With Hong Kong fighting for its very survival amid an unrelenting boar-nado, one lawmaker yesterday revived calls to murder the wild pigs where they sleep after one ran in front of her car, while another wondered aloud whether porcine pedestrians could be taught to cross the road properly.
The thoughts were raised by two pro-Beijing lawmakers during a Panel on Environmental Affairs held to discuss wild boar management at the Legislative Council yesterday.
The first person to weigh in on the matter was Regina Ip — a controversial figure in Hong Kong politics who once suggested that asylum seekers should be put into a detention camp in Shenzhen, and also described Filipino domestic workers as “sexual resources” for western men.
Ip recounted an incident that took place one Sunday afternoon when she was driving along Kennedy Road in the Mid-Levels and struck a wild boar that rushed out into the road.
“It’s really dangerous, right?” she said. “These wild boars don’t obey traffic rules!”
According to Ming Pao, Ip told those present at yesterday’s meeting that the authorities should look to Australia for ideas on containing the boar menace.
Specifically, Ip was referring to news in August that farmers in New South Wales were being encouraged to shoot more kangaroos as parts of the country struggled with drought.
Also weighing in on boars’ inability to follow traffic rules was Junius Ho, who gained notoriety for once suggesting Hong Kong independence activists should be “killed without mercy”. Oddly, he was much more lenient in his approach to boars, asked members of the government present at yesterday’s panel, “How can we teach wild boars how to cross the road?”
Tse Chin-wan, the undersecretary for the Environment Bureau, did not directly respond to either lawmaker’s traffic-related wild boar concerns, instead reminding the public not to feed the boars, and reiterating the government’s commitment to the wild boar contraception program.
But Ip and Ho’s comments add to a growing mountain of complaints that the government’s contraception program is not doing enough to curb boar-ish behavior.
Suggestions by lawmakers have included marooning boars on uninhabited islands, re-introducing natural predators, and bringing back the wild boar hunting program.
Earlier this year, the authorities revealed that there were 679 reports of wild boar sightings in Hong Kong through the first 10 months of 2018, putting the year on track for the most wild board complaints since the government started compiling the numbers in 2013.
