Every year in Italy more than 600,000 wild boar cause more than 5 million of damage to agriculture. The largest numbers are concentrated in Tuscany, with around 130,000 causing damage amounting to 3 million per year. At the moment huntsmen in Tuscany shoot up to 70,000 wild boar annually but even so the population is not diminishing.

In an attempt to solve this problem the World Wide Fund for Nature, at Burano a reserve on the Tuscan coast near Grosseto, is proposing that wild boar should be trapped in cages and taken to farms where they can be fattened up for meat production. Fausto Prosperini, national president of the federation of hunters, regards the WWF suggestion as naturalists ideology. He claims that the wild boar are an economic resource that could be controlled if properly managed by farmers and hunters together. The head of the agricultural commission for Tuscany, Fabbio Roggiolani, has accused hunters of encouraging the proliferation of wild boar because they control the sale of the meat at unnecessarily high prices.