As wild boars invade Seoul’s suburbs, city fights back with data, steel

For residents living on the scenic fringes of Korea’s capital, an evening stroll has increasingly come with an unwelcome hazard: encounters with aggressive, multi-hundred-pound wild boars charging down from the mountains. Now, municipal authorities are deploying a mix of heavy-duty infrastructure and predictive data to reclaim the streets. The Seoul Metropolitan Government, in partnership with the Korea National Park Service, announced Monday an aggressive expansion of its urban wildlife containment strategy. Officials will install an additional 3 kilometers of specialized exclusion fencing along residential boundaries in heavily impacted northern districts, including Seodaemun, Nowon and Eunpyeong. The new barriers will fortify an already sprawling defense network that includes 18.8 kilometers of steel fencing and 184 heavy-duty cage traps strategically hidden along the foothills of Bukhansan National Park. The offensive appears to be working. According to city data, the population density of boars around Mount Bukhan has dropped steadily over the last four years, falling from 2.1 bo