Wild Boar in Berlin: What to Do When You Meet One, and How to Keep Them Out
On 13 March 2026 a wild boar walked into the Allende-Center in Köpenick. The shopping centre was closed off for a while, and the police and staff from Tierpark Berlin had to push the animal back out of the building. Nobody in the estate around it was very surprised. Residents had been reporting boar between the flats and the river for more than a year.
That is the thing about wild boar in Berlin: they are not a forest story any more. They root up lawns in Zehlendorf, cross the road at Heiligensee and walk past playgrounds in Spandau. If you live here long enough, you will meet one. The meeting is almost always harmless, as long as you know the three or four things that turn it into trouble.
Where you meet wild boar in Berlin
Most of the city's boar live in and around the big forests: Grunewald and the Havel shore, Spandauer Forst, the Tegel forest, the woods around Köpenick and the Müggelsee, and the forests of Pankow in the north. The Berlin environment department and the NABU say they mostly stay at the edges of the city, but they follow green strips much further in and feed in parks, cemeteries and gardens.
Some families never go back to the forest. The NABU calls them "Stadtschweine", city pigs. They remember every place where they once found food, they teach those places to their young, and they stay in the housing estates all year. That is why the same streets get the same visitors every night.
Hakenfelde in Spandau, March. A group with young digging up a park beside the path, in daylight.
Boar can be out at any hour, but the ones in town learn quickly. When people disturb them by day, they move their feeding to dusk and night and sleep in thick cover. So the meeting most residents have is on the walk home after dark, on a path along the forest edge, or at the bins.
What to do when you meet a wild boar
The official advice from the Senate, the districts and the NABU fits on a postcard, and it works:
Stay calm and keep your distance. Stand still or walk back slowly. Slow movements tell the animal you are not a threat.
Always leave it a way out. Never walk a boar into a fence, a corner of a garden, a yard or a building. A boar that cannot get away is the one that charges.
Give a sow with young a very wide berth. Turn round and go back the way you came. Boar attack people when they think they or their young are being threatened, and walking between a mother and her piglets looks exactly like that.
Do not go closer for a photo, and never follow them to see where they go.
City boar often do not run when they see you. That is not aggression. They are used to people, and in most cases they will not attack. I treat a boar on a path like a cyclist coming the other way: I slow down, I leave space, and I let it decide where it is going first.
Wild boar and dogs
This is where most real trouble starts. Your dog smells and hears the boar long before you see it. Many dogs follow the hunting instinct, and then find out that a 70 kilo animal fights back. A sow with piglets sees any dog as a threat to her young and can get very aggressive.
So the NABU's advice is simple: keep the dog on the lead where boar live. If you are walking in a forest area where dogs may run free, the dog still has to come back the moment you call. I wrote about where that rule applies in my guide to dog parks in Berlin. If your dog's recall is not perfect, dusk on a forest path is the wrong place to find out.
Check the boar year for your date
The risk is not the same all year, and neither is the light. I built a small tool that shows both for any date and time: where Berlin's boar are in their year, when it gets dark in the city that day, and whether the NABU wildlife line is open at that hour. Then it runs a three-step drill and gives you the move for where you are. You can also keep it open as the Berlin Boar Year tool on its own page.
When wild boar are most dangerous
According to the NABU, the mating season runs from late October to March, with its peak from November to January. The males live alone for most of the year and join the family groups now, so a group you meet in December can be bigger than it looks.
A sow carries her young for about four months. Count forward from the peak and most piglets arrive in spring. Before giving birth she leaves the group for a nest in thick cover, and she suckles the young for about three months. Piglets keep their pale stripes until they are about four months old, so from spring into late summer you should assume any group has young in it, even if you only see the big animals.
Sows with striped young in a Spandau park in May. This is the meeting to walk away from, slowly and in the other direction.
That spring scene of a mother leading her striped young through the trees is the one I chose for my Grunewald print, and it is also the moment in the boar year when I give them the most room.
A boar and her two striped young in the Grunewald pines. My Grunewald print, printed to order.
How to keep wild boar out of your garden
Boar smell bulbs, roots, fallen fruit and vegetable scraps from a long way off. If your garden or allotment backs onto a forest, a hedge will not stop them.
Build a proper fence. The Treptow-Köpenick district puts the minimum at about 1.50 metres high and dug about 40 cm into the ground. The NABU adds the trick that makes it work: bend the buried part outwards, so the boar stands on the fence when it tries to lift it with its snout. An electric fence is the other option.
Keep compost inside the fence. An open heap outside it is an invitation.
Keep bins closed and put them out only shortly before collection.
Never dump garden waste or fruit at the forest edge. It is one of the main reasons boar move into a street.
One thing many people only learn after the damage: in residential areas, gardens, parks and cemeteries, hunting is banned for safety reasons, and there is no right to compensation for damage done by wild animals there. A torn-up lawn is your own cost. If you rent a Kleingarten near the woods, the fence is worth more than any plant you put behind it.
Piglets in the sandpit of a playground in Hakenfelde, Spandau. Sand and lawn are easy digging, and picnic leftovers do the rest.
Feeding wild boar is banned, and it is the real problem
Feeding wild animals is banned in Berlin under the state hunting law, and the fine can reach 5,000 euros. Almost everyone who does it means well. They think the animals are hungry. They are not: the city is full of acorns, chestnuts, roots, mice and leftovers.
What feeding does is take away the animals' natural distance from people. Fed boar come back every night, dig up the same front gardens and start pushing people for more. In its answer to a question in the Abgeordnetenhaus in September 2026, the district office of Treptow-Köpenick said that residents in the Allende area were feeding wild animals. That estate is the one the boar in the shopping centre came from.
A family working through spilled rubbish by a Berlin road. Every easy meal teaches them to come back.
If a neighbour feeds them, talk to them first. If that does not help, tell the district office: the forestry office looks into repeated reports.
Who to call about wild boar in Berlin
Danger to people, a boar inside a building, or a car accident: the police on 110.
Advice about boar in your street or garden: the NABU wildlife line on 030 54712891. From October to March it is staffed Monday to Wednesday and Friday from 10:00 to 13:00, and Thursday from 12:00 to 15:00, with longer hours from April to September. I checked those hours on 2 November 2026; the tool above shows whether the line is open on the day you pick.
A dead boar: keep yourself and your dog away from it. Report it to the local forestry office (Forstamt) if it lies in the forest, or to the district office (Bezirksamt) if it is outside. The animals are tested for African swine fever.
Do not expect someone to come and shoot the boar in your street. The city's Stadtjäger are volunteers with a special permit, they are not employed by Berlin, and they may only fire where nobody and nothing else can be put at risk. In the hunting year 2025 they took 47 boar in the whole district of Treptow-Köpenick. Prevention in your own garden does more than any call.
If you hit a wild boar with your car
The Senate counts more than 200 wild boar killed on Berlin's roads every year. Forest roads at dusk are the worst: think of Havelchaussee, the roads through Grunewald and Spandau, and the Adlergestell towards Grünau. Boar move in groups, so where one crosses, the next one is usually right behind it.
If it happens, the Senate's checklist is short:
Secure the scene with hazard lights and the warning triangle.
If it is safe, pull the animal to the side of the road. Never put it in your car: that counts as poaching.
Call the police. They bring in the hunter responsible for the area.
If the animal ran off injured, mark the spot with sticks and do not follow it. A hunter will search for it with a dog.
Leave blood and hair on the car until the police have seen it. Damage from a boar is covered by both partial (Teilkasko) and full (Vollkasko) car insurance.
The Tiefwerder Wiesen nature reserve in Spandau. A boar where it belongs, at the wet edge of the city.
My move for this winter is simple: dog on the lead after sunset on any path by the woods, compost behind a real fence, and a calm step back whenever a black shape turns up at the end of the street. Berlin shares its edges with a few thousand wild animals. Most of the time, all they want from you is room to walk past.
Image credits
Source and licence details for the 5 photographs used in this article.
Wild boar between the blocks in Hakenfelde, Spandau: Leonhard Lenz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A group with young in a park in Hakenfelde: Leonhard Lenz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sows with striped young in a Spandau park: Leonhard Lenz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Piglets on a playground in Hakenfelde: Leonhard Lenz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A boar in the Tiefwerder Wiesen, Spandau: Holz.Bube, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.