Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain's Wild Boar | Chantal Lyons

Big, messy and mysterious - crossing paths with a wild boar can conjure fear and joy in equal measure. Driven to extinction 700 years ago, a combination of the species' own tenacity and illegal releases from the 1980s has now seen several populations return.
With growing worry over the impacts on both people and the countryside, the boar's right to exist in Britain has been heavily debated. Their habitat-regenerating actions benefit a host of other wildlife, yet unlike beavers, these ecosystem engineers remain unloved by many. Why is there no clamour to reintroduce them across the land?
Author Chantal Lyons explores our attitudes towards the boar, and what life is like for this intelligent and quirky species. From Toulouse and Barcelona where they are growing in number and boldness, to the woods of Kent and Sussex where they are fading away again, to Inverness-shire where rewilders welcome them, join Chantal on a journey of discovery as she reveals what it might take for us to coexist with wild boar.
Chantal Lyons is a naturalist, writer and science communicator. Having grown up in the tidy countryside of Kent, her encounters with the growing rewilding movement opened her eyes to the potential for restoring nature in Britain, and inspired her to study the relations between people and wild boar in the Forest of Dean. She currently lives in Cheltenham, never too far from the boar.
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