Video footage has shown how a wild boar missing one leg is thriving in a Polish forest, where he is cared for by other boars and appears to coexist peacefully with a pack of wolves – one of which also has only three legs.
The boar was first seen near the city of Częstochowa in southern Poland two years ago by Dawid Popończyk, a journalism student with a large online following who documents local wildlife. He has been observing the animal ever since.
“The family of this wild boar takes care of him all the time, they wait for him, you can see it in the footage. The boar functions normally. You can see he has grown, he is doing well, he is well fed,” says Popończyk.
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The boars live in the same part of the forest as a wolf pack that also contains an individual missing one leg, and about which Popończyk has also made videos.
It is often the case that the boars and wolves visit the same place during the day – a boggy spot where they look for water and, as the three-legged boar was recorded doing, take mud baths.
But the two species seem to coexist peacefully. Popończyk notes that the wolves have certainly had many opportunities to catch the three-legged boar, since an animal without one leg is unable to escape or put up much resistance.
Popończyk plans to continue tracking the boar family and its three-legged member. “I will try to get some recordings in the spring. While there is snow I don’t want to bother him – it’s harder for him to move around and he loses more energy because of it.”
Last year, another three-legged animal – a young wolf Kamyk (Pebble) – came to fame in Poland after digging a tunnel to escape his enclosure. He was then often spotted by tourists running on local beaches.
Wild boars are native to Poland and, due to increasing urbanisation, are ever more often seen in areas of human habitation. That has led some cities to appeal to residents to stop feeding boars. The capital, Warsaw, has also sanctioned more culling of the animals.
Wolves were once hunted to the verge of extinction in Poland, but their numbers have boomed in recent years after they were granted special protection in 1998.
Kraków has appealed to residents to stop feeding wild boars as growing numbers of the animals roam the streets.
The authorities estimate that up to 1,500 boars now live in the city, which is ten times the normal figure https://t.co/AkvbvVzKs3
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) November 12, 2023
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Main image credit: Leśny Kawaler (screenshot)
Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.
