Wild boar as the state: Wildlife/state of agricultural decline and reproduction at the Hungarian–Slovenian border

The article examines a popular story framing the state’s introduction of wild boars into the local environment of the Hungarian-Slovenian borderlands as a purposeful act aimed at harming peasants. By presenting animal agency as the agency of the state (wildlife/state), the narrative projects an image of an insidious state expanding into the local environment under the guise of seemingly natural forces. The article explores how this story resonates differently in neighbouring borderlands, depending on their contrasting political, economic, and ecological histories. In one borderland, it laments the bygone era of peasant agriculture; in the other, where household farming persists, the story helps sustain resistance against the state as a steward of wildlife in the context of peasants’ struggle to secure reproduction. Meanwhile, in this other context, hunters, as state representatives, contest the narrative. They highlight the natural increase in the wild boar population as indicative of their, and the state’s, limited influence on wildlife. Framing the narrative of the wild boar and the state as a purported historical event conveys different moral and political messages in neighbouring borderlands and among various actors; it can be viewed as a framing the past, but it can also apply that past to current boundary work and class struggle.