The images that the Cordovan hunter Miguel Ángel Pulido Baena has sent this Wednesday to Jara y Sedal continue surprising us: it is a mangy wild boar that has been recorded by his friend José Antonio Ordóñez Marín while he was jogging in the Sierras Subbéticas, in the province of Cordoba. Specifically, the video was recorded in the vicinity of the municipality of Luque.
When José Antonio came across the strange creature and recorded it, he decided to upload the images to his daily Instagram stories. It was there that Miguel Ángel Pulido Baena, who is a hunter, noticed the strangeness of this mangy boar. “I asked him if he knew what he had recorded, and he replied that as he doesn’t understand much about animals, he thought it would be normal at this time of year”, Miguel Ángel explains to this media outlet.
It was then that Miguel Ángel explained to his friend that, although at this time of year the wild boar loses its hair, it is an animal with mange, a disease which, although not very widespread in this part of the province of Córdoba, can occur in isolated cases, especially in foxes and even wild boar. “It looks like they’ve put a clippers in it”, the young man replied to the hunter.
New study shows that sarcoptic mange can affect wild boars
A scientific study published in Switzerland in 2018 found that seropositivity to sarcoptic mange (S. scabiei) is more frequent and occurs over a larger geographical range than expected. The results of the work suggest that the parasite is endemic within wild boar populations in Switzerland and other European countries, but that its presence is not necessarily associated with disease occurrence.
The study concludes that sarcoptic mange is more widely distributed in free-ranging wild boar populations than previously assumed.
