Feral pig populations have grown to unmanageable numbers
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I found it interesting how hunting backfires (scatters them and increases their range) as it seems to be always pounded into me "hunted out of existence" was a common thing that hunters would do if left to their own devices (I know, there is a LOT of propaganda in this space!) That said, I'm surprised there are not more trapping & slaughtering programs in place.
The engineer in me wants to slaughter the pigs, use the cesium capsules at Hanford to irradiate/sterilize the meat of all bacteria and parasites, and then turn it into free bacon and/or jerky for whomever needs it. Impractical for sure but free bacon right?
Food irradiation is relevant for other types of food too, including the ones we don't normally cook, such as fruits.
Technically yes, but how many households typically have a (meat) thermometer? A lot of people go by the "not pink" or "clear juices" rules of thumb, which work well enough for typical grocery store 'industrial' packaged meat, but may not be good enough for more 'uncontrolled' meat.
A 6.5- to 7.0-log_10 reduction in pathogens (salmonella) is generally hit at 158F/70C (with beef) where there is 'instantaneous' destruction of the pathogen(s), but lower temperatures can also be reached as long as they are held for longer periods of time, e.g., 140F/60C for 12 minutes. Poultry has slightly different numbers, also dependent on the fat content, but a similar principal of a time/temperature 'curve'. Ditto for fish†, pork, etc.
If you mess up the temperature you can have a really bad day.
† And the type of fish can mean different temperatures. The fat content of wild versus farmed salmon means few degrees' difference could result in a dry versus juicy result:
Frankly, if labeling was available I would actively seek out irradiated food (specifically bread and fruits). This would be great to reduce food waste due to spoilage and pathogen risks (either from spoilage or otherwise present in the food).
I suspect most(if not all) of the "unprocessed" food I eat has not been irradiated.
Edit: A woman was killed this year by feral hogs: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/us/texas-woman-killed-fer... . Attacks that result in death are unusual but you don't want to be in that position.
Welllllll those odds aren't terrible
It's disgusting to everyone, but women are particularly sensitive to the male sex hormone and tend to find it highly unpalatable.
There's a reason why boars are used historically to represent especially unpleasant or revolting men.
Thanks for that link tho, learn something new every day.
I for one don’t have a problem but my wife is repulsed by it. Also it’s not “gamey” it’s a different flavor profile.
While a real and recognized phenomenon, it isn't common or universal. I haven't ever noticed it in wild boar and have not heard of it from any other hunters. Internet forums of full of hunters arguing over if it exists at all.
I don't hunt boar because I don't like eating it, at least.
In several of the stories there are recipes and methods of cooking the meat that make it palatable.
You missed one of the bigger reason it backfire... people enjoy hunting them, which has made it a fairly lucrative industry in some areas.
Therefore it's actually become against some people's interests to fully eradicate them.
Haha yeah, people say that, but recreational hunters typically have a vested interest in maintaining something to hunt...
I say that as a recreational hunter - I started hunting after encountering starving deer in very poor condition in eaten out forest, they had even eaten all the mountain beech seedlings[1] which is a sure sign of desperation. And an obvious part of population control is shooting the hinds...
...which makes me somewhat unpopular with other recreational hunters. Although trophy hunters, at least, realise that lower populations lead to better antlers due to better nutrition for an individual animal.
[1]: Not a real beech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothofagus_solandri_var._cliff...
“Legit question for rural Americans - how do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 min while my small kids play.”
And yet, it sounds like this is literally what the guy did.
PJ: Willie told me the reason his wife was scared is these weren’t like, barnyard pigs, they were feral hogs. They’re more like wild boars – some have big sharp tusks, they’re much bigger, with longer legs. They move really fast. And that moment, there was a bunch of them swarming around his 4 and 5 year old. It was scary.
WILLIE: I went to my safe. I got my gun. I got my shells. Went right out on the back porch.
PJ: And how were the hogs acting? Were they like moving quickly? Were they–
WILLIE: Well, yeah. You know, they’re running all through the yard from the back of my yard all the way to the front. And then I pick out, of course, the ones that look the meanest. The one with the tusk. These are two or three hundred pound hogs. I’m not letting them near my family.
PJ: Yeah–
WILLIE: So, just for lack of a better term, I just start laying them down.
I may be misunderstanding your comment, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Retrieving a gun doesn't take 5 minutes.
Let t be the time at which the hogs arrive.
I can sprint from my basement to the top floor in a bit over 5 seconds. I can find something in a closet in about 5 more seconds. That's about 12-13 seconds to having a gun in my hands, but let's account for opening the gun safe and fumbling around for magazines. The clock is now showing t+30.
Let's now assume the gun isn't loaded. I'm probably a bit stressed by all of this, but almost anyone can load a magazine-fed rifle in 5 seconds. t+35s.
Now I have two choices:
1. Open the bedroom window (~3s), take aim (~2s) and fire. => t+40s
2. Sprint down to the ground floor (~3s), run out the back door (~2s), get into a shooting position (~3s), aim (~2s) and fire. => t+45s
A conservative estimate has me shooting hogs in 45 seconds. If I live in a place where this is a problem, I'm also likely to take steps to prepare. I might keep the gun safe in a more accessible place (e.g. the garage). I might store the firearm in the gun safe with a magazine already seated in the well. I might keep my eyes open and notice the hogs at a distance, giving me the time to fetch a gun sans the frenzy. In some parts of the world, it's common to keep a rifle at hand when outside.
I don't live in a part of the world where I have to deal with feral hogs, but this doesn't strike me as a "gratuitous excuse to shoot 30-50 feral hogs". Nor does it strike me as diagnostic of unsafe firearm handling, as others have suggested.
-- EDIT --
The most worrying thing here is the idea of shooting in a place where little kids were running around/playing just moments ago. While this kind of situation can be handled safely, it's also where dramatic accidents tend to happen. A big problem with firearms handling is that it's a perishable skill. You forget. You get rusty.
The tale looks much more like an excuse to explain having a lot of furtive hunting in the fridge IMO.
I haven’t been confronted with feral pigs, so I’ll take you at your word. What I can say with great confidence is that it doesn’t take 5 minutes to get a gun, so the fact that someone manages to shoot pigs in their back yard doesn’t in itself point to furtive hunting.
I guess that leaves us with two possibilities:
- poaching
- a bad response to a legitimate threat
You can rest assured that we agree both are bad.
It is strictly legal to hunt feral pigs any time of the day or night (!!), any time of the year, without permit in Arkansas, so long as it's on private property. You can even do it on public property if you have a generic hunting license, though there's time-of-year and time-of-day restrictions in that case.
There is no bag limit. You can even do it with night vision.
But yes, shooting pigs with small children playing nearby isn't good. I don't know the context, maybe it was very obvious that the kids all got safely inside and accounted for.
... but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.
If this is a concern in some areas, just a small stone wall around the kids's playing area would deter the pigs to enter. They do not jump very well.
I think this relates to the specifics of the situation.
If you're on farmland, and you've ensured your family is in a safe place, it's pretty safe. The danger -- as I mentioned in a previous comment -- is that this kind of situational awareness is a perishable skill. If it's not being practiced (ideally by all parties involved), it's easy to make mistakes. It's definitely not like riding a bike.
It is only legal in a handful of states, usually those with insane quantities of feral pigs.
In a lot of the US, it would be illegal. However in Arkansas where the person in question was, it was legal on private property.
In nearby Alabama or Louisiana you need a permit, likewise in California. So in those states it would have been illegal. In Arkansas, Texas, or Oklahoma, there's no permit.
In Texas, it's legal on public property even. Texas has a feral pig population nearing 2m, which causes almost (supposedly) half a billion dollars in damage annually. Or $50m. Or a billion. It depends on the study.
Are you perhaps projecting onto me some ideas you have about the kinds of people who discuss guns?
I am definitely interpreting your lack of concern for small humans as someone who does not have kids nor understand their lack of ability to do whatever it is you think they should do when being shot at.
In many U.S. states a gun safe or other secure storage isn't required. (And even when required people don't necessarily obey it.) Getting your gun might be as simple as grabbing it off the living room wall. It might even already be loaded. Even in households with children--that's why accidents happen.
All the while seeming to ignore the fact they have a rather large hole in their fence if multiple colonies of feral hogs worth of feral hogs can enter the garden in a very short space of time.
All of the natural predators coming up from googling seem to be fairly "weak" at population control -- alligators, cats, large birds (preying on the young) -- so it seems to be the wild hog has both the traits of an apex omnivore, but also comical rates of breeding; combined with their ability to eat just about anything (including each other), it almost as if the inevitable outcome should have been complete and total domination of the world centuries ago
I am having trouble linking it but Wikipedia says that wolves are indeed the primary natural predator of wold board
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21967020
Senestech's system for controlling rodents [1] is an ovary poison that stops female rodents from reproducing. The system is deployed continuously to keep rodent populations down in cities. But trying to kill all the rats in a city is probably not a good idea either: "A Vancouver rat study is showing us how pest control can backfire... " [2]:
>> [Rats] may be just as much a part of our city as sidewalks and lampposts. We would all be better off if, under most circumstances, we simply left them alone. [2]
Invasive ferrel/hybrid pigs are not comparable to rats, and I don't think a case can be made to let them alone. Maybe something like contrapest [3] could be developed for these invasive hybrid/ferrel pigs.
[2] http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/the-case-for-leaving-city-ra...
More info from Texas gov https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/nuisance/feral_hogs/
There's no nice, fully socially acceptable answer, because even in Texas the majority of city folks are not comfortable with the reality of killing another living creature, and they certainly aren't comfortable with people using firearms inside the city. Unlike deer issues, you can't do crossbow hunts for feral hogs because they're dangerous and travel in packs. You need firearms with high magazine capacities to safely do feral hog abatement hunts.
In addition to all of the above, Texas is uniquely difficult to resolve this situation for because of the size of the state. Texas is big, and feral hogs range across the entire state. In many ways, there's simply not enough people who are interested and able to spend their free time during the week shooting hogs. Because of population centralization in cities, people do it as a weekend trip and usually with a company that charges them to handle the logistics, because it's also not okay to just walk on random land here as every part of the state is private property unless otherwise designated. Managing the feral hog problem here costs the state billions of dollars and is like trying to hold back the floodwaters by putting your finger in a collapsing dam.
Specifically the section about how these things at full grown size can even kill a black bear!!!
There is only one known way to stop a full-grown feral hog, and that's with a (big) gun. Unfortunately. So until we have a better answer, our best bet is to kill them as rapidly as possible. Even with all the lore and furor around it in Texas, hog breeding is outgrowing active efforts to exterminate them and the population increases every year and is trending upwards.
They're also very aggressive, so enjoy that if you encounter feral hogs. I carry a large bore revolver with me when I go hiking and everyone assumes it's for bears... it's actually for feral hogs.
Which is very unpopular with pig hunters and people who don't like 'chemicals'. And not very feasible for countries with native/endemic mammals that may scavenge a hog corpse.
But, poison works, albeit accidentally. We use a variety of other techniques to control introduced mammals - intensive trapping and poisoning in ecologically sensitive areas, judas goats[1], helicopter culling, and sometimes, just letting the free market handle it[2] - wild animal recovery is very good at keeping red deer populations at low - medium numbers... ...when the price of wild venison in Germany makes it economical. Although it has changed their behaviour - they become more daylight-averse, and quickly learn to hide from helicopters.
[1]: https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/10136/judas-goat [2]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/get-involved/apply-for-permits/busin...
Just tell the hunters you have a problem and invite them in to eradicate them. I feel like government bodies whose job is to deal with such things never want to "solve" a problem completely, but would rather "manage" it so they can keep their job.
Some day these few hundred pigs will be 10's of thousands or more and they'll look back and wonder why they didn't put more effort in sooner.
This is only a problem if there are not hunters there. If there enough hunters, the pig problem will disappear.
Feral hogs are still a scourge in Texas, I doubt that’s because Texas doesn’t have enough hunters.
As other comments have mentioned, most of Texas' population lives in large urban areas. Even though hogs are starting to show up in and around cities (I have personally seen them right next to I-45 in The Woodlands/Conroe area immediately north of Houston), it's illegal to shoot them there. And there are only so many people willing to spend their own time and money to leave the city and go kill them.
If we're talking straight theory (and this is HN so why wouldn't we), all it should take is enough predators to reduce/eliminate any given prey population to the desired number. The predator count that is needed could itself be reduced if more effective predation methods are available, but it's still a numbers game.
Have permits and bounties been discussed? It has backfired with cases like cobras in India, but I don't see such a risk here. I'm not always one to go for a market based solution but it looks like it could help here.
I would also be concerned about unintended consequences, like you mentioned. I know for a fact that there are people today who, if they manage to trap the right pigs, would try to sell them. Their market would be landowners that offer canned hunts on a high-fenced property (say, $300 for a guaranteed large hog kill). Sure, the hog is still dead - but what if it breeds first? What if the piglets then escaped? Personally I'd feel dirty if I didn't cull the animals I trapped immediately, but if I were less financially secure, maybe not.
I'm guessing a real blocker is tax funding as you say. It is a little odd since solving this seems like it should be appealing to a wide range of people on the political spectrum for various reasons.
Why track them and remove?
Of course, even the extreme measures taken against hogs (explosives, machine guns, etc) seem to be doing little good.
The US is a heavily militarized state, spending a lot of money on it's use of weapons. However, these weapons tend to be very expensive and hyper targetable.
But just killing literal pigs, in the wild, with really no restrictions at all, and practically no need to track the kills or process them for food, is a nearly impossible task. Just pure, cheap, blunt weapons will do the job more than fine. But there just isn't enough, even with the massive spendings.
So it still seems like an improvement, unless there are frequent night attacks on humans or something that don't happen in the day (if being driven nocturnal to avoid humans I wouldn't think so).
Running 100 miles away, if there is food heir they would eventually breed themselves over to their anyway without hunting anyway wouldn't they?
The State of Texas--which is absolutely full of hunters and gun owners and such--has "shoot on sight" rules for hunting feral hogs. There are no limits and the season is always open.
The problem is only getting worse.
Because people get their panties in a knot over the idea of loosening other hunting laws enough to let an open season make a difference. As long as it's not ok to just shoot a hog on the side of the road a baseline population is going to exist in perpetuity in rural/suburban areas where property owners don't generally tolerate people shooting hogs off their front lawn from the road.
> The latter method [encouraging recreational hunting] has sometimes backfired dramatically when surviving animals spread across the state. In some places, for-profit hunting outfits have worsened the problem by importing feral pigs
Basically, it doesn’t seem to work for pigs (thus why Montana banned hunting them).
According to the article, this is because Montana doesn't have any pigs. You can't hunt pigs without bringing them in if there are no local pigs. But that's not an issue that applies to places that have too many local pigs.
Right now, those huge killer wasps from Asia are nesting in Washington State. There is a silly ineffective effort to track down the nest, as if there would be only one nest. That won't work, and the pests will eventually spread all across the Americas. We could solve it, at the cost of a short-term ecological mess. Simply dump pesticide from aircraft, covering a 100-mile diameter region, in quantity sufficient to kill every member of the order Hymenoptera. We won't do it, and so both North America and South America will eternally be infested.
Start counting money and proclaimed a national hero and the icon of mutual dependency between us and China...
Sounds like a good idea. And this is free for copying.
But, the real problem is allowing hunters to shoot them when they see them. Got it.
If I remember right, part of the problem is that they are not great eating. Although, a animal overrunning Texas boggles my mind.
Most of the predators are listed as hunting the young, but based on how frequently these breed, it seems like those wouldn't work well enough
And "endangered bird control" :/
I expect if the need arose, many of these would help thin the feral hog population with little incentive. (Maybe free access to land, or even a discounted hunting license for next year.) It wouldn't take much.
I think I've read about playing hawk screams or bird distress calls to scare away birds from airports. Would something similar like playing a cougar scream be enough to keep pigs out of an area?
Your best bet for audio deterrence would be firing blank shells, and that's most effective on a sounder (herd) that's already been hunted.
Might it have been a major vector of smallpox?
Solution: eat animals
Problem: people like eating animals and want more
Solution: selectively breed animals in a way that makes them reproduce rapidly
Problem: poor containment has caused selectively bred animals to breed with wild animals and created explosive population growth
Solution: kill all the animals?
"[Scientists] are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something." - Jurassic Park
Perhaps we should stop trying to screw with nature. We end up with things like explosive population growth and I don't know... SARS, COVID, etc.
Relying on what can be foraged/hunted would keep the human population in check instead of being propped up by agriculture -- and all the problems that brings.
Also there are more slaves in absolute terms today than at any other time. Not sure what agriculture and messing with ecosystems has to do with the human urge to enslave and kill each other.
https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/assemblag...
Nah. Cannibalism is basal human behavior. Strong taboos against it are a good idea, but also a relatively recent one, viewed across all of human history.
Historians say the number is skewed due to the higher infant mortality rate. And I would need to do more research on the prevalence of starvation.
Seems like there was plenty of that after agriculture was discovered and we had high populations during a season of crop failure.
None of this addresses the reality that humans' playing with the larger ecosystems is incredibly destructive.
In a hundred years, people may have a very different view of "progress".
The reality is that humans playing with larger ecosystems is only as destructive as humans make it - it's not inherently destructive, it just needs to be done with appreciation of long-term effects, and it's something that we're still learning to do as a species.
The reality, also, is that any group of humans that goes there, is going to stomp any other group that doesn't, because things like agriculture are necessary to produce a surplus that's needed for the society to maintain specialists - who become specialists because they don't have to spend most of their life foraging for food, because other people can produce more food than they need just for themselves. This category includes professional soldiers.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...