Description of the breed
The wild boar is a close relative of the domestic pig, but differs in some characteristics. The boar has long legs and thick fur. The head is wedge-shaped with a short neck. On the muzzle there is a cartilaginous patch that serves the animal for digging the ground and moving stones.
The jaws of cleavers are equipped with large fangs (up to 12 cm), protruding outwards and representing a formidable weapon. The female boar's tusks are not visible under her lips. The length of a large specimen of the animal reaches more than two meters (females are significantly inferior in size). The weight of an adult wild boar is 80-150 kg, some individuals reach an average weight of 250-270 kg. The wild forest pig lives from 20 to 30 years. Of the sense organs, smell and hearing are especially well developed, vision is poor.
Purchase of young animals
In 1 year, it is advisable to buy 2 wild boars of approximately 2 years of age and 4 females of one year of age, then a year later, at the age of females 2 years 6 months (end of November - beginning of January), fertilization will occur and in May of the third year, perhaps three females will give birth to 4-7 piglets (the first farrows are usually not large). Until May of the fourth year, it is better to leave the entire herd in the enclosure, and in mid-May, release one male and three females and 9-13 piglets, and leave 1 adult male and 1 adult female and 3 one-year-old piglets in the enclosure. After the first birth, deer are also kept in enclosures for a year and most of the livestock are released.
Thus, a reserve herd will remain in the enclosure for several more years to replenish and refresh the population. Until a large stable herd is formed.
A prerequisite is the presence of a large number of feeding fields and areas, so that they are sure to stumble upon them when leaving.
Breeding
In recent years, wild boar farming has been gaining momentum. Compared to domestic pigs, avoid diseases
When breeding wild boars, it is worth considering some features. To keep an animal, a large metal enclosure and several individual pens are required. Considering that the wild pig loves to dig, the fencing sections should fit snugly to the ground and be securely fastened.
Important! When entering the enclosure of wild animals, safety precautions are required. Cleaning is best done when there are no wild boars.
Wild pigs are vulnerable to overheating when exposed to the sun for a long time, so a tent made of lightweight materials will certainly be provided in the pen. The floor does not need to be covered; they will happily tear up the ground in search of worms, roots and insects.
The cleaver is nervous from the bites of parasites, so it is advisable to make a shallow pond where the cattle will lie under a layer of mud, protecting the body from overheating and parasites.
Interesting! In the pens you can build original scratchers for wild boars from wooden beams.
Lure
This process is not at all difficult, the main thing is to have patience.
Sometimes these animals have difficult times. For example, the snow becomes too deep or the temperature drops significantly. Then proper nutrition becomes unavailable. In this case, complementary feeding turns out to be as successful as possible.
Top dressing can be organized from meat and bone meal, mixed feed, wheat, oats, and vegetables. Usually pigs do not come during the day, but appear only at dusk. But, after some time, they get used to the feeding place and begin to come during daylight hours.
It is advisable to set up a feeding area with a small enclosure, since baby piglets cannot compete with adult boars, who push them away from the tasty food. Even the mother pig prefers to ignore her offspring during feeding, taking the most tasty morsels . Therefore, the enclosure must have walls of such a height that an obstacle is created for the penetration of adults, and the kids can safely eat the food intended for them.
To feed a wild boar, you should determine its habitat, arrange a feeding area, lay out food there and not interfere with the animal’s settling in.
The wild boar is an omnivore. What they eat ranges from tree bark to crops and even small mammals.
Raising wild boars. Breeding wild boars is a profitable business at home
Oddly enough, not everyone in our country knows that the most rational hunting enterprise is an aviary. Many hunters have prejudices regarding the aviary, since a stereotype has formed according to which an aviary is a very limited, fenced-in space within which game animals are shot in much the same way as poultry and livestock are slaughtered on a farm. In fact, the area of the enclosure can be extremely large, including larger than the area of hunting grounds, as is the case, for example, in South African or Namibian enclosures, called “ranches” throughout the world. The significant difference between an enclosure and hunting grounds is not the number of hectares, but the fact that the animals living on the territory of the enclosure are not the property of the state, but the property of the owner of the enclosure, that is, acquired by him from the state or in other enclosures. Accordingly, the timing, volume or form of removal of animals from the enclosure is determined not by a government official, but by the owner of the enclosure.
Unfortunately, in Russia the experience of creating and maintaining aviary farming is not systematized, and each new aviary is working from scratch, in many ways repeating the same mistakes. Safari magazine decided to talk about the principles of creating an enclosure and the features of its operation using the example of several of the most advanced and rationally organized farms, which largely used foreign experience. In the first article of the series we will talk about one of the most significant structures of the enclosure - the fence - using the example of the enclosure of the hunting and fishing base and the Biosphere yacht club.
In accordance with the mentioned fundamental difference between an enclosure and a hunting farm, its main component is the fence, which ensures the isolation of the enclosure territory from lands for other purposes. That is, on the one hand, it prevents the penetration of wild animals inside, and on the other hand, it does not allow enclosure animals to escape into the wild. Therefore, the fence should represent a reliable barrier, and this despite the fact that the territory for semi-free keeping of animals, at least in central Russia, is best to have a variety of biotopes - with fields, meadows, forests, bushes, ravines, streams, ponds and swamps , along which this fence will have to be led.
A fence, as you know, consists of what forms a barrier - in the case of an enclosure, as a rule, it is a metal mesh, and what it is supported on, that is, pillars. The third element of the fence is gates and wickets. All this will be discussed in more detail below.
Net
One of the essential parameters of the mesh is the height of its fabric, which actually determines the height of the fence. In the case where the enclosure is planned only for keeping wild boars, the height of the fence may not exceed one and a half meters above the ground; for mouflons, two meters will be enough. If the enclosure is designed for a variety of ungulates, including fallow deer and deer, then the fence should be at least two and a half meters, and preferably two meters and seventy centimeters, since a deer can jump over a two-meter fence without a run-up if desired.
On the bottom side, the net must be dug at least twenty to thirty centimeters into the ground, especially if the enclosure contains wild boars. This is often enough to prevent the wild boar from digging under the net during the day, but it is undesirable to leave the tunnels uncovered for a longer period of time, otherwise you may lose the herd (along the bottom of the net in the Biosphere enclosure there are also lines from trees that were cut down in period of clearing the area for the enclosure). Along the entire length of the mesh, its lower part in the lowlands is still regularly covered with earth. In the fields this is done easily - a tractor with a plow makes a dump of earth. In the swamp, all this has to be done manually.
Thus, we obtain the desired mesh width of 2.7 m + 0.3 m = 3 m. However, as we know, this is not produced in Russia, and a foreign one will not be cheap. Most of the nets produced in our country have a fabric height from one and a half meters to 2.1 m. Only in Chuvashia there is a plant that produces mesh with a width of 2.3 meters.
But not only the height of the mesh is important, but also the thickness of the wire from which it is made, the size of the mesh, and even the method of connecting the longitudinal and transverse wires.
As for the thickness of the wire, you must immediately keep in mind that the mesh is not decorative. Male ungulates, when populating the enclosure, attack the net with acceleration, and it must withstand the rapid blow of a two hundred kilogram carcass of a wild boar or deer. This is the first reason why the thickness of the wire should be quite serious. Unfortunately, we did not find galvanized mesh of suitable size in Russia; painting a mesh encircling an area of even several square kilometers is difficult and very expensive, so you need to take into account that it will rust and gradually lose its strength. And this is the second reason why the wire should be chosen thicker. However, the thicker the wire, the more expensive the fence will cost, so you need to look for the optimum. At the Biosphere, a mesh with a wire thickness of 4 mm was considered optimal. This is not cheap, but we assumed that constantly patching up the holes made by animals in the fences or losing breeding animals would be much more expensive.
It is best to have a woven mesh for an enclosure, but it was not possible to find chain-links with wire of suitable thickness and suitable width of the fabric, and the mesh produced in Chuvashia is welded and has a rather fragile connection between the wires. During frosts, the mesh sometimes leads, and these connections burst from time to time, so you have to constantly monitor the condition of the mesh and tighten the connection points with soft wire.
The larger the mesh cell, the less material and labor costs it uses, and the cheaper it is. In an enclosure for ungulates, a mesh with a cell of 10x10 cm is quite appropriate. For a complex enclosure, where it is also planned to breed hares (and not just breed, but also hunt them in the future), a mesh of at least 4-5 cm is required on one of the sides. This is necessary not only to block the path of hares and hares from the enclosure, but also to prevent foxes from entering the enclosure, which can significantly undermine the hare population by eating young animals.
The question of attaching the mesh to the pole may not be the most difficult, but it also has to be solved. In the Biosphere enclosure, it was decided to attach the mesh from the outside, thanks to which the pillars were inside the enclosure. One of the reasons is that it is easier for a poacher to climb into the enclosure using the post, the other is that it is more convenient to repair the fence with this method of attaching the mesh.
The dimensions of the Cheboksary mesh fabric are 6 × 2.3 m, so fastening posts were installed every six meters, so that one fabric overlapped the other by 10-15 cm just at the point of attachment to the pole. Here the mesh was welded and attached to the post with four brackets (three brackets above the ground and one below the ground level) on the outside of the fence (or welded with pieces of metal reinforcement to metal posts; the mesh cannot be welded to the posts - such welding cannot withstand loads). To increase the strength of the fence, additional support posts were installed in the middle between the fastening posts, to which the mesh was also attached.
Thus, the mesh was fixed in a tense state on poles every three meters. And yet, from the blows of the animals, it vibrated quite strongly, provoking the animals to make new attempts to escape from the enclosure. Therefore, it was decided to strengthen the upper part of the net with poles from pillar to post. They were simply nailed to wooden poles, and a metal corner was welded onto metal poles and poles were attached to it with self-tapping screws.
As already mentioned, the grid rose only two meters above the soil surface. Barbed wire was stretched in three rows to a height of 2.7 m above it. This was done to prevent unauthorized entry of strangers into the enclosure and to ensure that the animals’ attempts to jump over the fence caused a negative conditioned reflex.
Pillars
The pillars are the second structural element of the fence, with which not everything is as simple as it seems at first glance.
First of all, it is necessary to decide what material the pillar should be made of. Actually, there are three options - wooden, concrete or metal. Depending on the geographical features of the region, its production capacity and other specific conditions, the issue can be resolved in different ways. In the case of the “Biosphere” enclosure, next to which there was no reinforced concrete production, they initially decided to install wooden poles, since there is a forest around and its purchase and delivery are not associated with large costs. Apparently, for enclosures of public hunter organizations, where the cost of manual labor is practically not taken into account, this is the most acceptable option. But where labor costs are also taken into account, that is, in private enclosures, the cost of installing wooden poles, which must be treated from rotting, dug in, covered with stones and compacted, and after some time replaced by rotten ones, eliminates the difference in the cost of wood and metal pipes, which are much more durable and are installed by simply pressing into the (soft) soil with an excavator bucket. It should be borne in mind that it is advisable to install an aviary only for long periods, since just creating a breeding stock will take several years.
Nevertheless, as already mentioned, first they began to install wooden poles in the Biosphere enclosure. In this case, the following point from the field of plant anatomy was taken into account - the pillars were installed with the butt side up, since this method eliminates the rise of water from the soil through the capillary vessels of the log and, accordingly, prevents its rotting from the inside. The parts of the pillars buried in the ground were pre-treated with bitumen, which also protects them from biocorrosion. It was realized in a timely manner that the installation of wooden posts was a mistake, and metal pipes were purchased for most of the fencing. The fact is that the structure and topography of the soil in the enclosure are very diverse. There are ravines and swamps, and in such places it is necessary to install high poles; on loose soils, it is generally problematic to securely install a pole, and it has to be connected to neighboring ones, and this can be done successfully with metal poles. In addition, scraps of wooden poles are waste, and with metal scraps you can use welding to build up fragments of insufficient length or even weld a pole from scraps, so there is practically no metal waste.
For this purpose, pipes with a diameter of 76 mm were purchased. The choice was made based on the fact that a 100-kilogram beast could bend a smaller-diameter pipe (as well as a channel or angle of the appropriate dimensions - the metal is sold by weight). Pipes, channels or angles are larger and therefore more expensive. So a pipe with a diameter of 76 mm at the Biosphere was considered the optimal choice between costs and structural stability.
Before installation, the pipes were painted and a metal plate was welded on top of each to prevent rain and melt water from penetrating inside the column.
Each post was numbered along the entire perimeter, since this makes maintaining the fence much easier - there is no need to remember where approximately the wild boar stretched the mesh and it needs to be repaired - the lineman just needs to write down the numbers of the posts between which a stretched or torn mesh was found.
The thickness of the pipe wall should be at least 4-5 mm, since a thinner-walled pipe bends even when installed under an excavator bucket. However, it was not always possible to approach the installation site of the pole even on a Belarus tractor. Therefore, some of the pillars had to be hammered in manually. To do this, depressions were made in the soil using a hand drill (with a cutter diameter slightly less than 76 mm), and a pipe was driven into the hole.
Where the terrain was fairly flat and the soil allowed, pipes 4.2 m long were used (buried to a freezing depth of one and a half meters so that they rose 2.7 m above the ground).
In places where streams crossed the border of the enclosure, the fence had to be raised, and the length of the pipe installed there reached 7 m. Accordingly, a mesh was attached to the fence in two rows, overlapping each other in the middle, and at the same time it was dug quite deeply into the stream, since the wild boars They like to wallow in stream mud in the summer.
Jib beams had to be welded to the high posts, as well as to the corner posts of the enclosure.
Where the border of the enclosure runs along a low-lying part, and there are elevated areas in close proximity to it, it is necessary to increase the height of the fence. In the Biosphere enclosure, a corner was welded onto the poles in such places and the wire was pulled not in three, but in five rows.
On swampy soil, the post had to be driven to a depth of about four meters. Of course, in such places the pillars turn out to be very unstable. Therefore, at a certain depth (15-20 cm from the surface) they were all connected to each other by one channel. The top of the pillars was also scalded with a metal corner for strength. The mesh here was installed 2 mm thicker than that of the fence on the field, since it rusts faster in a damp atmosphere.
In a swamp, a fence is expensive, a lot of material is consumed, and it is very labor-intensive work, but a swamp is one of the favorite biotopes of many ungulates, and it is advisable to have one on the territory of the enclosure (if possible, then not on the edge, but closer to the center). Green growth appears in the swamp earlier in the spring, lasts longer during drought, and a wet swamp provides salvation for many ungulates during the period of greatest activity of blood-sucking insects.
Gates and wickets
There can be one or several gates in the fence of the enclosure, depending on the transport scheme. They must be such that even agricultural equipment such as a combine can pass through them freely. The fact is that for feeding animals in winter, it may be more profitable to purchase grain or other feed than to grow it yourself during the summer, but hunting specialists strongly recommend growing agricultural crops on the territory of the enclosure. And for this you need to plow, sow and remove from the fields in a timely manner.
The question of what type of gate should be was decided by the Biosphere management in favor of sliding ones. The fact is that with swing gates the gap can be large enough for young animals to jump out of the enclosure through them.
The gates have to be used not only in summer, but also in winter, so they must be raised above the ground. In the Biosphere enclosure, a log is laid under the gate, on which a channel is fixed, and the gate rides along it. It is welded from a pipe, the surface on which the frame moves is small, and therefore two people can easily open this gate. A channel is welded into the upper part of the gate, which serves as a guide for the gate frame. Inside the frame, the mesh was built up so that the deer could not jump over.
All gates are closed with duplicate locks, since one can break, freeze, and so on, and to change it will take time, during which the gates can remain open, and the animals can scatter at such a moment. All gates are numbered as this is convenient in everyday work.
Feeding
In order for a wild boar to grow and develop properly, it will need a balanced diet. In home breeding, the person himself monitors the regularity and completeness of the animals’ diet.
The wild boar in the farmstead loves high-quality food and can eat up to five kilograms of food per day. To reduce the cost of feeding their pets, farmers often switch to combined feeds and concentrates, and also feed food waste. The menu must include fresh grass, nuts and acorns, which contain a lot of fats and proteins. The boar's protein deficiency is supplemented with minced meat, cottage cheese, fish waste or small rodents.
