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RE: How You can Preserve Biodiversity: Endangered Island Pigs
They do got that going for them LOL. Habitat loss has left some of them down to a few hundred, whose members are fragmented. Since they have ordinary porcine habits, farmers find them intolerable pests. At least one species has recently gone extinct.
There are plenty of folks that I think would be pretty proud to have unique pigs with beards, or amazing crests. These pigs ooze character, and that's a fact.
Yeah they do have some pretty cool beards to them! I think at our local zoo there is some sort of hog that has a weird beard thing to it. Never really thought about it being endangered but I suppose that is why it is there now that I think about it.
How about them wild boars in some states where they gun them down by gattling guns in helicopters? Those ones seem to be a huge problem.
Were the endangered ones getting killed due to the same thing?
Well, my grasp of their situation is that on islands, their habitat is limited in extent, and this renders populations less robust. As development has proceeded, that habitat has been destroyed, and fractured, leaving those relic populations far more vulnerable. At the same time, farmer's resistance to the depredations of pigs on their crops has further put pressure on the species.
On a continent, such as N. America, there is little limit on the available habitat to an omnivore like pigs, and the feral domestic hogs that have become problematic are not facing the same pressures island pigs face. Neither is that species already limited in number, as island pigs are. Domestic pigs are on every continent but Antarctica today. It is practically inconceivable that feral hogs could be endangered as island species' are.