As you may have read in the Daily Digest or heard me mention in a recent podcast, Texas Ag Commissioner Sid Miller approved a Warfarin-based pig poison called Kaput Feral Hog Lure for use in the Lone Star State. Despite research from Australia showing that the pesticide isn’t as effective as promised and has significant impact on non-target species, the Scimetrics owned Kaput got Commissioner Miller’s OK.
I should also mention that the Kaput lure isn’t nearly as well researched as a sodium nitrite-based poison currently being researched by Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Texas A&M Agrilife extension. But that’s never stopped a Texas politician from doing whatever they want before.
What has stopped Sid in his tracks is an injunction announced today by the Texas Hog Hunters Association. Press release below:
Texas Hog Hunters Association
MAR 3, 2017 — Texas Hog Hunters Association and Wild Boar meat company successfully had an injunction placed against Sid Miller which invalidates his emergency rule for the use of a warfarin based poison to be used against Feral Hogs.We stand firm on our no poison position and look forward to working with lawmakers in stopping this permanently.
This injunction gives us all until March 30, so we still need to be diligent in our efforts and continue to press Austin and our representatives.
We will have to take this fight to Austin so your help is greatly needed.
Thanks to everyone and please keep sharing and pushing back.
Scott Dover
For those of you who signed the change.org petition, you have my personal and heartfelt thanks. If you agree that this is a supremely bad idea, please continue to call Sid Miller’s office, the governor, and any concerned sportsmen, land owners, farmers, and ranchers you know.
Good! Give em’ lead poisoning instead!
Good, using poisons like this almost always seems to lead to unintended consequences. A good alternate would be some sort of way to open up the access to land for hog hunting. In Texas it seems that there is very little state/federal land where hunting can take place, it seems that most land is privately owned.
I am not advocating in any way, shape or form a government land grab though!!
The problem is people in the South like myself included don’t want people walking around on their private property. This is been going on since before attorneys would sue landowners because of people having accidents on their private property this goes back to this is my land and you stay the hell off of it. I believe if we wish to control the pig population especially in Florida Texas and Georgia we need to promote helicopter hunting. As I’m aware the only fence that will stop a feral hog is a 30 caliber fence LOL. We need to get together with these large hunting organizations and our state officials and plan a day of hog hunting during the reproductive times of the year that these Hogs reproduce which is damn near 12 months of the year. And start paying Hunters $5 apiece for every tag Hawk or untag hog brought in Two Fish and Wildlife. This would give hunters and Outdoorsman a little payback for the ammunition and Equipment they use to hunt and harvest these animals. This is a much better plan then to spread poison that can kill human beings throughout the woods. We could have National hog hunting day that would be awesome. People could group up together family and friends all go out and blast a couple hundred Hogs apiece everyday for a month and not a big dent out of the problem. But this idea of poisoning Hogs with Warfarin which is a very dangerous drug is a bad idea. Warfarin can be passed along through secondary contamination to all species that live in our Woods. Not to mention it persists in cooked meat so even after you cook and prepare the hog it’s still contains a dose of Warfarin depending upon how much pesticide it consumed. Warfarin can be exhausted the epidermis of human skin it can be inhaled into your respiratory system and it can be transferred from dead animal meat that has been cooked and prepared correctly right into human blood streams. This drug does not belong in our Woodlands water areas and outdoor areas at all. Not to mention this stuff can also contaminate your family’s clothing through washing your clothing in a washing machine that your family uses to wash the family close with it can pollute water tables Wells streams rivers and lakes. It does this by having such a long Half-Life meaning it can last quite some time and not degrade in water it is not water soluble or biodegradable whatsoever. Very very nasty drug and one of the key ingredients and arsenic poison.
We’ve been sinking money into the state through hunting and fishing licenses all these years…..maybe its time for the state to give some back as bounty or rewards.
Poison is the gift that keeps on giving. I don’t want any kind of poison, chemical, or fertilizers running off into the water I throw on my crops, right now the water in my area is relatively CLEAN and I want it to stay that way. Yes, there is some trash, occasionally a creosote treated log, but still clean.
On a side note, yes, I would rather use a cage trap over a foot hold trap.
Also, I’ve found air dropped gift packets in the back yard before, its a real feeling of violation when someone else is dropping shit ontop of you without your permission or even a warning.
I don’t get why there aren’t enough people hunting them. Is it an issue with access or bag limits or something?
There is effectively free bacon and pork chops running wild.
Can a commercial deal be made? Like a butcher or grocer offering $20 a hog or something? Surely the 150+ lbs of meat would be enough to turn a solid profit.
Gardening sucks but if attracted bacon to my property I’d plant anything that’ll grow.
Many if not most ranchers in Texas want to charge exorbitant fees to allow hunters to hunt feral hogs on their land. They seem to be more concerned about making a profit than they are eradicating the hog problem. I know two groups that would love to hunt hogs in Texas but don’t want to pay the landowners fees to help them with THEIR hog problem.
You are absolutely right about the charging of money to come and help farmers eliminate their problem on their land. Here in Florida you have guys that own 250 300 acres of semi swamp land covered and Palmetto bushes and they want $250 for one hog whether it weighs 70 pounds or 250 plus pounds. They’ve used this epidemic as a way to make money. And to boot there are these so-called hog hunting operations where you get flyers in the mail here in Florida that advertise guided hog hunts for like 400 bucks and come to find out once I talk to the actual property owner they are only getting $150 of that 400-plus dollars that the Ad Agency is charging. It’s just a typical thing where people are less interested and controlling the hog population that is destroying thousands of Acres every year of good cattle land and replacing it with something that looks more like a Battlefield after heavy artillery shelling. LOL we need to have a national hog hunting month and give special permission to the hunter from the landowner so that they can freely come onto their property being safe of course and help eliminate the problem at hand instead of trying to charge people money to come on their property and hunt hogs I always tell them this isn’t a game animal this isn’t a white tail why do I want to pay you 250 bugs to ride around in an old beat-up pickup truck that smells like gasoline and shoot a hog off the hood of it the truck that is and then pay you 200 to $250 cash for one hog that is not going to solve any problem with the population whatsoever.
The Deseret Ranch in Florida has a standing “shoot on sight” order for all hogs and pythons, among the cattlemen working the property. That’s saying something…. if you ever take a tour of the property, the guide will tell you they prefer to leave the gators alone, because they’re good for the ecosystem. It’s the snakes and hogs that are the biggest ecological issue for them.
The Deseret Ranch is owned by the LDS Church, which is the reason they’re not fleecing people.
Farmers and ranchers such as myself don’t want groups of amateurs roaming around our property shooting our families and our livestock, which happens all the time.
If that were true of most landowners, they are okay with amateurs roaming their land and shooting their families as long as they pay a bunch of money first. m’kay. I certainly understand if people don’t want hunters on their land for whatever reason, but these landowners are fine with people hunting their land. They just want their profits from it.
Funny how we have hundreds of thousands of hunters in the woods up here every year and there is rarely a problem of amateurs shooting other people. I could be wrong, but maybe many of these amateurs you got are due to the lack of a decent wall.
As a Texas landowner I gotta say hunters aren’t gonna make a difference in hog populations. My allowing free & open access to hunt hogs causes more problems than it solves and I potentially put my self at liability if someone gets injured. No way I’m doing that, add that I, like many landowners who live and work on our land, are barely making a living ranching & farming so of course many are gonna charge a fee. It is the large, often corporate owned, spreads that are charging the outrageous fees. Poison is certainly not the way. We do have commercial trappers that sell hogs to processing stations – these need to be expanded.
Then you don’t have a hog problem to the rest of the country. Just another example of Texas ego. You can’t have it both ways.
You are a private property owner. If you can deal with the associated problems, sell.
Fake news.
The issue isn’t hunting hogs it’s how fast these little guys reproduce I forget exactly how fast they can reproduce a hog guy told me a while back that a female hog can start birthing piglets at 3 months old and a male hog at the age of 60 days can actually impregnate a female hog. You wouldn’t really have to have some sort of national hog hunting day where people families Hunter’s Outdoorsman all joined together for one month straight and kill as many hugs as humanly possible and this would only reduce the population by a very small percentage. But it is a step in the right direction the only way we can come back this problem effectively is through entire States going to the woods and hunting hogs and doing that for a sub stained amount of time. This would lower the hog population and help keep it controlled. Helicopter hunting of hogs is the most effective way to do this especially using for forward looking infrared so you can see them in the tree line and chase them out with loudspeakers and blast and blast and blast then go pick them all up and you have a ton of free meet for the homeless serves two purposes at the same time imagine that period LOL and this from a guy that isn’t a politician just an old army ranger period LOL
As it is, Texans need to kill about 70% of the statewide hog population annually just to stop the numbers from growing. We’re averaging around 25-30% right now. All we’re doing is slowing it down a little.
That cause of things like this story. I was doing a floor for a guy with a very large ranch. He has it all high fenced. He was complaining that hogs had gotten in and he had a hog problem.
i offered to sign a waiver and hunt then out of deer season. He countered that he would let me hunt and only charge me a buck a pound for all the hogs I killed.
I said I guess you don’t have a hog problem.
It takes between 50% and 70% of a population to be controlled annually just to hold the numbers stable from one year to the next (Our population model suggested 66% had to be removed to hold the population stable).
http://feralhogs.tamu.edu/frequently-asked-questions/frequently-asked-questions-wild-pigs/
4-8 million pigs in Texas. That’s a lot of slaughter.
Pay the farmers and ranchers a bounty. If they want to collect it, they can shoot the pig. If they allow a hunter on their property, they get the nose or the ears for the bounty. Everybody wins.
“May I have access to your land to hunt hogs?’
“Sure. I won’t charge you for it, but I get the ears of any you kill.”
“Deal!”
That idea actually has some merit. I can see a couple of problems needing solutions; obviously, would Texas Parks and Wildlife agree to fund the bounties? And what would prevent some douche from collecting bounties on pen-raised hogs?
Otherwise, I like the hell out of this.
The state could charge a 25 dollars for a pig tag and a hundred for a license. No Limit on pig tags. Program pays for itself.
The wild boar meat I ate one time really was gamey. These are not corn fed hogs that have been off the dirt for 45 days. I imagine they can taste better depending on what they eat, but I don’t think the meat would be tasty enough to sell for human consumption, if it is even legal. Giving the meat to soup kitchens or making pet food might be ok
If they use Warfarin, you’ll need to be sure to have a large helping of kale or broccoli (or Vitamin K) with your bacon.
The war on Texas hogs is a lot like the gang wars in Chiraq: it’s going to take a significant change of heart and a “come to Jesus” moment in the mindset among the people before you can truly get to the root cause of the problem and start actually making a difference.
Warfarin? Aw, hell no! The Rhodesians used that anti-coagulant to spike wells in Mozambique during the Bush War…. That stuff is bad news.
You should see what happens to someones dog when it gets anti-coagulant poisoning…
One google search away.
The hog problem. Lol. Everyone with land in Texas loves this so called ‘hog problem’ because they can charge outrageous fees to hunt hogs. And then the abundance of hogs nearly guarantees a kill, thereby giving the hunter a positive experience and more hunters. That equals even more money for the landowner.
It’s kind of like having a roach problem at your house and having the exterminator pay you to stomp on the roaches.
I know a guy who whines about the hog problem, about how the hogs eat his crops, but then he baits pigs onto his land so that hunters score a pig and come back. He makes more on his hog hunts than he does growing stuff on his land.
This so called ‘hog problem’ isn’t going away anytime soon because it’s a problem that the land owners and hunters want.
Yeah, I call bullshit. I can’t think of a single rancher or farmer I know in Texas who works the land for a living, who welcomes hogs. My family included. The bigger issue is having total strangers come around shooting shit with no idea of their surroundings.
That’s it.
Then Texas doesn’t have a hog problem. Individual Texas landowners have a hog problem, which isn’t anybody else’s problem. Hey, I’ve got a leaky toilet upstairs at the moment. Same thing.
If that land is within a couple of hours of Harris County you and I need to get acquainted. That’s not a joke.
“The bigger issue is having total strangers come around shooting shit with no idea of their surroundings.”
BINGO!!!
Its funny everyone seems to have an opinion about what others should do with their land/truck/money/resources until suddenly it’s their name on the title, and their money going to the bank, and their ass on the line for the liability policy.
The fact is, liability increases exponentially when money changes hands. What was a simple hunting trip becomes a business relationship and you “owe” the client something in return. That’s why ranches that do charge, charge a LOT. They have to make sure they get enough return to make the eye bleeding increase in personal risk worth it. So all the “wahhhhh why dont people let me come onto their property for free” crowd can piss up a rope as far as I am concerned. Everyone wants something for free when they dont have any personal skin in the game, but can the land owner expect a random stranger to return the favor/kindness after he lets them on his property and they fall into a ditch and stub their toe? Judging by the way so many seem to immediately assume greed/selfishness, I highly doubt it.
We had a property adjoining ours that let people on to hunt, predictably it was a complete shitshow. I never asked if they charged money, but judging by the quality of people who hung around, they werent setting the bar very high if they did. Livestock on their property got shot, people’s houses developed random unexplained roof leaks, deer blinds got shot up, trash/beer bottles strewn near fence lines, cut fences, thankfully no people actually died that we are aware of. I found a full piss bottle in one of my own hunting blinds that was near the fence line. It took my mom, uncle, and several other landowners calling the game warden and the sheriff on a near weekly basis before the landowner finally stopped his “open gate’ policy. So yeah, we dont let people who arent family or inner circle friends onto the property, period. See no reason to change.
Why exactly is Texas whining about a hog problem then? I’m missing something.
I wasn’t aware that we were? What this article is talking about is how corporate lobbyists were pushing an untested and potentially very harmful toxicant that has had zero research done on its secondary effect in non-target species… that’s what people are “whining about”. Oh, and some other people came in to whine about how landowners have the audacity to charge money instead of just leaving the gate open and let them and all their buddies come onto their property and shoot the place up for a night or two.
Unless I missed something, I don’t think anyone was whining about the hogs or the efficacy of the current tools at our disposal for controlling them.
Texas hog whining has been a regular thing in TTAG for a couple of years now.
I’m not a scientist and haven’t done the research, but at first blush putting Warfarin into the environment (not into a basement or crawl space in small quantities to kill rodents) seems like a bad idea.
If the feral hog problem is really as bad as claimed, then ranchers and farmers can open their lands to hog hunters, who may reduce the problem. If the land owners choose to exclude hog hunters, well then, they’re angling for something and the problem can’t be as bad as they claim.
There’s no angle, there’s just no good solution. It’s either suffer with the crop loss or have large groups of hunters shooting on your land day and night for extended periods of time.
I know lots of farmers who have stopped leasing to hunters after having their livestock shot.
Okay, I get it. The hunters are a bigger nuisance than the feral hogs. So, like I said, the hog problem isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be.
When the hogs are a bigger nuisance than the hunters, the farmers and ranchers will know what to do.
Ralph, see 300BLK’s reply just above.
JWT appears to be right on this, there’s no winning solution here, besides JWT knowing the hunters well enough where they aren’t a problem, and there’s no way he he has the damn time to know enough hunters well enough to keep the piggies suppressed.
Even if someone was to try to set up a ‘known hunter’ system with clearly laid-out shoot no-shoot zones, expected behaviour, etc. It would be un-managable. Assholes would ‘game’ the system.
With the technology of IR trail cameras with cellphone connection, it may be possible to develop an ‘alarm’ system that notifies Mr Taylor’s household so he or his kids can respond at 0-Dark whenever to deal with the problem. But that does little for those who have responsibilities like jobs where they are expected to show up…
300BLK – Yeah, man, you have a real *problem* with that out there. Thanks for laying it out…
Having been a farmer and having had dealt with pests that needed killin’ (ground squirrels, pocket gophers, voles and the like) and having had hunters on my land, I’ve seen the two group behaviors that lead to an explosion of the pest population:
1. Sloppy, careless or downright dangerous hunters. There’s a lot of shooters out there who don’t know jack about shooting off a prepared range. They know nothing about proper bullet or rifle selection, they know nothing about choosing firing lanes and angles, they know nothing about co-ordination with the landowner.
If someone had ever shown up on my outfit with an AR loaded with XM193 or M855 ammo, they would have asked to leave immediately. Show up with a .17 HMR using 17gr Vmax pills, or show up with a .223/.22-250 loaded with 40gr Vmax pills? OK, let’s talk.
If I were hunting hogs, I’d show up using something like a .270 Win with 110gr Vmax pills.
2. Farmers who want to make money from allowing shooters on their property. There’s lots of farmers who are looking for any angle to make money – other than actually farm, you see, because actually farming involves sweat and this four-letter word called “work.”
When I was a farmer, I had a very select group of people who I would allow shoot on my outfit. Very select. They knew me, I knew them, we were (and are) good friends. I trusted them with a loaded gun behind my back, and never had a complaint.
I also never charged them a dime, I’d serve lunch and bring everyone beer at the end of a day. We’d go hunting chukar and dove together in the fall. When I’d ask them to shoot out a particular 40 acre piece of ground thoroughly, the’d do so, even if it meant they got only one or two shots all morning.
No one else was allowed on my outfit, for any amount of money.
Yup. Our place and the places right around me are pig free. So are most of the places of my friends. None of us ever charged hunters, or were charged ourselves, but we knew the landowners and I know the folks hunting our place.
DG – This I can respect. You want to limit access to your land to hunters you know and trust. You don’t charge them for the “privilege”. I have no respect for landowners that only allow hunting on their land if they pay significant money to do so.
Some people are broke ass poor and an AR15 with surplus ammo is all they have because they can’t justify several weapons for specialized purposes and need one tool to do it all. This is why my go to rifle is in 308Win. Its for SHTF, but until then, I need it to do everything from kill rabbits to deer to anything other pest animal.
That said, geometries of fire is exceptionally important and I have a hard enough time shooting out here in the sticks even with knowing where everything is. Anyone else would probably send a round off through the trees at an oil rig, a road, pressure tank, truck, equipment, house, barn, livestock, etc. Its a liability and land owners are right in choosing to deny anyone that they feel is unsafe.
All it takes is for one idiot to send a round off in the wrong direction and peg someone on a road for the media to scream D.C sniper all over again.
I don’t care how rich or poor someone is. If they’re shooting on my land, I’m liable for errant shots originating on my land.
FMJ bullets ricochet quite nicely, and they’re not to be used in low-angle shots, such as you find in squirrel control. The reason for using Vmax (or other similar varmint pills) is because when the bullet hits the ground, they blow up and there is no bounce or deflection. You can see the results by deliberately aiming a Vmax pill at the ground in a shallow angle shot – you see a puff of dust, and then you see something that looks like a shotgun pattern further downrange.
Besides, most AR’s aren’t accurate enough for squirrel hunting. When I’m squirrel hunting, I need a rifle that can hold a sub-MOA group. My preferred rifle is a .17 HMR. It works exceptionally well for squirrel hunting.
DG, selectivity is wise when your business is not in extremis. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
The sense that I’m getting is that times are not desperate for Texan farmers and ranchers, and the hog problem is overblown.
Quite overblown.
I’ve BTDT, in “extremis.” Ground squirrels, aka “hay rats” can completely take over an irrigated field in Nevada in, oh, three years. I’m saying that in three years, the field will have so many mounds of gravel in it that you cannot drive a swather through even 10 acres before the machinery is wrecked due to hitting mounds upon mounds of gravel. When you’ve got 128 acres/pivot to harvest, and you can’t get through a field in a week due to equipment failures, that’s pretty extreme – and expensive. Parts are expensive. I got rid of hay rats by shooting, having other people shoot, and by using zinc phosphide poisons – and by creating incentives for raptors of all kinds to nest on our place.
We had a field adjoining a farm which was taken out of production by a real estate developer, and the developer allowed the pocket gophers to breed without restriction on the two pivots adjoining my field. The county used to offer a $0.50/tail bounty for pocket gophers. You’d trap them, cut off the tails, chuck the dead gopher into a pile and put the tails into a ziplock bag with up to 100 other tails, freeze them and then take the frozen tails into the county extension office.
We bankrupted the bounty fund our first year on the outfit; we took in 7,000+ tails. Got a check for $3500, and then the fund went dry. All of those were trapped by hand with Cinch traps. I’m a master gopher trapper.
So I’ve seen extreme pest control issues.
I’m really good at killing things. As I used to tell people, my job as a farmer was to get up every morning and find something to kill: gophers, voles, squirrels, Mormon crickets, grasshoppers, weevils, aphids, mites, jackrabbits, crows… you name it, I killed it. Mom Nature took care of the growing, I just made sure that I was going to be the one to harvest it.
My fields were clean, and I kept them clean, and all of my pests had a reproductive rate that makes hogs look like a trivial problem. Voles and pocket gophers are practically born knocked-up. If I farmed or ranched in Texas, I would have no hog problem. The problem is a lack of stewardship on the part of the landowners – they’re too busy doing something other than farming or ranching.
So. How would you gents like to do this? Shall we interview over the phone, email or in person? Who shall I send my credentials to?
And right up front – my preferred tool is a .50 cal Kentucky rifle or my bow.
I hope this gets permanently killed.
Poisons like warfarin have way too many consequences. That is really bad stuff.
Warfarin has its place. Hog bait is not that place.
Exactly. I don’t want to see it banned.
Too many times, the reaction to some pesticide incident is full-on banning – and another tool in the IPM toolbox is lost.
We’ve already seen this happen with strych.
Thanks for that DG, too many useful tools have been removed from our toolbox. Bedbugs made their comeback because of this. Considering the limitations put on my industry when baiting for rats and the reasons for the rules(which make sense, for a change), this is a very bad idea.
I can’t imagine giving the hogs enough warfarin to kill them. My Dad fed it (rat poison) to the hogs 60 years ago to worm them. It killed the worms but didn’t seem to hurt the hogs at all.
Warfarin was discovered by accident when a herd of cattle died after eating rotten sweet clover…
That sweet smell of fresh-cut grasses? The source of the molecule that ferments into the anticoagulant:
http://www.pmlive.com/pharma_news/how_dead_cattle_led_to_the_discovery_of_warfarin_485464#
Thanks, barnbwt! New stuff to learn is always cool!
(Next time I cut the grass, I know what I’ll be thinking…)
Perhaps you could ask the Feds to redirect some of Montana’s non-resident wolves to your locality.
All joking aside, yall (yalls?) best sort this thing out because your problems are rarely worse than the .gov solutions.
I’ve got an idea for re-populating NYC and Long Island with wolves.
There are already plenty of wolves in NYC. And way too many pigs.
They’ve got plenty of wolves.
You’re looking for “all y’all”.
They should spend the money wisely and offer a bounty. Say 10 bucks a head, that’d pay for my hunting trip.
I’m in Hays county. The county at one point *was* offering a bounty…
At $2 a tail.
Needless to say, it wasn’t nearly as effective as they had hoped. The problem is going to get a lot worse before it ever remotely gets near being better. If ever.
At $2 a tail, if you need a second shot, you may be losing money. Especially if the landowner is *charging* $250 a tail.
And if it were illegal for the owner to sell access for profit, suddenly he has no incentive to keep the hogs alive on his property, and that’s when the full weight of man’s unstoppable destructive ingenuity comes to bear on the hogs…
The poison used in Australia for pigs is Sodium fluoroacetate (1080). It occurs naturally in some Australian plants so most native wildlife is immune. Pigs being imported are not and it breaks down quickly once eaten.
Just wondering if it is used in USA at all?
Easy. Offer a $10 bounty. Anything hunters don’t want to keep for themselves, goes to a series of huge barbecue events; Charge $20 a seat at the event and funnel that money back into the eradication program.
I suspect you cannot sell game meat. Which would include cooked meat.
Warfarin? Seriously? That’s rat poison. God forbid a pet, livestock or a game animal got into it. You wouldn’t know until 3 days later. And they wouldn’t be symptomatic until then. Which means you could easily harvest a game animal or livestock that had a belly full the day before. Not a circumstance I’d like to be in.
Warfarin causes hemophilia; it’s pretty obvious when a hog you cut into has blotchy contusions throughout its tissue and has a pool of blood at each end when you found him. Warfarin kills quickly in the massive doses it’d take to be harmed from eating such a small fraction of your body weight, which is how it is applied for rats, which is why rat poison is dangerous. This bait is designed so pigs gradually get to a lethal concentration over weeks, so if you eat a pound of a 200lb sow, you get 1/200th a lethal dose, worst case scenario. A dose which by definition will not be lethal, and is not even hazardous according to those who’ve studied the chemical for the last seventy years.
Here in CA they wring their hands at the state level and decry these nasty invasive hogs and won’t we please kill them out. And then they charge us 20+ bucks per tag per hog. And they don’t allow night hunting.
The ranchers wring their hands and beg us to save them from the voracious hogs that are destroying their ranches. Please come and kill them. At 4-600 dollars an animal.
I wish I had the money and means to import millions more of the things to turn lose in CA.
*enter illegal immigrants (literally). At some point competition with the wildlife is inevitable.
Why, back in the old days (circa 4000 BC), people would come from all around and they’d spread out in a long long line, and drive everything in front of them into killing corrals. They’d do the same in various parts of Africa–still may for all I know–and India. Might work in Texas too.
Texas doesn’t want a solution. Talk about fake news.
How to end the hog plague, for those who are actually interested; do the reverse of what leads to healthy game populations;
1) Allow poisoning (trapping is a tricky idea since hogs are man-sized and live near populated areas) with cumulative toxicity (like warfarin) methods that don’t leave a corpse with concentrated toxins behind to kill scavengers, and have limited collateral effects.
2) Allow unrestricted hunting methods that don’t threaten other game (already taken care of) and institute a bounty
3) Ban the sale of hunting access for hogs. The opposition to effective poisoning methods comes entirely from envirowackos and equally greedy & short sighted land owners who profit from the hogs on their land. Most hog-filled states had to pass laws banning the intentional loosing & feeding of wild hogs, so these greedy fools would quit bringing in hogs and helping them proliferate
A bounty encourages penned breeding.
Un-restricted hunting leads to bullet holes in the homes of the people who live where the hunting takes place, (see 300BLK’s family’s experience above).
The vicious prick in me would think legalizing return fire from homes shot at would be an official Martha Stewart ‘Good Thing’ 🙂
It’s a problem with no cut-and-dried solution…
The solution is every Texas landowner with a hog problem shuts up and take care if the problem, just like every other property owner in the country. The difference is, the rest of us don’t virtue-signal our problems.
Warfarin/Cumidin is a medication given to stroke patients. Used as a blood thinner. However, the levels must be monitored often, or the next stroke may be a cerebral hemorrhage. It’s also used in rat poison, in large enough levels that the rats hemorrhage from a scratch, or internal bleeding. Aspirin is also a blood thinner, that doesn’t require monitoring, as far as I know. But, I wouldn’t link Warfarin to arsenic. Maybe someone in the medical profession would.
For people, Vitamin K stops the medication from doing it’s job. Food like broccoli is full of Vitamin K. Others on the list that I’ve forgotten, Kale may be another. Or, just pill form. I am not suggesting roasted pig and broccoli for dinner.
I am simply passing along information given to me by a doctor about the use of Warfarin in humans, and information given to me by an exterminator, for treatment of a rat infestation. Another component or choice of rat poison is something to make them thirsty, so that they leave your home, to find water, and die away from the home. I forget what that is.
Yeah, and when you have cancer, they pump you full of poison hoping that the poison will kill the tumor faster than it kills you. Warfarin requires a lot of monitoring when used for patients that require a blood thinner. It is a dangerous substance used when that’s the only alternative.
Instead of warfarin, ask your doctor if Xarelto is right for you….
That last line put coffee all over my desk/screen. Thanks. hahahaha
Hunt the feral hogs from the air but scrap the helicopter and use an AC 130 gunship.
I have a partial solution. Pass a law exempting landholders from damage claims of licensed hunters they give hunting permission to.
Also let’s sterilize and or trap hogs not poison them. Much safer for the environment.
dude no ones making money on hog hunts. Hogs do more damage to crops and deer hunting than ranchers would ever make offering hunts. Its not hard to find a place that will let you hunt hogs for free. I started hog hunting ona south texas ranch that charged 50 bucks for 2 hogs. Now u can easily find a rancher that will let you hunt for free if your not a mouth breather. Just use your google fu
+90% of these responses have no factual basis, just someone’s useless personal opinion. Here are some facts. Hunting and trapping feral hogs has not, nor ever will have a significant impact on hog numbers. Helicopter hunting is ineffective in heavily wooded areas such as the several hundred acres I own in Montague County. Feral hogs are essentially nocturnal animals, so hunting must take place at night with night vision gear and semi auto rifles. The minimum caliber is .223 or .300 AAC up to .308 with effective ranges to 1000 yards. Trapping in large round pens with bait, even when done by the book, will only catch a portion of the hog sound and those missed will generally avoid ever going into a trap again. Hogs go into cultivated fields, pastures, parks and golf courses in the middle of the night and the destruction looks like a drunk on a back hoe was there.
I have been trapping and hunting hogs for several years on my place without affecting the hog numbers one bit. I am still nervous hunting at night due to bullet over travel and take care not to take shots over 100 yards and fully assess the backdrop. Yet there are many advocating letting the public come hunt on private land as a control measure. No way.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to fill in hog damaged pasture and pecan orchard sod strips. I’ve built cages around young pecan trees because hogs rub them and break the graft off.
I can care less that some hunters and hog hunting outfits might lose “the fun” of hog hunting or the loss of revenue should there be an effective way to control feral hogs. Anyone suggesting that we need to take into account the economic impact of the hog hunting groups is drinking their bath water. Poisoning hogs is the answer. Period. Is Warfarin the poison of choice? Maybe or maybe not. I really thought sodium nitrite could be a better choice for several reasons and it is still under study. Delivering the poison to the targeted species is the biggest problem. Raccoons can get into anything and bears can lift anything that a hog’s snout can lift. Bears occupy only a small area in East Texas so make those counties off limits for poisoning hogs. The frustrated hog hunters can go there to hunt. Some raccoons may be lost to poisoning, but there’s always going to be some collateral damage. Like migratory birds and wind turbines.
Poisoning is a reasonable and effective means to control feral hogs
I understand landowners don’t want to be responsible for someone getting hurt waiving a firearm around but just like any hunting sport there are always risks. If they feel guns are the issue why not leave it to the real hog hunter that use only dogs and knives. CHECK EM OUT ON FB! ~ Doin’ It Doggie Style ~
To hell with the hog hunters and wild meat sellers all there doing is having fun while we the farmers are suffering the total losses and our livelihood by these destructive animals .
Lots of opinions on how to remedy this problem, but the use of poison isn’t one of them! This solution should NEVER be considered when you take into account the detrimental (and uncontrollable) affects on the rest of the food chain. I know allowing hunters on land the land for free to take care of the problem still may not be able to keep the population down as fast as these hogs reproduce, but there are other, more humane ways we can assure more kills than with poison. What about providing ammo? Paying hunters for a job well done? Allowing hunters on your land may feel like as much a nuisance as the pigs at times, but parameters can be set to minimize the issues with that. Everyone wins.