The wild boars of Wong Tai Sin aren’t playing around.
Three people were injured, two of them hospitalized, yesterday after they were attacked by a wild boar, which marked the second such case in the area four days.
The first attack on Wednesday morning was abrupt.
The victim, a 65-year-old female security guard surnamed Chan, was knocked over and bitten on the leg by a 300 pound boar that charged at her as she walked towards the public toilets near Fu Shan House at the Fu Shan Estate just after 6:50am yesterday, according to Apple Daily.
Video posted by local media shows a pool of blood on the floor of the public toilet.
“I was so scared,” she told reporters as she was taken away on a gurney. “It was really big, it was as big as a human.”
She told reporters that when she was knocked over, she screamed for help and an elderly man walking by came to her rescue and started poking the boar with his umbrella.
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But then the boar charged at the man, leaving him sprawled on the ground. While the boar escaped, the second victim was treated at the scene for minor injuries to his leg.
Shortly after the Fu Shan House incident, Apple Daily reported that the same wild boar struck again outside King Shan Court — about 180 meters away — where he attacked a 79-year-old man surnamed Chan.
“I heard someone yell ‘there’s a wild boar!’ And I looked up and saw it charge towards me,” he told Apple Daily.
He then fell to the ground and hit his head. As he was reaching out for a large wooden stick to protect himself, the wild boar bit him on the right leg.
Fortunately for Chan, a Wong Tai Sin district councillor, Wu Chi-kin, happened to be in the area at the time and helped drive the wild boar away using a wooden stick, on.cc reports. (Now that’s a man who fights for his constituents.)
Police were unable to find the wild boar while Chan was also taken to hospital.
Speaking to reporters after the incident, Wu said that he would often see wild boars in the area foraging for food and that, in the past, residents had been seen feeding the animals.
Reporters at the scene noted that there were AFCD banners reminding people not the creatures. Feeding a wild boar can earn residents a HK$1,500 (US$191) fine.
Wu said it was likely that the wild boars had been venturing into more residential areas to forage for food since people had stopped feeding them.
Eric Lai, a vet who spoke to Apple Daily, said that it’s very rare to see a wild boar bite a person, and reassured people that when that happens, it’s because they want someone to move out of the way and not because they want to eat human meat.
Well, that’s good news. The bad news? Lai noted wild boars can carry bacteria that spread rabies.
According to HK01, the number of wild boar related complaints in the past couple of years has increased from 294 in 2013, to a whopping 738 in 2017. For the first six months of this year, there have been 380 wild boar-related complaints.
As Coconuts Hong Kong reported, the increasing number of wild boar complaints is partly a result of the city’s growing wild boar population, with experts concerned that the growing wild boar population is becoming unsustainable.
