BergaIt’s not even eight in the morning and everyone is already there. They have had breakfast, but they make a coffee to warm up and finish organizing. The younger ones are with the dog handlers devising the raid strategy. Inside his place, a space of a few square meters and whose walls are filled with boars’ and roe deer’s heads, there are the older ones in front of the fireplace. They also take part in the hunt organized by the Colla del Senglar El Pi de Berga, but they are veterans and look at it from a distance.
Photographs of wild boars killed in other hunts are shown with the mobile phone, but Manel – known to the gang as Grandpa Manel – goes one step further: he shows how to do it from his smartphone a video made with AI in which he goes out into the dining room at home jumping between wild boars. Pepe and Agapito, also veterans, look on, explaining that the day they hunted more pigs with the gang, they shot down up to 70 pigs in one raid. While they are beating her, outside the scene is totally different.
About twenty people – almost all men between 50 and 60 years old -, dressed in different models of jackets, vests and bright orange fleeces, listen to Paco, the leader of the gang for more than 30 years. As a manager, he has the mandatory security courses – to know how to position people during the raid – and game meat – to check that the animal killed is in good condition; otherwise, they must call the Rural Agents. He is also in charge of communicating with the company that will collect the wild boars they hunt, as it is forbidden to transport the dead animals beyond the meeting point. You must use an application where you will enter the number of catches. It will be the company that will tell you when it will pick up the boars to transport them to Solsona.
“Today we will cover an area of 100 hectares. The raid will take place in the north, in the area between the river and Berga, and we will have 25 positions“, details Paco, who wears an orange cap with an embroidered boar and the gang’s name. The positions or stops are the points where each hunter is placed individually to circle the hunting area and try to shoot down the animals when they try to leave the perimeter marked, in this case, by the Paco. One of them will be occupied by Ariadna, the only woman who participates in the strike today. He is 20 years old and it is only one year that he made his debut in the world of hunting. She joined because her boyfriend, Marc, is a dog keeper and has been participating in raids since he was 15. “The first few times I only came to help, but now I’ve got my license, I have my rifle and we come to hunt whenever work allows us, especially on Wednesdays and Fridays,” the girl explains enthusiastically. She, Ginna and Vanesa are the only women in the gang.
Once organized, all the hunters move to their position points and it’s the hounds’ turn. Marc and Cuerva are coming today, both with a dozen dogs. “They tell me he’s thin, but he’s fit. He eats half a kilo of meat and runs 30 km a day… It’s like they told Kilian Jornet he’s thin,” Cuerva complains to a colleague as he puts a vest on one of the animals. “It’s not because of the cold, but because of the tears that a wild boar can make with its tusks,” he clarifies. He also explains that gangs lack relief because young people have to work and don’t want to spend their free time hunting. “I, although I don’t convince my wife, spend all my holidays hunting, but young people prefer to go on trips,” he says.
Track and “lift”
Marc and Cuerva’s mission is to make the dogs track the wild boars and “raise them” – scare them and make them run away – so that from the positions they can shoot them down with rifles or shotguns when they run through their area. To monitor the position of the dogs they use a GPS and a device similar to Strava, one of the applications to record a route when you go for a run. Again, it’s up to Paco to decide what everyone does and where, since, for example, it’s forbidden to hunt next to roads or country lanes, and the number of rifle shots each hunter can fire is strictly limited by law.
Cuerva with the dogs starting a wild boar raid
After the commotion to get organized, once on the mountain everything is silent. The first shot is not heard until two hours and eleven minutes after the encounter began. It was preceded by hundreds of barking dogs warning that they had found a wild boar and the onomatopoeic cries of Cuerva. “Ea, ea ,ea,” he is heard shouting to guide the dogs.
The scene takes place several meters beyond a 76-year-old hunter who is also part of the gang. “My name is Max, like the bad guys in the movies,” he jokes. He is another of the veterans. He has been in the same place for over an hour, standing, almost motionless, looking both ways. He carries the rifle slung over his back, but his hands are strategically placed to be quick if an animal approaches. He only changes position to, from time to time, wipe himself with the handkerchief he carries in his pocket.
While he patiently waits for a boar to approach him, he admits that he sees it as unfeasible to reduce the boar population by half, as the Government announced on Wednesday. “These are political words, but there is no ability to achieve it. Boars are beasts, but they are not stupid, it is not as easy as taking a puppy,” he warns. Suddenly, the conversation stops. Slides are heard, dogs sniffing and Cuerva yelling again. Max puts his index finger to his lips for silence and points ahead. A single shot echoes across the ravine and, again, absolute silence. A few seconds later a murmur is heard in the earphone that Max has connected to the walkie-talkie that all hunters carry to communicate. “Looks like they’ve hunted him down, they say we’ve already got two,” he says. He also explains that they seem few and that his record was in 1987, when in a single season he hunted 25 by himself. Silence returns and, at most, a shot is heard every twenty minutes or every half hour.
Security seals
Six hours after starting the day at the gang’s headquarters, Paco announces that the raid is over. The hunters face is a mixture of resignation and helplessness. They have only hunted two, and they are both cubs. They undo the journey they have made to pick up the two animals and put them in Paco’s van, who places the animal seal on them, an approved label on which he writes the name of the gang and the day the boar was captured. “It’s very important, remember that you can be fined for misusing the seal,” warns the gang leader. He also explains that they are now paid 18 euros per piece and that every year around 6,000 are spent on vets.
The result of the raid makes Paco reaffirm his conviction that the goal of halving the number of wild boars in Catalonia is “impossible”. “You should go out hunting every day with gangs of 30 or 40 people. If they don’t promote young people it will be unviable, but that’s why we should have a better image”, he acknowledges.
