Secret Weapon Against Wild Boar - Human Hair?

Yesterday, March 9, 2009, The Star Online, the electronic version of The Star, Malaysia's most widely-read English-language daily, published an interesting report on a novel method to prevent wild boar from damaging crops.

The manager of the Kampung Sungai Laba plantation claims to have successfully used human hair to keep wild boar from destroying his freshly planted oil palm fields and eating the young plants.

“Previously, if we planted 300 oil palm trees today, we would find that by the next day all the trees would have been uprooted and eaten by the wild boars” said plantation manager Mohd Nuin Rusni.

“However, after placing human hair around the young crops, the wild boar don’t destroy them,” he said according to the newspaper report.

The plantation manger first learned about this unusual method while working on another oil palm plantation.

“A handful of hair was placed near the young crop so that when the wild boar sniffs the hair, it would think that there are humans present or the hair will get into its nostrils and thus, it will run off,” he said.

If this proved to be true it would be an entirely new and organic method of keeping wild pigs out of crops planted on a ranch. The problem is that in Malaysia it took three months to gather enough human hair (about 200 sacks) from barber shops to supply enough for one plantation.

Even if it worked, organic boar control apparently has its own organic limitations.

PJJ