Shrine to a wild boar shot dead in Zaragoza, Spain: pest becomes martyr

A shrine for a culled wild boar: when the pest becomes a martyr

A wild boar dies outside a bar in Zaragoza, Spain, during the Fiestas del Pilar festival, and someone decides that deserves a shrine. Flowers, apples, pinecones and banners. Fifty people then march for the animal they call "murdered", chanting that it is no celebration if there is violence. The scene has something of a parable about it: the same animal that is hunted for overpopulation becomes, within hours, a symbol of a cause.

The fact is, the wild boar is not an endangered species. It is a pest on four legs. Each female gives birth to eight piglets per litter and has no natural predator to keep it in check, so the only way to control the population is the obvious one: culling. Anyone who lives in the countryside knows it. Anyone who lives in the city centre, apparently, does not.

From pest to martyr in forty-eight hours

The sequence is almost textbook. First the makeshift shrine outside the bar. Then the gathering of fifty people with a message mixing animal-rights grief with criticism of the bar's owner, described as a hunter. And in between, the ongoing investigation into what peine, presented as something that will not go unpunished.

There lies the crux of the matter: an animal killed every day to feed the population —millions of head a year in Spain— suddenly triggers a public reaction that no farm slaughter ever does. The protest is not about the boar. It is about something else.

The bar's business and the cost of the crusade

Because the shrine has a collateral victim that does not appear on the banners: the owner of the bar. Setting up the circus outside his door, singling him out and wrecking his life as much as possible is a bill someone ends up paying. And it is not the boar.

Some argue the reaction is proportionate if you believe the animal was killed cruelly. Against that stands the argument that population control is a health and agricultural necessity, not a hunting whim. The two narratives never meet.

The double standard of armchair animal activism

The comparison hanging over the conversation is uncomfortable: no shrine for the dolphin killed in Ceuta. But yes for a wild boar culled in a Spanish city. The selectivity of the mourning says more about those practising it than about the animal.

And meanwhile, the festival goes on, the overpopulation goes on and the piglets keep being born eight at a time. The shrine will wither. The pest will not.

The predictable outcome is that the story cools off within days and becomes a Fiestas del Pilar anecdote. What is less clear is whether the next time an animal is culled in the centre of a city, someone will not stage the same show all over again.