Environmentalists across Europe are condemning an announcement by the Polish government which plans to kill 200,000 wild boars by the middle of March. The government says the measure is needed to contain African swine fever. Our correspondent Aljosa Milenkovic reports from Poland.

This is the grim fate awaiting more than two hundred thousand wild boars in Poland. The excuse for the mass slaughter is African Swine Fever. Poland has an estimated 240 to 250 thousand of the animals. Conservationists say killing 90 percent of them is an overreaction from the government. The decision has sparked outrage not just among the environmentalists, but also from hunters associations as well, with some of them even labelling it as "sick in the head".

ALJOSA MILENKOVIC WARSAW "But after the initial announcement, the Polish government backtracked and blamed poor interpretation of their original statement on the issue. Now, instead of hunting down and killing 200,000 wild boars in the next couple of months, they are claiming that's the figure for the period of the entire year."

The Polish minister of environment explaining and defending this mass cull, gave us the government's mathematics behind the decision.

HENRYK KOWALCZYK POLISH MINISTER OF THE ENVIRONMENT "The population of 240 to 250 thousand is always counted at the end of March of every year. So, since that moment, the boars reproduce very efficiently, and their numbers go up by at least 200 percent. So, in one year, they go up by about 500,000. Some are killed by predators, but at least 250 to 300 thousand boars are still added in a year. In other words, at the end of March next year, there should be about 250,000 boars again, so the population will not go down."

But environmentalists are not buying this explanation. Tomasz Zdojewski is a member of an anti-hunting NGO. He says the decision is not based on the risk of African swine fever, but to satisfy the interests of groups whose votes the government needs.

TOMASZ ZDROJEWSKI SPOKESMAN LET LIVE CAMPAIGN "It's a political decision that fulfills the demands of farmers. They openly say that they want all wild boars in the country to be killed. It is the position of pig farmers. And farmers who grow crops also have a hidden goal in this depopulation, or extermination, of wild boars. They want to get rid of damage to the crops inflicted by the wild boars."

Environmentalists say this mass cull won't just fail to stop African swine fever, but it might inflict irreversible damage to the ecosystem. That's something the Polish government has just recently been accused of, when it allowed commercial logging in one of Europe's last primeval forests.

Aljosa Milenkovic, CGTN, Warsaw.