Britain likes to think of itself as a nation of animal lovers – though from the beast of Bodmin to XL bullies, we seem just as attached to lurid accounts of their unpredictable menace. Naturalist Chantal Lyons has a diagnosis for what she calls our “national zoophobia”. It’s “a symptom of our isolation”: as a society, we simply don’t have enough contact with wild nature not to be terrified of it. In September, a government-led report on biodiversity observed: “Nature is still seriously declining across the UK, a country that is already one of the most nature-depleted in the world.” Over the past half-century, the populations of UK species have declined by an average of 19%, with one in six now at risk of extinction: what wildness we have left is diminished, corralled and thoroughly unthreatening.
Groundbreakers tells the story of the uncomfortable disruption of this status quo by a large-headed, fleet-footed interloper: Sus scrofa, the wild boar. Lyons, a naturalist and science communicator, traces the scrappy, unofficial populations that have sprung up across Britain since the 1980s, the first since they were hunted to extinction more than 300 years ago. The descendants of farmed animals that escaped or were deliberately released, they exist in a legal and cultural limbo, without official recognition as a wild native species. About 2,600 animals now live wild from south-east England to north-west Scotland, with their stronghold in the ancient Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Lyons goes in search of them – with forays to larger, more unruly populations in France and Spain, where the singer Shakira claimed two boar stole her handbag in a Barcelona park in 2021 – to discover the impact of their return.
