The beast from the east:Preparing for cross-border wild boars in Norway

Managing migrating species is a geobiopolitical undertaking: with this is meant that administrating life (and death) across borders has political implications between neighboring countries. When a species immigrates, or is moved anthropogenically, its sudden presence can trigger defensive-nativist responses from its new destination. Sometimes its mere risk is enough to generate anxiety. This is true both of invasive alien species and of unpopular or conflictful species. But what actually happens culturally and politically in the process of such an immigration? What determines which foreign representations and practices are adopted, vs. rejected? In this paper, we examine means of transmission of actual and representational wild boar from Sweden into Norway in the recent decade. With the relative infrequency of encountering physical boars in Norway today, representations of wild boar are necessarily imported from elsewhere in Europe. This is done through media coverage, personal experiences, international institutional cooperation and more. Our paper thus shows how traces of a ‘ghost’ boar precede and partly shape responses to a ‘corporeal’ boar in Norway. Through interviews with stakeholders, we show how the boar is welcomed, unwelcomed, made foreign and partly assimilated into Norwegian hunting culture by hunters, veterinarians, farmers and decision-makers. We show that the public—typically individual hunters—appears to have been more important actors in the diffusion process of learning how to live with (and hunt) wild boar than the transmission in institutional pathways has been. Complicating the situation is the contested nature of wild boar belonging in Norway, as an invasive alien species and threat from the east on the one hand, and as a new game resource on the other hand.