This story is delicious :))

‘Educated’ wild boar in Gloucestershire stealing food and breaking into pig farms to mate with sows


Read more at:  My kind of wild boar roaming...

Not so sure about digging up cricket pitches, though - that seems a bit excessive.

But it reminds me of once playing golf in France, in the late 1980s. I played at Hardelot les Pins, a beautiful course that winds through quiet, dense pine forest and sand dunes.

It was very early in the morning, as the young golf professional (who was my partner) suggested that if we teed off at 6 am, we would not be held up by the notoriously slow play of the locals. However, we were held up on the first hole, because - as we approached the green - we saw that a large area of fairway had been dug up. 

"Perhaps they are building a new bunker," suggested my partner, but it was not so.

The damage was done by wild boar, rarely seen this far north in France.

When we returned after finishing our round, the golf course manager was on the phone to another golf course in the Czech Republic, where invasion by wild boar was not uncommon. The answer was to surround the forest late at night with cars on full headlights and men with guns and torches to flush out the poor creatures and shoot them.
"Better in the pot than on the golf course," they told me...