From Pests to Pets: Wild Boars Ambivalent Companions in Rural Uruguay

Multispecies and more-than-human approaches are key to broadening our understanding of interspecies relations in the Anthropocene. These perspectives promote relational knowledge, showing how human and nonhuman worlds are intertwined through “encounters” (Lestel and Taylor, 2013). Accepting the contextual and paradoxical nature of human and animal categories requires us to understand how “empirical animality” emerges in shared spaces, bonds, and affects, co-produced and transformed into regimes of coexistence (Haraway, 2008; Ingold, 1992).

This paper, adopting a phenomenological approach and the idea of fluid, intersubjective animality, explores the relationships between humans and non-traditional pets, focusing on the wild boar in Uruguay. Although considered both a pest and an Invasive Alien Species, subject to eradication programs, wild boars are also raised as pets or companion animals in some rural households, where they participate in affectionate, care-based relationships despite their classification as pests.

Fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024 involved interviews and participant observation with farmers, hunters, veterinarians, and biologists who work with this species, some of whom have raised wild boars as pets. The findings present the wild boar as a potentially ambivalent pet, revealing the complex affective relationships established between humans and nonhumans. Key attributes, such as charisma, care, extensionism, and individualization, mediate these interactions. The wild boar case illustrates the ambivalence of how the same animal can embody different animalities, or how the same person can perceive the animal differently depending on the context. We propose that, as a pet, the wild boar blurs the boundaries between the wild and the domesticated, becoming part of multispecies kinship and family dynamics based on reciprocity and affection. This, in turn, highlights the complexity and ambivalence of human-nonhuman relationships and the richness of multispecies assemblages in the Anthropocene.