Pig takeover secretly backed by state?

ETV24 reports that Estonian farmers are pointing the finger at government authorities for the sorry state of the annual potato crop, which has been decimated by the thriving populations of wild boars roaming state forests.

The farmers claim that the powers-that-be are endangering the nation's tuber harvest by deliberately keeping the animals' numbers up in order to cash in on hunting. With some simple arithmetic they show that a day's hunting fees from people who enjoy shooting things are worth more to the officials in their ivory towers than one of the cornerstones of the Estonian diet.

In Rapla County, once the agricultural heartland of the nation, there are said to be so many wild boar ravaging the fields in search of starchy snacks that large swathes of the population may be looking for something else to boil and smother in dill this season.

“The worst of it is where I have two whole hectares where there's simply nothing to retrieve," lamented farmer Mait Värk. "They've done away with the lot of it. If there were maybe five pigs out on the field I wouldn't make a fuss - but hunters are sighting 70 pigs a night! It's gone beyond a joke.”

While someone called Peep Männil from some lesser forestry centre with a very long name admits that the numbers of wild boars are being artificially inflated, Kalev Männiste from the Hunting Management Department of the State Forest Management Centre insists that the shooting of innocent animals that goes on in the country's forests does so according to law. If farmers are incapable of defending their fields against attacks from pigs, he adds, that's their problem.