Book Review: Wild Boars by Geert Groot Bruinderink and Jasja Dekker

 

 Note: The title of this book has been translated into English by me for the reading comprehension of this blog's viewers as the book itself isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads Wilde zwijnen.

Wild boars are actually one of my favorite animals, though I know I don't talk about them much. So let's have a look at this non-fiction about them.

In this book, the authors delve into these animals, particularly their existence in the Netherlands. We learn mostly about their relationship to humans, due to (among others) the damage they cause to farmland and the huge (arguably too big) population of boar in our little country.

While I like this book, I do have a few gripes with it. First, it was really short, only a 100 pages or so, a lot of which were just covered in pictures. And while I do like to have images in my non-fiction books, here it feels like they were taking up much-needed space where more text could be added.

I also wish this book was more about boar themselves as a species. While we do get brief chapters about what their lives are like in the wild, they felt really brief compared to the rest of the book, which is about human-boar relations in the Netherlands. I still think that's an interesting subject as well, but I could've done with more info about the species, maybe by highlighting a certain individual the authors studied for example. 

I've read plenty of wolf non-fiction books that do this, by describing parts of the life of an actual wolf they followed in real life, and it really puts the information we're given into perspective. Here, we're just given basic info about the animal before delving into the human-boar relationship stuff. I could also simply open up a Wikipedia page if I wanted that. 

Another thing: the font was simply too small. I get that it's a thin book, but I had trouble reading it sometimes and I'm not even nearsighted. I'd have preferred it if the book was longer with a larger font, that would've made it easier to read.

That said, I do like the parts we're given about the boar-human relationship aspects, as it really goes in-depth there, also interviewing several people with different occupations and stances on wild boars. Some are pro-population control through hunting, others want different solutions or to just leave things be. It's interesting to read these people's point of views and the information the authors gathered about wild boar in the Netherlands.

Overall a decent book, I just wish it were longer and went more in-depth on how boars actually live in the wild. Give me some examples of real-life individual boars. And a larger font, even just a tad larger or at least thicker, would've been nice. 

Rating: 3.5/5