Classroom lesson 路 Wildlife馃嚝馃嚪 France

The wild boar

A clever, hairy cousin of the pig that roams French forests

A wild boar standing in a forest clearing

Photo 路 Wikimedia Commons

What is it?

A wild boar is the wild ancestor of the pig you might know from a farm. It has a thick coat of dark bristly hair, a long snout for digging, and curved tusks. Wild boar live in forests all across France - and sometimes they come right into the edges of towns.

Tell me more

Wild boar live in family groups called 'sounders'. A sounder is usually a few mums and all their piglets, led by the oldest female. The males usually live by themselves and only join the group at certain times of year. Piglets are striped brown and cream when they are little - which helps them hide in the leaves.

Their long snout is one of the strongest noses in nature. They use it to dig up roots, mushrooms, acorns and bulbs. A boar can flip up a chunk of grass the size of a doormat with one push of its snout. In some French forests, you can spot where a sounder has been by the patches of churned-up earth.

Wild boar are surprisingly smart. They have been seen using tools - one in a wildlife park figured out how to use a stick to dig with. They also have an excellent memory for places, and can find the same berry bush months later, even in a huge forest.

Boar are very good at adapting. They can live in cold mountains, hot scrubland, near rivers, in farmland and increasingly in towns. There are now more wild boar in France than there have been for hundreds of years, partly because the forests have grown back since people moved into cities.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

  1. 01Why do you think baby boar are striped? Look at the colours - what do they match?
  2. 02Wild boar live in family groups led by the oldest mum. What kind of advice might she pass on?
  3. 03Boar are very smart but most people only think of farm pigs as a bit silly. Why do we sometimes get animals wrong?
Try this

Classroom activity

Draw the same animal in two ways: once as a 'wild' version (long fur, tusks, alert eyes) and once as a 'farm' version (pink, smooth, calm). Compare round the class - what changes when an animal lives with humans?

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