Shakira says she was attacked by a pair of wild boars in Barcelona
Shakira says she was attacked by two wild boars while in Barcelona, Spain. The singer took to Instagram to explain the harrowing tale to her followers, saying the boars attacked her and stole her bag while she was in a park with her son, Milan.
"Look at how two wild boar which attacked me in the park have left my bag," Shakira said in the Instagram story, according to BBC News. She showed the bag, which appeared covered in dirt.
"They were taking my bag to the woods with my mobile phone in it," she said. "They've destroyed everything." She then asked her 8-year-old son about the incident. "Milan, tell the truth. Say how your mummy stood up to the wild boar," she said, according to the BBC.
While the incident seems bizarre, Shakira is just one victim in a string of attacks by wild boars in Barcelona.
In 2016, police in Spain received 1,187 calls about hogs attacking dogs, running into cars and holding up traffic. And the problem made headlines in 2013, when a police officer attempted to shoot a wild boar but missed and accidentally hit his partner, BBC News reports.
The number of boars has exploded across Europe – not just in Spain – with more than 10 million across the continent. Not only can they be aggressive, but they can carry disease — and they can survive in almost any environment, including cities, where they can feed off garbage.
In Italy last year, a police officer killed a family of wild boars in a playground with a tranquilizer dart and lethal injections, which sparked outrage, BBC News reports.
Videos from Rome last week show groups of wild boars rampaging the city and eating garbage.
The ongoing boar issue has even spilled over into Rome's mayoral race, with Mayor Virginia Raggi, who is seeking re-election, filing a legal suit earlier this month accusing the Lazio region of failing to keep the animals out of the capital, according to Reuters. The region denied her accusations, saying management of the animals around Rome is up to the city's councils.
"Even walking to school...has become dangerous here," Nunzia Cammino, who lives in Rome, told Reuters.
And as wild boars wandering into Germany from Poland spread African swine fever, Germany last week asked the European Commission to help them put up a fence to counter the spread. The disease is harmless to humans but fatal for pigs, which can lead to a loss in pork exports.
A fence helped Denmark decrease the number of boars crossing its borders from Germany in 2020.
In 2019, European Union's executive approved Poland's plan to slaughter 200,000 wild boars to protect farm pigs from the disease, the Associated Press reports.