BIG-GAME hunting has returned to Britain with gunmen paying £550 apiece to shoot captive wild boar on a country estate.

At two recent trial drives, 20 “hunters” killed a total of 51 wild boar. The owner of the estate now plans to hold regular commercial shoots. Enthusiasts predict that it will become a main-stream sport within the next few years as boar stocks grow.

However, antihunting campaigners are likely to target the sport, and the proprietor of Britain’s first commercial boar hunt will not advertise it publicly. He relies on word of mouth to attract customers.

In the two trial drives the animals were herded through woodland by men and dogs towards a line of shooters armed with large-calibre rifles - a minimum calibre of 0.270 is recommended.

Both drives took place at a secret location in Scotland within the past few weeks.

The boar are kept within a 200-acre enclosure with an electric fence and the carcasses are sold by the estate for meat.

“It is an adrenaline high as a 16-stone boar charges at you through the undergrowth,” said Dave Corner, a hunter who helped organise the drives. “But it is not without its dangers. Often the dogs used will be killed and the people can be badly hurt, too.”

Groups opposed to hunting were horrified at the development. A spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sports said: “It beggars belief that people actually get pleasure out of the mass slaughter of animals. Anyone participating in this kind of institutionalised killing has to be sick.”

And a spokeswoman for the Born Free Foundation said that flushing the boar would cause “confusion and panic” in the animals. “It is inhumane to treat wild or farm animals in this fashion,” she stated.

Wild boar became extinct in Britain 300 years ago but the number at large has grown rapidly in recent years because escaped and released animals from farms have bred and established populations from Kent to well north of the Scottish border.

Charlie Jacoby, who was the launch editor of Sporting Rifle magazine, estimated Britain’s population of wild boar at between 5,000 and 10,000. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will soon announce the results of a review into whether they should be subject to regulation and their killing licensed.

Farmers and landowners complain that the animals, omnivores with voracious appetites, destroy meadows and arable crops with their constant rooting and grubbing. They consider them a pest.

Jacoby said: “Wild boar and pheasant are pretty incompatible because the pigs destroy the land and the eggs and nests of the birds.”

The species is not classed as indigenous, so landowners can legally kill boar on their property. So far, however, they have been shot only singly or in small numbers by individual hunters working from hides at night.

Drives, which are a common hunting technique in mainland Europe, can lead to much larger kills.

The boars often turn and savage the dogs, sometimes killing them. With large males weighing 30 stone or more, armed with sharp tusks up to 6in long, they are dangerous to people too, although they usually attack only when threatened.

The drives in Scotland took place on December 28, when 18 boar were killed, and January 5, when 33 were killed, in the Dumfries and Galloway region. The Sunday Times has agreed not to identify the location.

Corner, who has attended drives in Germany and wanted to bring the concept to Britain, said: “We used about half a dozen beaters and between six and 12 dogs. One of the terriers seemed to take an instant dislike to wild boar. He was practically hanging off the tail of one of them.”

A line of men and dogs drove the boar through the woods to where rifle-men were positioned on 4ft “stands” to give them a superior firing line.

The largest boar to be shot weighed more than 25 stone. “One chap shot 10 of them and said he could have had 30 more,” Corner said. “We have all sorts of people taking part, from car mechanics and builders to multi-millionaires. They are bored with pheasant shooting and are looking for something different.”

Corner, who often shoots on the estate, said that there were also large populations of boar outside the enclosed shooting area. In future the drives may be held outside the barbed wire and electric fence.

Although the wild boar are considered pests, Corner said, they are fed to keep them from uprooting pasture and to foster the population for shoots.

The Hunting Act 2004 forbids the use of more than two dogs to flush out quarry. Corner said that no more than a couple of dogs were off the leash at any one time.

“In Germany they put the dogs in Kevlar vests to try to protect them from the boars’ tusks but every time I’ve been there I’ve seen dogs die on the boar drives.”

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