A teenage girl came into conflict with a wild boar on Tuesday while walking her dog in her neighborhood in Haifa, according to a Channel 12 report.
While Israel is known for the many stray cats roaming the streets, the wild boars that roam the streets of Haifa are less known. While the pigs are often shy, and roam at night, occasionally they're seen during the day interfering with human activities.
The girl was walking her dog Skip when they came across a wild boar, which promptly got into a fight with the dog."Skip got into a fight with a wild boar," the girl told her father over the phone.
The girl's parents quickly arrived on scene. "It was really scary," Mierav Sela, the mother of the girl, told Channel 12. "The wild boar escaped to the garden nearby. At this point we had already arrived and heard someone sound a whistle to drive away the boar, which the Haifa Municipality has recommended."
"And then what happened is that the pig ran away, and then ran back in our direction again," she said. "The situation got intense, because the dog began again to bark and go crazy."
Nearly everyday dozens of videos are shared documenting wild boars. In one neighborhood a boar was seen breaking into a food bag hanging off a baby stroller. In another situation a wild boar family had invaded someone's gardens. Wild boars prefer the wild over urban areas, but sightings of them in Haifa have become more common recently, as there is plenty of food to be found on the streets, either in trash cans or the food people leave out for stray cats.The Haifa Municipality claims to have taken action, but boar sightings have become more frequent, especially since the coronavirus outbreak, as people tend to stay indoors more, leaving streets empty for the boars to roam.Last year, the municipality suspended culls of the boars, whose urban incursions, some experts say, are a response to human expansion into their natural habitat – the surrounding Carmel forest range, of biblical fame.
Reuters contributed to this post.