Americans who grew up on Davy Crockett legends tend to like their hunting tough. You know, lots of rain. Some sleet bouncing off the brim of your cap. Ungodly inclines disappearing in the clouds. Sometimes, though, even Davy Crockett types like to kick back a bit and relax, no? Maybe dream of hunting out of a four-star hotel, right on a beach that's world-famous for its beautiful women. Enter Col. Davis Stevenson, US Army Retired. Stevenson spent most of his military career in South America, and he's now in the genteel business of putting together some unusual hunt packages. One of the first he has come up with is a boar hunt in the countryside near Punta Del Este, east of Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. Base camp for this hunt is the four-star Hotel Casino San Rafael. Grub consists of gourmet fare from top quality restaurants. The cost of this hunt runs $650 a day, but that includes hotel, all meals, ground transportation, services of dog handlers, gun permits, transfers from and back to Montevideo Airport - plus one boar of any size per day. Additional boars are $100 apiece. Hunters normally can expect to take at least one boar per day and might well take several. The per diem cost is negotiable if there are two or more hunters.
But how did Uruguay come to have wild boars, you ask? When European settlers began to colonize Uruguay, they found the country lacked indigenous big game and embarked upon an ambitious program of importing and releasing exotic big game animals. By far the most successful of their introductions was the wild boar, which now offers an excellent year-round hunting opportunity. Due to the mild climate, the total absence of predators, the abundant foodstuffs and the very light hunting pressure, wild boar have proliferated. In fact, by 1982 they had become so numerous and so destructive to land and crops that they were officially declared a national plague and hunting was authorized without any restrictions whatsoever. Since then their numbers have greatly multiplied, and they have become an even more dangerous plague. They thrive in........(continued)
