After the Olympic ecstasy, it became fashionable to repeat the cuñadero adage according to which until then "Barcelona had always lived with its back to the sea." There was, as always happens, some truth in the commonplace; but it should also be added that most city dwellers also spend their lives with their backs to the two rivers that ---thanks to providence--- limit our growth and, in turn, look with suspicion at the mountain. The relationship with the sea water has changed radically, but I have the feeling that we still contemplate from afar the Tres Turons or the Collserola mountain range as if these were landscapes from another planet; even more so the latter, now colonized by a series of highly motivated scientists and members of the invading army who have confined it with the aim that no human presence can hinder the containment of swine fever. Apart from being forgotten, now they go and barricade the mountain range.
On a daily level, the confinement of life (and the obsession with monitoring wild boars) has changed my routine very little. In the mountains, you see, I had only gone as a child and with great protest to go up to the Tibidabo amusement park or, as an adult and with much greater enthusiasm, to go to have sex in La Florida. But my Judeo-Christian education ---which has given me the gift of atheism--- has also caused me a stupid compassion for wild boars, who are not only now persecuted by hordes of men in white coats, as if they were the alien ET, but are about to experience a massive annihilation in the name of the natural-biological balance of the territory. Experts say that there are more wild boars than Catalans, so it will be necessary to excite the hunters of the tribe to massively eliminate a lot of specimens of this artiodactyl mammal. Well, as for me, and I don't know why the hell it happens to me, now I feel sorry for them.
Like most first-world European city dwellers who are absolutely allergic to the countryside, I began to love wild boars thanks to the Astérix cartoons, where this friendly round creature with a panxeta (potbelly) was the Gauls' favorite dish (a historical anachronism by Goscinny, as this tribe mostly devoured sheep, pigs, and even dogs). Obélix would guzzle down a few wild boars a day, but he seemed aware that one had to preserve them from extinction, if only to not run out of his favorite dish. Later, the Americans—who meddle with everything—bestowed much dignity upon Pumbaa the warthog, a jungle variant of this little animal (with a significant propensity for very trumpeting farts and living without worries) to whom etymology grants a dose of stoicism, because the porcus singularis does not refer to the creature's singularity, but to its dignified existential solitude.
For many days, both politicians and scientists explained to us—in an alarmingly uncritical way and without much information—that the origin of swine fever was a contaminated sandwich. It now seems that the matter more likely arose from an isolation or transport error of the virus in question in a very specific laboratory. In a curious abracadabra, the Generalitat has chosen a commission of wise men to investigate it... where, lo and behold, several researchers from this very center are found, making everything difficult to objectify. But be that as it may, I would say that the advent of this plague of porcine life will be the perfect excuse for an unrestrained wild boar hunt to begin. For me, I insist, it shouldn't matter, because I couldn't care less about the natural world and have always implicitly collaborated in murder by devouring magnificent civets. But, incomprehensibly, I have fallen ill with sentimentality.
Who knows if what bothers me is that imperious frenzy for the genocide of the wild boar, my poor dear, who is not at all to blame for the spread of the plague and who simply roams freely along the paths of Collserola. Well, there you have me patrolling Commander Paco and the entire scientific community compulsively searching for him, in a very clear example of wild boar-phobia. I know that all this is done for the good of the system and so that our farmers can earn their bread by sending pork to China and all the other global economy stuff. But lately, perhaps due to the disgusting sentimentality of Christmas or because of the emotional deficiencies I suffer as I approach middle age, I can only think of the future genocide of wild boars. This is an emotional article, and therefore absolutely dispensable but, at least, the critters will have had someone to write them a heartfelt epitaph.