The Agriculture, Fisheries & Conservation Department said it is very concerned about an incident at the Mong Kok Flower Market where a wild pig injured a member of the public today.
The department expressed sympathies to the injured person and hopes that he will recover soon.
After receiving a referral from Police this morning regarding the wild pig, the department said it immediately sent a dedicated team to the scene to follow up and found the animal upon arrival.
During the incident, the pig dashed into a flower shop on Yuen Ngai Street and injured a man. A department veterinarian anesthetised the animal with a tranquiliser gun and captured it.
The wild pig was reported as being an adult female weighing about 55kg with a body length of about 1.2 metres.
Considering that the wild pig had attacked a member of the public and its continual presence in urban areas would pose a danger to people, the department’s officers dispatched it humanely to safeguard public safety.
The department explained that in an effort to keep the public safe and maintain public hygiene, it implemented new measures in November 2021 to capture the wild pigs for humane dispatch at sites with a presence of large numbers of wild pigs, with cases of wild pigs injuring citizens, or with wild pigs posing risks to the public.
Since the implementation of the new measures, a total of over 670 wild pigs have been humanely dispatched, and the number of wild pig nuisance blackspots decreased from 63 in 2021 to 28 as of today, the department pointed out.
It added that there has also been a downward trend in the number of public reports of wild pig sightings or nuisances received by the department, from over 1,400 cases in 2021 to about 1,100 cases in 2022. The number of cases this year, as of September 2023, was about 770.
Furthermore, the number of injury cases caused by wild pigs has decreased from 20 cases in 2021 and 36 cases in 2022, to eight cases in 2023 as of today.
