19,
20,
21,
22]. Wild boars are believed to consume fresh maize as their staple food, even if it is not displaced by mast [
18].
The crop damage-based PCA results revealed that the crop damage was highly influenced by the crop varieties and the winter and spring seasons. We assumed that this trend was because of: (1) the most favorable crops (maize) for wild boars, coupled with high-energy yielding crops such as sugarcane, and, (2) being readily available in the study area in the early winter. In addition, in both of the aforementioned seasons, there is a depletion in the natural food resources in the wild [
23], thus massively attracting wild boars towards agricultural lands. Likewise, we believe that in spring, a wide variety of vegetables and fruits are available on farms, thus adding greatly to the crop damage perpetrated by wild boars [
2]. These results are supported by the findings from Laurent et al. [
18], where the relative availability of different food types strikingly determined the overall diet breadth of the wild boar in any instance. Similarly, the results obtained from the orchard damage-based PCA revealed that the type of damage and the winter season were the most influential factors. We believe that this pattern is due to the high consumption of carbohydrate-rich crops (maize and sugarcane) by the wild boar in the winter, which increases the need for animal proteins [
24]. Such requirements lead to the uprooting of saplings and digging up roots in orchards in search of invertebrate prey, leading to substantial economic losses [
19]. Several aspects of the wild boar’s ecology make them particularly damaging to crops. For example, they raid crops more frequently during the flowering and fruiting seasons. They would continue to raid the same field until they destroyed all its crops [
25], thus preventing any chance of replanting the crops and recovering the loss. Further, they do not shy away from forest edges [
26,
27], providing easy access to farmlands in the human settlements near protected areas. In our study area, most of the agricultural fields were fenceless or surrounded by traditional thorny boma fences, which did not seem to be successful in controlling wild boar infiltration. Electric fencing or net wires are less effective at limiting access for the wild boar than conventional methods, such as scaring devices operated by guards [
25,
28].
Moreover, given the wild boar’s ability to adapt to deterrents over time, using combinations of different methods that shift over time may be necessary [
25]. Therefore, there is a need to move towards more advanced fences and strategies to deter wild boars. Finally, regulated hunting must be considered as the wild boar population grows and their habituation to existing deterrents improves [
19,
29]. Moreover, the introduction of apex predators (wolves and the common leopard) can be very promising in controlling wild boar populations, as evidenced by an example where wolves managed the unchecked populations of elk (
Cervus canadensis) in Yellow Stone National Park, USA [
30,
31,
32].
According to the Household Integrated Economic Survey of Pakistan (HIES 2018–19), the average annual income of rural households in KP province is USD 2580 (
https://www.pbs.gov.pk/, accessed on 26 October 2021), where crop and orchard losses constitute 9.46% of their annual income. The reported figure of 9.46% in our study is slightly higher than the economic losses caused by wild boars in Nepal, i.e., 9% [
33]. A recent study by Khattak et al. [
2] revealed that wild boars caused four times more crop damage than porcupines (
Hystrix indica). Such damages may seem unimportant at state levels; however, given the very low incomes and prevailing poverty in agro-pastoral communities, such losses are substantial to farming households [
2]. The economic losses caused by the wild boar are one of the main reasons for the communities’ hostile attitudes towards wildlife, in general.
For designing robust protection and management strategies and enabling improved human–wildlife co-existence, it is very important to understand the attitudes of locals towards the wildlife of an area [
34]. The results revealed that in our study area, most locals (96.43%) had negative attitudes towards the wild boar, wishing for its complete elimination from the area. The GLM model revealed that respondents’ attitudes were significantly influenced by four factors: wild boars seen, wild boar numbers, agricultural land owned, and household size (
Table 9,
Figure 4). It is obvious that the species sightings are directly proportional to their numbers and statuses (common, rare, or absent). Our results showed that the huge numbers of wild boars and wild boars being a common species in the study area were the main reasons for frequent sightings by the locals. It is supposed that the recurrent sightings of wildlife species typically adversely turned the locals’ attitudes, causing a lack of acceptance of wildlife [
2], especially if the species were involved in causing significant economic losses. However, the respondents with more agricultural land (≥5 Kanals) showed soft negative attitudes towards the wild boar as compared to the respondents with less agricultural land (<5 kanals) whose attitudes were hard negatives (
Figure 4). We attribute this trend to the low agricultural outputs per Kanal relative to the crops and orchard damages caused by the wild boar [
2,
9,
23]. Similarly, the families with larger household sizes (≥7) showed much more negative attitudes towards wild boars as compared to those with smaller household sizes (<7) (
Figure 4). These results suggest that the economic losses caused by the wild boars are compromising the economic conditions of low-income families, such that it becomes more difficult for them to meet life’s daily needs, especially in larger households. We believe that the low income levels and the average household sizes (8.6) in our study area (
https://www.pbs.gov.pk/, accessed on 26 October 2021) support our findings.