Book review – Groundbreakers by Chantal Lyons

 

This is a fine book about a very interesting species.

I’ve seen Wild Boar in continental Europe (Netherlands, France and Spain) but not yet in the UK. Decades ago, in the Camargue, I sometimes travelled the roads after dark in a flimsy ancient Citroen Deux-Chevaux and I always thought that any close encounters of the boar kind would be more likely to write off the car than the boar.

Here in the UK there are probably more Wild Boar than most of us realise, but probably fewer than there were a decade ago (maybe) and a lot fewer than there were 1000 years ago. We are not familiar with this extirpated native species and we don’t quite know how to behave in its presence. That is, to a large extent, what this book is about.

We meet a variety of people with different perspectives of Wild Boar; foresters, farmers, villagers, conservationists, hunters and more. Like most other species some regard them as a treasure, some as a pest and many others as largely an irrelevance. Some of these views are based on myth rather than reality, and our dreadful press really doesn’t help, but all of these views and the author’s own assessments based on living in a boar-rich area of the Forest of Dean (and also carrying out social research on people’s attitudes) are fascinating.

However, I found the accounts of how Wild Boar fit in, and sometimes don’t fit in too well, in continental Europe even more fascinating. These are accounts from places where Wild Boar have long been present, are not regarded as freakish occurrences, and where the response to them appears rather more rational and less demented than some in this country.

I was disappointed not to find accounts of boar hunting in France where I was told (I’m sure I was…) that Wild Boar were hunted in the past on horseback with lances but that now some hunted them on horseback with pistols and that you could sometimes spot a boar-hunter by his limp because he’d shot off the odd toe or two. I have remembered that story for getting on for four decades and it’s probably false – just like people will remember newspaper headlines on Wild Boar attacks on walkers, children and pets and believe them because they are striking. Such things happen, but they aren’t the norm and many living in areas of the UK with Wild Boar don’t know they are there. That is not to say that Wild Boar don’t pose us challenges, but the challenges are hardly existential and ranked with all the other challenges in the world they don’t get very high up the list. And even if French shooters don’t shoot themselves in the foot on horseback they do seem to shoot an awful lot of fellow French citizens by accident (this book tells me).

I learned a lot about Wild Boar from these pages, but then I had a lot to learn, and I learned a bit about people too, and we all have something to learn about our own species. It’s a good read with just a little too much creeping around forests for me but not loads too much and you might want a bit more of it when you read the book. The author writes well, in my view, and this is both a useful and engaging introduction to the species which touches on a lot of current wider issues along the way.

And the author has laudable views on the importance of French golf courses, tells us about Shakira and introduces us to the ass-biting boars of Barcelona. This boarish book is neither borish nor boring.

The cover? Simple and good, I’ll give it 9/10 provided it really does look like it does on the publisher’s website.

Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar by Chantal Lyons is published by Bloomsbury and is published on 1 February but available to pre-order now.

Note 1: just for transparency, I have been reading a spiral-bound  printout of this book which lacks the index and acknowledgements, and cover of the final product, but that shouldn’t affect my ability to form an opinion of the book.

Note 2: this book like a growing number of other books has mentions of and sometimes comments from, folk who readers of this blog will have encountered here. In this case Hugh Webster (eg https://markavery.info/2019/06/02/why-i-wrote-the-blue-hare-by-hugh-webster/ ), Alick Simmons (eg https://markavery.info/2019/06/07/guest-blog-the-ethics-of-animal-exploitation-part-1-by-alick-simmons/) and the writer of my book of the year for 2021, Steve Cracknell (https://markavery.info/2021/10/10/sunday-book-review-the-implausible-rewilding-of-the-pyrenees-by-steve-cracknell/).

 

Signed copies of my own book, Reflections: what wildlife needs and how to provide it, are available from me at my talks or by post.

Email [email protected] for details of how to pay.

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