80kg wild boar shot dead in Yano
An 80kg wild boar was shot dead in Yano-nishi in Aki-ku in the early hours of Friday November 8 after charging around the neighborhood, injuring 2 people and several vehicles.
The first report of the 1.2m long male boar’s rampage was just after 8:00 pm when it pushed its way into a beauty salon in Kaita. The boar left without paying and headed south down Route 31, knocking a 23-year-old guy off his bicycle on its way.
Then at around 8:25 the boar is reported to have leapt the 1.4m from the train tracks onto a platform at Yano Station and injured the leg of a 55-year old woman. The Mainichi also reports that at one point when cornered by police it butted two police cars before escaping as well as having a go at a tanker truck. Both the woman on the train platform and the cyclist are reported to have suffered karui kega or light injuries. After a string of calls from members of the public, the boar was tracked to some open ground in a residential area about 800m from Yano Station.
Kaita chief of police gave the order to shoot the boar. He is quoted in the Chugoku Shinbun as saying that the injured state of the boar increased the danger of the encounter and it was too big to use a net. He added that there was a chance it would break glass and get into the residential area – which makes it sound like it was in some kind of greenhouse, though this is unclear from the newspaper and TV reports. The boar finally met its end just after midnight at the hands of the Hiroshima Hunting Club.
Sightings of wild boar in the streets are increasing and are particularly prevalent at this time of year when they leave the mountains in search of food. Usually the boar are relatively timid, however, as this case shows, they can be large and feisty. Hiroshima police advise against patronising ground floor beauty salons in the suburbs.
Sources (be quick, these links have less chance of survival than a rogue boar 🙂
