The swines in question are wild boar and the banquet was a rich carpet of protected plants on Cerro Gordo… is nothing sacred?

The reason this happened, apart from the greedy pigs, was a lack of fencing, so before you could say, oink, they had uprooted half a hillside and wiped out almost all the orchids. Whereas goats might eat all the visible parts of a plant, pigs go the whole WMD and eat the roots and bulbs too.

The discovery was made by the Chairman of the Sociedad Andaluza de Botánica, Jorge Garzón and a merry band of botanists who were on a mission to croon over 22 Gennaria diphylla orchids. Without a doubt bacon sandwiches all round were their vengeful thoughts. Only two of the wild plants survived, so that a species in danger of extinction has become, “almost extinct” in the Chairman’s words.

Apart from the growth in the wild boar population, the problem is that protected wildlife land is pretty lush in plants and unlike farming land they don’t tend to get greeted by 12-bore diplomacy.

(News: Herradura, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia – photo: John and Jill Elson)