Wild boars are spotted near Inwangcheon Spring on the Inwangsan Trail, Jongno District, Seoul, in this undated photo. Yonhap
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 boars per square kilometer in 2022 to 1.6 in 2024. Concurrently, emergency calls to the fire department reporting boar sightings inside city limits fell 16 percent over the past year, dropping from 589 incidents to 494.
This year, Seoul is pivoting from blind containment to data-driven hunting. Park rangers are using advanced "infestation heat maps" provided by the National Institute of Biological Resources to dynamically relocate traps to active crossing corridors. To bypass the animals’ notorious suspicion of human structures, teams are utilizing local foraging data to craft highly appealing bait cocktails of ultrafresh grains.
Beyond trapping, city officials are launching a crackdown on the human behaviors that draw the animals down from the peaks, initiating public campaigns against illegal hillside farming and sloppy commercial food waste disposal.
“We are strengthening safety management to relieve citizens’ anxiety,” said Kim Young-hwan, head of the Seoul city government's Garden City Bureau, who urged hikers to stick to designated trails.
For a modern metropolis like Seoul, keeping the peace now means balancing urban sprawl with the ancient, unyielding rhythms of the surrounding wilderness.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.
Source: Korea Times News
