Hong Kong’s boars are getting bolder.
With a growing boar population and traditional food supplies dwindling, encounters are on the uptick, usually revolving around the city’s dumpsters.
But for at least one discriminating behemoth, which gate-crashed a barbecue on Sunday afternoon at Aberdeen Reservoir, dumpster diving just isn’t cutting it any more.
Video of the party gone desperately wrong was sent to Apple Daily by a woman surnamed Cheng, who told the newspaper she was with her friends for a feast at the park’s barbecue area on Sunday afternoon.
Cheng and her friends were utilizing one of the four pits in the area, sitting at a table laden with food, when the wild boar walked up, dragged the table cloth and food onto the ground, then started digging in as bystanders started furiously snapping pics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvouvM1__m4
Speaking to the newspaper, she said the unwanted guest was particularly fond of the pound cake they had bought with them to the picnic.
“It then stopped eating the food from our table, and slowly walked to the other tables. It wasn’t scared of anyone,” she said.
Cheng said that the boar took a bit of everything from each of four tables in the barbecue area, including cakes, steaks, sweet potatoes, and sticky rice.
It wasn’t to be the last hungry boar sighting of the day.
At 3pm that afternoon, a woman surnamed Liu spotted two wild boar piglets eating food left at the Wo Hop Shek Cemetery in Fanling.
In Chinese tradition, people often leave food for their ancestors at grave sites. Boars as it turn out, have little respect for Chinese tradition.
Paying her respects with her family at a gravestone, Liu told Apple Daily that she was planning to leave some fruit and a whole chicken when the two piglets appeared and began intently watching them, presumably waiting for them to leave so they could pounce on the free grub.
In the video, Liu and her family can be heard debating whether or not to just throw food at them so that they would go away.
The standoff lasted a few minutes, before the two piglets gave up and left.
On the plus side, all the wild boars encountered on Sunday were significantly more benign than one that made headlines in Wong Tai Sin earlier this month when it attacked three people.
A district councillor for the area told local media at the time that wild boars had been spotted wandering into residential areas more frequently to forage for food since authorities put up signs telling people not to feed them.
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