The hunting season began in Burgundy last Sunday. The first couple of weeks are dedicated to the pursuit of small game: pigeons, partridges and hares. Call it the hors d’oeuvre to the main course: the hunting of wild boar, which gets underway in earnest at the start of October.

My neighbour, a farmer, hunts, and so does his son and most of their friends. They spent much of Sunday blazing away in the adjacent fields. I felt like I was in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Not that I mind. I was a townie in another life but now I’m what the French call a plouc (yokel), and in rural France hunting is sacrosanct. It’s also imperative, specifically the culling of wild boar. Their numbers have exploded in recent years and the damage they do is immense.

More boar and fewer hunters means those who do go out every weekend aren’t short of targets

More boar and fewer hunters means those who do go out every weekend aren’t short of targets

A 60kg boar can eat up to 3kg of food a day, although many of the beasts weigh twice as much. Boars aren’t fussy eaters. They’ll snack on anything from roots, crops and fruit to insects and small rodents. So ravenous are boars, they have been known to roam as far as thirty miles in one night in search of a good feast. On the advice of my neighbour, I........

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