Latin pop sensation Shakira took to Instagram on Wednesday to talk about an unexpected attack she and her 8-year-old son Milan experienced in a Barcelona park. In a series of now-expired stories, the singer talked about being attacked by several wild boars while walking through the park with her son.
The boars stole her purse, but fortunately she managed to wrangle it back, albeit with somewhat damaged contents. “Look how two wild boars that have attacked me in the park have left my bag,” she said, while displaying her muddied backpack.
“They have attacked me, they have shattered everything… and they were taking my bag to the forest with my phone. And in the end, they left me the bag/purse because I confronted them,” Shakira added. She also shared two photos she took of the boars, which do look quite large and menacing. Fortunately, neither she nor her son were injured.
While it may sound preposterous for wild boars to even be inhabiting a park in a city like Barcelona, it is apparently a very real problem. According to a 2019 Guardian article, the boars have been a problem for quite some time, with police logging over 1000 calls about nuisance boars in 2016. The animals cause thousands of road accidents each year, destroy property, hunt ground-nesting animals and their young, including endangered turtles’ eggs, and destroy crops, like fragile vine roots and shoots.
Boars can carry African swine fever, also known as ‘pig ebola’, which kills wild and domestic pigs. In 2014, this risk of disease threatened the global pork industry, and countries responded by erecting physical borders with neighbours, threatening embargoes, destroying millions of farmyard pigs, and offering bounties for the culling of wild boars.
Image: Shakira/Instagram
This article first appeared on Over60.