African Swine Fever and wild and semi-wild swine farming in the Apennines: farmer perspectives on animal welfare and farm biosecurity

In January 2022, African Swine Fever (ASF) was found in wild boar in the northern Apennines. ASF is a highly contagious viral disease that infects wild and domesticated swine. While it cannot spread to humans, it is incredibly deadly for pigs and wild boar and can easily spread from wild to domesticated swine species. In Italy, wild boar are the current hosts of ASF and forests are the primary habitat of wild boar. Forests abut farmland in the Apennines and managing swine contact with wild boar is essential to controlling ASF spread. ASF poses an imminent threat especially to those farmers who practice the wild or semi-wild swine farming typical of the Apennine mountains.

Farmer behavior and beliefs are important variables in the control of ASF spread and must be understood in order to prepare currently uninfected Apennine areas for the arrival of ASF. This is because social behaviors and ideas about ASF have been shown to play an important role in ASF spread. Understanding the decision-making processes, beliefs and behaviors, understandings of disease, and broader social-ecological context of small-scale swine farming will be essential in the management and control of the disease. The current project therefore examines swine farmer perspectives on the threat posed by ASF, on animal welfare, on farm biosecurity measures, on veterinary practices for controlling ASF, and on the role of wild boar and forest ecosystems in spreading the disease. The goals are to increase animal welfare and farm biosecurity and surveillance in order to prepare farms for the arrival of ASF and to identify sustainable and feasible biosecurity measures for small-scale mountain farms. The study will also identify underlying ideas about the relationship between humans and nature that shape farmer beliefs and behavior and examine the links between human, animal, and ecosystem health and well-being in the Apennines.

ASF is a disease that connects: (1) human behavior, (2) wild and domesticated animal behavior, ecology, and biology, (3) ecosystems, and (4) virus epidemiology, molecular biology, and ecology. While this project focuses on human beliefs and behavior related to ASF, it considers them in relation to animals, ecosystems, and the virus itself, and to the larger social, economic, and ecological context of the farms under study.