Pigs are not native to the Western Hemisphere. But when European settlers set out for the New World in the 15th and 16th centuries, they brought swarthy swine with them. The animals were an obvious choice as a food source: highly prolific breeders that were hardy and adaptable enough to fend for themselves on the landscape.
Before long, America’s free-ranging pig population was booming. The animals are difficult to survey, but experts estimate that the United States is now home to at least six million feral hogs, descendants of those early farm animals and Eurasian wild boars that arrived later. Although feral hogs have been reported in dozens of states, they are especially common in Texas.
“There’s a saying in Texas,” said R.A. Ortiz, who goes by Bubba, of Ortiz Game Management in New Braunfels, Texas. “There’s two kinds of property owners: One that has a feral hog problem and one that’s about to have a feral hog problem.”
There’s no easy solution. “Because they’re not native to this part of the planet, there is nowhere that we could take these animals and go release them where they ought to be,” said John Tomecek, a wildlife biologist at Texas A&M University and former chair of the National Wild Pig Task Force. “So every option that we have involves either preventing them from being born in the first place or killing the ones that are alive. That can be a distasteful thing to think about.”
Dr. Tomecek has no personal animus against the pigs, which, he noted, reproduce quickly because humans bred them to do just that. “But,” he said, “they have to go away.”
Fixing the feral pig problem will require an array of approaches, all of which have limitations and drawbacks. Here’s what some Texans are trying:
Trapping
Wild pigs, which live in social groups called sounders, are highly intelligent. Targeting just a few pigs at a time merely teaches the survivors how to avoid capture, so many trappers employ large, corral-style traps to round up an entire sounder at once.
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The post How to Deal With 30 to 50 Feral Hogs appeared first on New York Times.
