By Miguel A. Faria, MD
Perry, Georgia attorney Larry Walker penned an interesting article in the (Macon) Telegraph on wild hogs describing their increasing destruction of flora, fauna, and property — a scourge and a serious concern to citizens in more than 40 states. Moreover, the multiple stories about wild hogs rampaging across the land and the recent woman killed in Texas by a sounder of wild boars exemplify this increasing problem.
Nevertheless, after citing disheartening statistics about wild hog damage, Walker further opines, “…trapping is difficult, if done properly, and shooting is not very effective.”
I ask: Are there any challenging tasks or arduous sports worth pursuing that are not difficult?
Where there is a will there is a way. Moreover, Walker’s assertion is not entirely correct. While trapping feral hogs is vastly superior, hunting them is not impossible, and the sport is not devoid of value and excitement.
The hog population can be culled, or at least the sounders can be forced out of valuable pasture and agricultural land and chased to more natural habitats in swamps and low-lying brush through hunting and trapping by private sportsmen (or farmers can invite hunters with dogs to do so).
There is no need to bring more government agencies to do a job that we can do as private citizens. A story that took place along the banks of the Ocmulgee River, “Whose bread I eat, his song I must sing,” told by the late Dr. J.G. McDaniel of Fulton County, illustrates this, conveying meanings at several levels:
Years ago in the great Horse-Shoe Bend down the river, there lived a drove of wild hogs. Where they came from no one knew, but they survived floods, fire, freezes, droughts and hunters. The greatest compliment a man could pay to a dog was to say that it had fought the hogs in Horse-Shoe Bend and returned alive…
Finally a one-gallused man came by the country store on the river road and asked the whereabouts of these wild hogs. He drove a one-horse wagon, had an ax, some quilts, a lantern, some corn, and a single barrel shotgun. He was a slender, slow moving patient man — he chewed his tobacco deliberately and spat very seldom.
Several months later he came back to the same store and asked for help to bring out the wild hogs…he had them all in a pen over in the swamp. Bewildered farmers, dubious hunters, and store-keepers all gathered in the heart of Horse-Shoe Bend to view the captive hogs.
‘It was all very simple, said the one-gallused man. ‘First I put some corn. For three weeks they would not eat it. Then some of the young grabbed an ear and ran off in the thicket.
Soon they were all eating it; then I commenced building a pen around the corn, a little higher each day. When I noticed that they were all waiting for me to bring the corn and had stopped grubbing for acorns and roots. I built the trap door.
Naturally,’ said the patient man, ‘they raised quite a ruckus when they seen they was trapped, but I can pen any animal on the face of this earth if I can just get him to depend on me for a free-handout.’
The story is instructive on several levels. Wild hogs, like men, can be trapped if they can be made dependent on a free-handout. And so it was that by baiting large, sturdily-constructed traps with corn, we trapped ferocious wild hogs at the farms of our friends in Taylor County, and ended there the damage of crops, sod and hay farms caused by these animals over the years.
Other hunters nearby used dogs (we didn’t). The hogs have not come back in force for two years. But we are ready for them if they return. It is open season for feral hogs in Georgia year round.
As a result of the hog hunts, we have had sausages, pork chops, and ribs in our freezer — pork that was so “important to the Walker family” in previous generations. Farmers are frequently willing to allow hunters to hunt wild hogs on their property, and pork can also be donated to the needy. It is the most consumed meat in the world. (Wild hog is lower in fat than regular pork.)
My friend and butcher, Ernest Thomas of Bolingbroke, Georgia, does a magnificent job of preparing the meat with our favorite cuts. My freezer is depleted; not only have we consumed a lot of venison and pork in the last few years, but we have even taken some to my family in Miami.
Worth repeating: There is no need to bring any government agencies in to do a job that we can do as private citizens. And let’s turn this problem into an opportunity, while protecting our property, the environment, and exploiting a natural resource that sorely needs exploiting.
Miguel A. Faria, M.D., is Associate Editor in Chief in socioeconomics, politics, medicine, and world affairs of Surgical Neurology International (SNI). This article is excerpted and edited from his newly release book, America, Guns, and Freedom: A Journey Into Politics and the Public Health & Gun Control Movements (2019)
Concerning the woman that was killed. Years ago I saw a stat that claimed that farm pigs killed more people per year in the US than dogs did.
If land owners are seeking to make a profit off eliminating their ‘problem’ pigs then the pigs are not enough of a problem, if any.
An agreement, I would love to go shoot some hogs. However, the farmers are charging too much for the activity to be enjoyable. Particularly with the knowledge that, if I actually hit a hog, it will cost me from $50-$200, and that is in addition to the “land use” charge.
This is another case of, “I will treat it like it is a problem when the people saying it is a problem start acting like it is a problem.”
What? How much are the hogs paying him for land use?
Exactly.
My response to the Texans charging admission to volunteer exterminators is “If you want your vermin, you can keep your vermin”
Exactly. Hogs make money. If people actually wanted them gone, they’d PAY hunters to remove them and the problem would be solved in a week. There’s too much money in hog hunting for that to happen.
Exactly this. As long as folks are making money off the hogs on their land they don’t have to feed, some will. And for every article about what a mess it all is, there are plenty about the land owners getting caught trapping and transporting wild hogs to replenish those hunted off their lands.
The payed bounties the US Gov had on eagles and wolves worked so well that they went extinct in most of the lower 48…
“Farmers are frequently willing to allow hunters to hunt wild hogs on their property,”
…yeah, not in the Hunter’s Paradise of Texas.
Or we should say the Well-heeled Hunter’s Paradise. Hunting in this state is a rich man’s game: you either own property you can hunt on, are friends or relatives with people whose land you can hunt on or have money to pay someone for the privilege of hunting their land.
But how to persuade landowners to stop charging people to help deal with their pest problem? Or to allow strangers to stalk their land with guns?
We see no easy answers here.
I’m still waiting to see my first hogs, all I seem to find is rooting and piles of crap in the forest. I think my neighbors killed them all, they tore down their hog trap but maybe its just for deer season. Their deer feeders attracted the hogs in the first place so naturally they should be the ones to clean up.
The building the pen around them strategy is a good one. I’ve seen it used first hand just as described and never fails.
Oh and by the way, pig hunting is a blast no matter which way you do it.
Shooting enough hogs to overcome their birth rate is unlikely to eliminate the problem, but certainly may lessen it.
As for farmers who charge hunters for helping with their wild hog problem, well, screw ’em. They don’t deserve the help.
People need to make a living. Yeah it’s frustrating but there’s also 22 million acres of public land in Texas alone to hunt pigs on.
If hogs are really a problem in terms of damaging crops then one would imagine farmers would make a better living by incentivizing people to kill the hogs, rather than deincentivizing it.
Yeah good point
OmnivorousBeorn I would like to hear more about all this public hunting land. I looked into hunting public lands in Ark&TX just for the feral pork. And it is mostly a no-go in all the Federal parks and forests and the State parks are too small.. But these pigs just can’t stay away from my fenced truck patch. Might be all the Asian carp heads I plow in the soil?
Not sure where you are, but the Crockett National Forest, LBJ grasslands, and the Caddo are a start for northeast TX.
I’m sure there are more and better places, but that’s tens of thousands of acres already.
While I agree the problem can be tackled. The writer is naive to think it will be done by taking out Hogs with hunters.
The problems is that hogs are approached as game animals instead of the pestilence they are.
When hunters hunt them, there will always be hogs. The biggest problems with hogs is hunter capturing them somewhere else and releasing them into their favorite hunting areas.
It should be illegal to transport hogs for relocation in the same way it is illegal to transport an invasive noxious weed. Real fines and penalties. Make it hurt.
Then approach hog killing as in the article. En masse, not singly. JaegerPro has some good videos on YouTube. If hogs are trapped on your land, make sure they are killed before they are loaded. Otherwise, they become someone else’s problem tomorrow.
They are not game, the are the most destructive invasive animal species in north america.
There are a very few States that have no restrictions on killing hogs, Georgia, TX, MS for example. Not sure about others. But most States do treat them as game animals with all the usual – license, seasons, etc. In MS you cannot transport live wild hogs without a special permit, they must be killed where you find or trap them. We would like to have the State put a bounty on them, but they’ve refused to do that since a bounty is not in the State budget. About the only thing MDWFP is willing to do is give free advice.
mdwfp dot com/wildlife-hunting/wild-hog-program/control-efforts/
Now, I really do not know, but have been told that wild hogs taste much better after a 40 day diet of corn, off of the dirt. That sounds to me like trapping, transporting to a better location and feeding is a win-win for the trapper and (assumably) the landowner. Trap 20 and get bacon for a couple o years and butts to be made into hams.
I never want to eat boar that was shot in the wild again – it stank and tasted nasty….
Yeah. MA is in tune with their evil nature.
As the author of the post stated – private individuals could get it done. Building and tending a large catch pen to corral 30 or so hogs can be done. A hunt club could make a hog slaughter holiday and offer some of the meat as meals for poor kids or old folks.
Pigs are good ( tasty). Feral hogs are evil
It keeps changing MS to MA. Spell checker must be a democrat.
in Fl.the only way to remove hogs off government property is dead and on some of them there is no limit on how small they say if it grunts kill it
Yeah. Some of my FWC friends maintain they are allowed to kill one per day on state property. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it. 😉
Kill them all….the Lord will know his own.
Back in the 60s I read that John Mecum Jr. of the real estate and oil Mecums used to hunt hogs with machine mounted half-track. It might be time to get some vehicles and play The Lost World, Jurassic Park.
“…shooting is not very effective.”
In my experience, putting a bullet into a pest animal is a very effective solution.
****
“I can pen any animal on the face of this earth if I can just get him to depend on me for a free-handout.”
I’m sure we’re all thinking the same thing here. Leftie Snowflakes and their bread-and-circuses free stuff…you know, for votes.
Feral hogs are smart sumbitches. You shoot one and his homies just figured out what not to do.
Hog gestation is around 4 months and they often throw 10 or more hoglets. You cant shoot them fast enough to reduce the population.
And – it takes a good while to get more than two hogs to enter a pen at one time. They usually spend several weeks with two entering and leaving to swap out with others. Smart sumbitches……
Makes you wonder when the balance is going to tip so badly that farmers & land owners will finally just let the hunters come in and take care of the problem for them, and be invited to return from time to time. Any hog hunter would probably be glad to pay a modest flat per diem fee (say $50) to take as many heads as he/she can. Fun for the hunter, good for the land owner.
If they are hunted like game – they will never be reduced much . People quit paying to hunt if they get hard to kill. Population explodes …..hunters want back in….time and again.
Well, no-nut November, and a big ass riffl raffl, some thermal optics, and creepin through the forests seems like a good way to get it on.
When I see farmers or ranchers are paying experienced hunters to eradicate hogs on their land, then I’ll consider the problem is ‘serious’ – and not one moment before that point.
See, I know something the public doesn’t know: farmers and ranchers will pay to eradicate a pest they really perceive as a problem. The fact that farmers and ranchers are charging people to shoot hots means that they’re not a problem in the eyes of those farmers.
When I farmed, there were times I paid people to trap/shoot/poison pocket gophers and ground squirrels on my outfit until such time as the population was brought under control. After they were brought under control, then occasionally I would allow some dilettantes with fancy rifles and high-power optics to shoot on the land – because while I knew they weren’t going to do squat for reducing the numbers, I also knew they weren’t going to make the numbers worse.
For the farmers in places like Texas who are bellyaching about hogs being a problem: Look, this isn’t rocket surgery. You put out some corn meal or other bait, and you soak it in antifreeze. Boom, dead pigs. Want another solution? Set out some sort of sweet fruit bait, like peaches or strawberries, and lace it with sodium nitrate. Boom, dead pigs.
My experience is that shooting or trapping pests is a very slow way to reduce numbers. If you really want to reduce numbers, you have to poison them.
What you say about poison working is true. Unfortunately it’s also illegal as hell. Don’t get caught.
Something else I know about farming and farmers: There’s lots of things that are ‘illegal’ – because some city slicker lost their pet on a farmer’s land or some such.
This doesn’t stop it from being done. When any pest reaches the point where farmers truly consider it an economic threat, measures are often taken that don’t meet with public or government approval. Things get used off-label all the time. Illegal? Yup. Economic? Yup. Effective? Yup.
There’s a reason why farmers/ranchers in the west have the saying “shoot, shovel, shut up.”
As it stands now, the EPA and Texas Dep’t of Ag are labeling a warfarin-based poison for hogs for use by licensed applicators. I consider warfarin to be a stupidly slow poison with an absurdly high secondary kill – I don’t know why they’re going through the process of labeling it, but here we are. Where there’s stupidity, there’s a government bureaucrat to champion the cause of stupidity.
Texas is also examining sodium nitrite for hog poison – but in the recent test, someone set it out in a way that resulted in a huge off-target bird kill in Texas.
The problem with poisons is that there’s always some dumb gomer who doesn’t think about what he’s doing with said poison, and they end up making a problem for everyone. It’s the reason why strych is now so highly restricted, where it used to be a great pocket gopher poison on groated oats buried with a burrow-builder. Strych is hell on raptors and canines, and some idiot used it in a manner where the gophers were dead above ground. So they take a tool out of the farmer’s IPM toolbox, and we’re right back to where we started – with pests coming out our ears, and no economic tool to solve the problem.
Speaking of using legally questionable methods, the most effective ways to tackle your gopher problems in CA are:
1) Road Flares. Forget those wimpy gas cartridges from Home Depot. Toss a couple of hissing deathsticks down the tunnels to send some fire and brimstone. This is my perennial favorite.
2) Chlorine Gas. A quart each of ammonia and chlorine bleach poured together down a hole sends a message. Just make sure to hold your breath while you do this until the hole is plugged up with dirt afterward.
3) Motor Oil. For a more lasting effect, save your used motor oil and pour several quarts’ worth down a tunnelway. Soaks into the soil and makes it taste really bad to those saber-toothed rootmunchers. Over time, as you treat the outer perimeter of your property, they’ll eventually give up crossing “The Line” and you’ll never see them in your yard again.
Just sayin’.
You know what a PPM or two of that used motor oil tastes like when it hits the aquifer and a hundred water wells get a wiff of it?
I’m all for creativity, but only a POS would pour used motor oil in the ground.
Hey Fed,
A small amount of motor oil only seeps down a couple of feet into the ground at most. Our SoCal aquifers are literally hundreds of feet down, and the larger ones have collapsed several inches over the years due to depletion.
Argue however you want to, because there’s always someone who tells me they’re against gopher traps (it hertz dem!), gassers (it chokes dem!), or pellet guns (it killz dem!). I’ll tell you what…there are no more gophers around my property, so I’m no longer having to replace large swaths of lawn grass.
You do what you want with your own yard. Let me know how you deal with the gophers/raccoons/coyotes/hogs when they start tearing it up.
It would be interesting to know if poisoning hogs is illegal in TX. I have been told that ANYTHING which kills them is legal, but the discussion concerned helicopters, machine guns, night vision, etc, not certain poison was considered.
And all it takes is one or two “gentlemen farmers” that allow hog hunting so they can make money to really exacerbate the problem. Since the hogs dont respect property lines, all the other farms get to share in the misery and feed these guy’s “game animals”.
Poisoning animals with bait is a great way for a landowner to go to jail. Better stick to aluminum phosphide for gassing pocket gophers and prairie dogs. YMMV.
Phosphine not phosphide
You had it correct in your first post – it’s aluminum phosphide. When it gets damp, it produces phosphine (PH3) gas.
I’ve used it many, many times, along with Zinc phosphide, especially on ground squirrels.
You’d usually see aluminum phosphide on oat bait (which I would set out in bait traps in 3″ PVC pipe above-ground for squirrels and voles, which are the very devil to eradicate) and then I would use zine phosphide tablets for gassing squirrels. I’d take a walk through a field in the late afternoon, find active squirrel holes, toss down a few tablets of zinc phosphide, dribble some water on them, and move on.
The next day, the area would be a squirrel ghost town.
My prostate is none of your business.
The used motor oil fix only leads to a bigger problem.
IIRC, one quart of used oil will make over 1 MILLION gallons of drinking water unsafe for human consumption.
That figure is from the EPA (which you misquoted), which states that one GALLON of used oil in a waterway or collection point (lake, reservoir) has the POTENTIAL to contaminate up to one million gallons of water. That only means it has the capability to trip a treatment plant’s sensors. A single PPM does not pose any health hazard whatsoever.
Of course, it would be a different story if everyone dumped all their oil together, but that isn’t what Haz said. The Massachusetts EPA reports that Americans drip/spill an estimated total of 180 gallons of used motor oil annually all over the roads, so a quart or two per year disposed of in a local area where there is no runoff into a waterway or aquifer is moot.
People here are all aflutter over a quart of oil, yet nobody’s talking about poisons, so they’re okay? As Haz said above, there is always someone who will be against whatever action you choose to take. My own area won’t let me kill any of the pests who destroy my yard, so I’m stuck with them.
Derp.
“…an estimated 180 million gallons…”
Gawd. Thanks for the correction, my head was spinning.
Yeah, I sense your sarc, but “may potentially trigger sensors” is a world away from saying an even smaller amount “makes the water unsafe for human consumption”.
They have sprayed oil on dirt roads for years.
In the 1960s it was pretty much recommended to dig a little gravel pit in the back yard to pour motor oil in after an oil change, times sure change.
I do A LOT of hiking and metal detecting across several properties and I would go out of my way to notify parks and wildlife, and the local sheriff, as well as take samples, photos, and install a trail cam for my own records. Hogs are not the only animal eating the poison and I don’t appreciate people sh***ing all over my enjoyment of nature.
Tell Progressives the feral pigs NEED to be taught Marxist-Leninist theory.
I have heard that in some states you can rent a helicopter to mow them down while using high capacity assault rifles. It saves that ‘sneaking up bit” some people call hunting. Since many hunters these days are old and overweight the helicopter plan makes sense. Rich retired old white guys need something to spend there money on anyway. If a complete sounder is put to flight a large pipe bomb would do the trick but in most states that would be illegal. If the Feds were serious about getting rid of them they should donate a case of fragmentary grenades for helicopter hunters to use. But most hunters would end up blowing themselves and the helicopter to bits. Score one for the hogs with ear splitting cheers from the Youtubers who hate all hunters.
In the old days Samuel Baker used 3 sets of dogs on the Island of Ceylon. The first group were blood hounds called “trackers” that tracked the pig, then when sighted he let loose the “coursers” which were trained Grey Hounds to run the hog down and then the last set of dogs the “seizers” would be unleashed and would physically latch on to the pig with their massive jaws while Samuel would rush in with a spear to finish the hog off.
There are some video’s of U.S. hunters attempting to emulate Samuel Baker using spears to hunt hogs in conjunction with savage “hounds from hell”.. The dogs naturally get the worst of it but hey they are expendable. Once in a while the hog scores on a hunter, proving that “yes there is a God”. All this is much better than watching a modern football game as the viewers in their blood lust get something reminiscent of the Roman Games at the Colosseum and the roaring of the ancient crowds of antiquity. One bearded semi-toothless hunter covered in blood and gore smiled and said to the camera “who says the good old days are gone forever”. If the speared pig could speak I am sure he would have said “We who are about to die salute you”.
If your a rich old white guy you can cut down a .700 Nitro Express British Double gun’s barrels to 10 inches (with the proper BATF paperwork) to make a handy pistol. Use 120 grains of powder using a triplex load of 20 grains of Bullseye Powder and a second layer of 20 grains of Elmer Keiths favorite 2400 powder topped off with 80 grains of 4350 powder. Its called the super day dream nightmare hog blaster cartridge which shoots out a 20 foot flame which burns down all brush and poison ivy and blows down any troublesome farmers fences so you do not have to climb over them or cut through them.. And if the farmer gets accidentally blown off his tractor its his fault for not getting the hell out of your way. Its also best to take along the wife in case you get attacked by a sounder of pigs. Since you can run faster than the old lady the sounder will finish her off and you get to inherit the house, the bank account and then you can let your 17 year old mistress move in with you. Who could a ask for a more perfect day? Both you and the pigs win and enjoy the perfect hunt. Prince Andrew would have said “Why did I not think of this”. I guess the Americans are not the retarded Colonials that I thought they were.
So, you’re a racist. Stands to reason. It’s what you fascists do.
We are all racist and fascist, we’re white, duh……
Nice story, Rubicon. You left out the unicorns and heat-seeking missiles.
Damn how could I have forgot the heat seeking missiles. They are the ultimate phallus symbol. The last unicorn I ate gave me indigestion.
Here in Florida we use bazookas…..
Wow now that is neat. I can hardly wait to do this.
Those who have some idea what they’re talking about should get a good laugh from the idea of hunting from a helicopter with a bazooka.
I think my Second Amendment rights have been violated when I cannot buy a surplus bazooka at the local hardware store or a surplus old style Hiroshima Atom Bomb or a surplus government flame thrower (cooks pigs on the hoof) I would also like to buy any surplus defective missiles from Kim Jung Un as I am sure I could fix them up enough to use them on my neighbors dog which howls all night and keeps me up. On missile launch should dot it. Help us petition the Supreme Court to restore surplus missile rights. I get a rush from the rockets red glare. Sounds patriotic don’t you think?
I think you’re trying to copy possum’s humor, Rubicon, but it isn’t working.
Make sure the back of the rocket launcher is sticking out of the helo I imagine. I did my rocket shooting on the ground. BACK BLAST AREA ALL CLEAR!!! ROCKET!!!
TLDR but C for effort.
First thing that’s needed is for people and game management to drop this silly notion that this is a hunting issue. It ain’t.
Feral hogs should not be hunted as game animals. They should be killed as are rats or other vermin. By using all means that work, with no limits to the numbers killed.
Helicopters? Kind of expensive but if it provides entertainment and helps somebody earn a living then why not? There should be no rules of sportsmanship in killing vermin.
When I was a boy and the nearby rancher wanted some rats shot, he invited a few of us who could shoot to come on over. Clever old guy, he had a hay pile beside the barn with a large tarp on a cable. We’d get ready, he’d hook the cable to his truck and gun it right as one of us hit the flood lights on the barn. Rats would scatter around the hay and we’d shoot ’em.
Nothing sporting about it, it is not hunting. It is shooting and killing vermin.
I live in Pennsylvania and would love to come south and shoot some hogs. My problem is how do I set it up. I’ve read many stories of it costing many dollars to do so. As many of you have already said, if they’re a problem then there should be no costs, except for maybe a license. I’m willing to help and have the experience but not at unreasonable expenses. Any help, ideas, or willing participants is greatly appreciated.
If you have to pay to shoot pigs they AIN’T a problem🐷🐷🐷🐷🐷🐽🐽
My thoughts exactly.
The shooter’s entertainment and liability ain’t free.
I wish this were relevant someplace higher up in the thread. KRS 150.645 releases landowners who charge no fee from any liability except intentional harm or undisclosed known danger like a bear trap or collapsing building. Not sure if theres any such law in TX or federal level, though other states have similar statutes.
Sure they can, but here’s one problem, instead of handling it, they’re(some) exploiting it…opening up their land for hunts for $$$, setting up bait stations, encouraging the ferals to feed and multiply, so instead of “handling” the problem, they don’t to want to kill their cash cow(ferals)…
Author has no idea the size of the problem.
There is no possible way to shoot our way out of this.
The estimated 8 to 11 million feral swine in the US are are only the next Great Depression (next Dem pres, imo) away from being what’s for dinner, along with a mess of poke sallet.
I also fish Asian carp, free, no limit-year round open season.
My Grandpap as a boy had to hunt&fish to help feed his own family, I think of them as natures food bank…
There are two barriers to elimination of the feral hog problem by shooting or hunting:
1. Private landowners who complain about “the problem” but want to profit off “the problem.”
2. Fish and game departments. These bureaucrats want to make money off the problem as much as the people in group (1) above.
Consider this: There are probably no more than 10 to 12 million feral hogs in the US at the present time. That’s a piffling number. Consider this second number: In 1865, there were probably about 20+ million bison on the Great Plains of the US. The herd south of the Transcontinental RR line was probably on the order of 6 to 7 million bison. They were all gone in by 1877 – in 11 years. How did that happen? No F&G departments charging for licenses. No one charging trespass fees or hunt fees to shoot them. You just shot them. If you wanted to make some money off the bison, you took the tongue and the hide. The meat was usually left to rot. After the meat rotted, farmers/ranchers made money by gathering up the bones and sending them east to be turned into charcoal.
In about 25 years, over 20 million bison were gone from the lower 48 states. Most of this slaughter was accomplished with Civil War era rifles. The Sharps and other buffalo rifles came on the scene when there were rather few bison left to shoot.
Species can be shot out of existence. The hog “problem” isn’t going away because too many people are making money on “the problem” – and it is in their financial interest to keep the problem alive.
Good thing bison don’t breed like pigs, ha! Any small cliff will bag you as many as you can stampede off it, right?
Yes, pigss’ fecundity is something to behold – hence why 50+ years ago, pigs were referred to by farmers as “mortgage-busters” – you could (with proper management and a cheap food source) pay off your mortgage pretty quickly if you had pigs.
In the days of the bison slaughter, you had mostly single-shot rifles, and most all of those with iron sights. Today, we have thermal/IR and NV scopes, silencers, semi-auto rifles… you have so much more hunting opportunity at your hands.
Pigs could be shot out of existence – but for the fact that too many people are making money on the pigs existing.
michener wrote in centennial that well placed shots (some from hunting trains…) that dropped the beast where it stood prevented the rest of the herd from stampeding.
if true, that’s some fish in a barrel. repeaters weren’t needed.
Guess that must have been what happened to DDT. Twice a year my dad would fog our house so thick he used a string to find the door. Daily in the warm/hot weather he would spray the barn, and when he milked our cow, he would wipe her down udder teats and all, with the same stuff good ol DDT. I must have breathed forty gallons of that, I used to use it for mosquitoes, wipe and spray it all over me body before going squirrel hunting. Ain’t dead yet. Do gooders would do gooder if they did nothing.
DDT’s biggest problem was a fraudulent bird study.
50 years later, we all know it was faked, but the ban it fostered lives on, because some people dying of malaria is better than admitting you were duped.
Silent spring was a great work of fiction
Yep, Them lies about eagle eggs going soft, gota make it hit the ole homeland and stir up the patriotic type with all that red white and blue. There was one other big fat lie about DDT but I don’t recall what it was. DDT is essentially harmless to people but wiped out bugs and mosquitoes like no one’s business.
The ozone hole BS caused so many problems we now enjoy in agriculture. Methyl Bromide? BANNED! You have to use several even more toxic chemicals now to prep your fields! Freon for your AC? BANNED! Now people just smuggle freon up from Mexico now, its very lucrative. China continues to use CFCs in manufacturing even though its ‘illegal’ they just don’t enforce it. Funny how that hole does what it does all on its own still, long after people forgot about it.
Dogs and traps.
Beaters. Funnel then into slaughter pens like they did in the old (old old) days. Neolithic people did it annually on the plains in Anatolia 6000 years ago.
When I moved from Nevada to Texas I was excited that I would be able to go hog hunting.
However I quickly found that to help reduce the hog population it would cost me big bucks.
I never did go hog hunting as I refuse to pay to help get rid of unwanted hogs.
Now back in Nevada and back to hunting Coyotes on BLM land, for free.
no commercial potential.
You know what’s worse than the hogs?
It’s the “hunters” that ourselves, and every other landowner I know, have let on our property for free. They leave gates open, or shut, almost always opposite of how they found them. They break locks off the gates you don’t want them going through, they prop/twist the wires on your fence so they, and all your livestock behind them can crawl through. They shit everywhere, I mean literally shit, even in places you wouldn’t think physically possible. They leave trash from toilet paper to beer cans all over creation and shoot holes in everything. I do mean everything. We’ve patched water tanks, replaced junction boxes, called the electric company for shot transformers and insulators, you name it, we’ve seen it.
Oh, remind me to tell you about the time they knocked the windshield out of Grandpa’s old Oldsmobile that had been sitting unmolested for 40 years.
We counted ourselves lucky when they didn’t kill any livestock.
We’ve found that charging makes folks respect what they’re paying for, while giving it to them for free does not. Which, oddly enough is kind of the message of the apocryphal story that leads off the article. The freebie hunters that we tried to help out just destroy it, intentionally or not. You’ll find that nearly every private landowner has the same stories or worse.
So, I’ll take the hogs, and the damage, as opposed to the hunters. Now, naturally, none of you would ever do such a thing, nor would the buddies you bring along, but oddly enough, the result is almost inevitably the same. Funny old world.
Well hogs aren’t a problem for me neither are errant hunters. Good luck with it all.
^This.^
Let some hot shot on your land and next thing you know, you are explaining to the sheriff why someone driving down the interstate got a window blown out of their car and that you aren’t a DC sniper copycat. Meanwhile, the hog hunter sees all the red and blue, and bounces out ASAP through old dirt roads and the phone they used for contacting you was a burner.
Ok, thats a fictional event, but its not too far off from reality. Country types aren’t in the business of providing free entertainment and taking on an ass load of liability all because someone thinks they are entitled to free hunting. I don’t need people shooting everything that moves or worse, someones dog.
“Hunters” have gotten dumber over the years and most were dumb enough to start with.
Used to be something called “respect”, for land owners, the land, the game. Responsibility for actions, when in doubt, don’t. I quit hunting when it quit being a means of survival. If thinning of the herd is needed, then call it what it is, culling.
I stand with the hogs. Well, ok, maybe not real close to the hogs. They are wild, you know.