HAIFA, Israel – The wild boars of Haifa may not be flying, but they seem to be doing almost everything else.
The pigs slumber in people’s pools. They sniff across the lawns. They kick residents’ soccer balls and play with their dogs. They stroll on the sidewalks and sleep in the streets. Some eat from the hands of men, and all eat from the trash.
The wild boars of Haifa, in short, are no longer particularly wild.
The pigs, which in recent times were largely confined to the gorges that cut through this hilly port city through the Mediterranean Sea, have recently become increasingly carefree and regularly go to built-up areas, unharmed by their human neighbors.
“It has become like an everyday thing,” said Eugene Notkov, 35, a chef who lets his dog play with the pigs that are put in local parks. “They are part of our city,” he added. Bumping one is “like seeing a squirrel.”
In many countries, animal observation has increased after the pandemic began and people left public spaces. But the pigs from Haifa started their conquest well before the coronavirus wreaked havoc. In 2019, residents reported 1,328 pigs with pigs to the city authorities – almost 40 percent more than the total in 2015. The Haifa City Council did not want to release data for 2020.
The growing appearance of the pigs has fueled a rumpus in local discourse. For some, the pigs are a threat, and the Council is to blame for their continued presence. For others, it is a charming addition to an already unusual place.
Israel’s third largest city, with a population of nearly 300,000, Haifa has an eccentric topography. The city in northern Israel, built on the side of Mount Carmel, is divided between districts that lie along the flat waterfront and neighborhoods that lie on a rugged mountain top. Ravines, or “wadis”, run through the city, creating a rare blend of urban and natural (though one that is often characterized by industrial waste).
“It’s a secret garden,” said Rona Shahar, a painter and resident of Haifa. “And there’s a magical side to it.”
The ethnic composition of Haifa is also atypical: it is one of the few Israeli cities where Jews live with a significant number of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 10 percent of the city’s population. It is home to the leader of the largest Arab political party in the country, and its residents have elected a female mayor before Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
“I wish we could all learn to live in Israel as they live in Haifa,” said Edna Gorney, a poet, ecologist and lecturer at the University of Haifa. “It is an example of coexistence – not only between Arabs and Jews, but also between people and wildlife.”
For dreamers like Mrs. Shahar, the painter, finds it almost unsurprising that the pigs cheek should stay with the people of Haifa. After moving to Haifa in 2008, she found a city that lends itself to the surrealist area, and began a series of paintings and drawings that explored what it would look like if the city were flooded with friendly tigers.
“I just had no idea there would be wild animals roaming the streets,” Shahar said. “It somehow seems appropriate.”
No one completely agrees why the pigs entered Haifa in such a large number. Some wonder if a major fire in and around Haifa in 2016 destroyed the pigs’ natural habitat and invaded the city. Others claim it was the mayor’s decision in 2019 to stop shooting the pigs.
But the statistics show that the pigs’ pigs had already risen when the shooting stopped. Ecologists say the pigs still have plenty of food in the nearby ravines outside Haifa. The real reason for their presence in the city, the internal ecologist of the Haifa Council said, is that people leave too much food waste in places that are even more accessible than the gorges.
“It’s easy to get food in the city,” said Yael Olek, the municipal ecologist. “And they do not have to look for that for a long time.”
Whatever the cause of their presence, the pigs unleashed true anger among some sections of the population. For every Rona Shahar, there is someone who views the pigs as a danger and a plague.
In their search for food, pigs regularly sweep the grass on people’s lawns or guns chaotically through their garbage cans. And although many pigs have become almost tame in the behavior of humans, they have eaten food from residents’ hands, but some are still very aggressive, especially when they are young. In January, a bear bit a pensioner in the leg – a day later, a bear took off with a schoolgirl’s pink school bag.
“They now control the streets,” said Assaf Schechter, 43, a dock worker who was recently confronted by a bear on his porch. “It’s a very crazy situation.”
Mr. Schechter’s teenage daughter sometimes asks him for moral support after meeting the pigs at night. His mother-in-law, Esti Shulman, was carrying a stick in the street after he was recently run off the sidewalk by a herd of pigs.
“They have to collect the little ones and put them in a park,” said Shulman, 75, a retired bookkeeper. “Or take them to the Golan Heights! Or shoot them! ”
This anger is increasingly directed at the mayor, Einat Kalisch-Rotem. At a recent public meeting convened by the Council to discuss the quark issue, hundreds of residents turned up to trample her for three hours.
“This past Saturday,” said Sarit Golan-Steinberg, a lawyer and councilor, “my husband ran back home because he ran into a 150-pound bear!”
“Tell me,” Golan-Steinberg demanded, “do you think it’s funny?”
Me. Kalisch-Rotem barely stood idle in the face of these powerfully built animals, which can fetch 300 pounds. Under her supervision, the council fenced off parks and gorges to suffocate the access points to the city – and fastened chains to rubbish bins, to restrict access to food waste. As the municipality no longer wanted to disclose recent data on the presence of pigs, it is unclear whether these strategies had an effect.
Meanwhile, amateurs have been trying to come up with their own solutions. One group tried to build an app that could deter pigs with subsonic sound waves. Others discussed leaving lye manure near the pigs’ pigs, hoping the smells would scare the pigs away.
Prof. Dan Malkinson, a naturalist at the University of Haifa, investigated the question of whether pigs can be repelled with urine. He did his own informal experiment next to the lemon and loquat trees at the bottom of a friend’s garden.
“In the evening I would go out for a drink and recycle the beer,” Professor Malkinson said. “It’s two for the price of one: you fertilize the trees and try to scare the wild boars.”
Unfortunately, however, the pigs kept coming.
But Professor Malkinson, who examined the pigs years ago and even tracked them down with collars with GPS devices, wonders if the pigs are really the biggest problem in Haifa.
According to him, the tension that is most needed is not between pigs and humans – but among the humans themselves.
“Essentially, the conflict is between those who are against having wild boars in the city and those who are not,” Professor Malkinson said.
“This is not an ecological problem,” he added. “It’s a social problem.”
Myra Noveck and Irit Pazner Garshowitz contributed reporting from Jerusalem.