He said governments say they are waiting for the pork industry to lead and the pork industry is waiting for governments to lead “and we’re caught in the middle. We need a break.”
One of the threats is diseases could spread from wild pigs to hog farms. African Swine Fever is of particular concern because an outbreak on a hog farm would shut off exports which account for about 70 per cent of the industry’s revenues.
Dr. Lu said there have been reports of African Swine Fever popping up spontaneously – i.e without any spread that can be identified from diseased pigs.
And the Canadian population of wild pigs has been spreading agt the rate of about 88,000 square kilometers per year, mainly in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, but there have also been sightings in Northwest Ontario and Quebec.
Hunting, fencing and trapping have been ineffective, he said.
His idea is to build on technology used at the University of Guelph to develop the Enviropig to develop genetics that render females sterile.
His idea is to obtain cells from wild pigs in Western Canada an genetically engineer a cell without a particular gene. That can ber done using CRISPR technology which can identify a specific gene, knock it out or change it.
Then the plan is to grow a boar from a doctored cell, a boar who breeds sows whose female piglets either die in the womb or are sterile when they are born and grow.
If this works as planned, within five years the wild boar population would be cutr in half and in 10 years would be gone, he said.
The idea of sterilized genetics is not new. It has been successfully applied in Florida and a city in Brazil to almost completely rid those areas of mosquitoes that spread diseases such as dengue fever, yellow fever and Zika fever, he said.
