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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

>> The province of Ontario has an emerging population of a few hundred pigs, and it’s educating the public, collecting data, and testing how to track and remove swine.

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.

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As it says in the article, there are problems with hunting: pigs are smart and become nocturnal to avoid hunters, making them more difficult to track; also because they are smart, pigs start traveling when they find they are being hunted and sounders can scatter, spreading feral pigs to a new, larger territory.

> spreading feral pigs to a new, larger territory.

This is only a problem if there are not hunters there. If there enough hunters, the pig problem will disappear.

Texas has a year round open season on board and a lot of hunters, some of whom attach machine guns to helicopters and kill entire groups at a time.

Feral hogs are still a scourge in Texas, I doubt that’s because Texas doesn’t have enough hunters.

I mean, it kind of is.

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.

> And there are only so many people willing to spend their own time and money to leave the city and go kill them.

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'm not sure if Texas Parks & Wildlife has discussed bounties to encourage culling. Such a program would probably require increased taxes to fund, which is not likely to be popular... though with the apparent increasing coverage of the issue, maybe that wouldn't be a problem. If everyone is on board, then it's just a question of how much the people (read: the government) are willing to spend.

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.

Gaming the system could be a problem but I think an equilibrium can be reached where the payoff is attractive but won't cause huge problems. If the boars are as destructive and dangerous as stated, it seems like a poor payoff to take a risk and corral them compared to more traditional farming/ranching.

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.

Agreed. It's clearly a known problem in the state legislature, as they specifically removed the requirement to have a hunting license on private land for feral pigs. I hope they're at least considering adding incentives.

Agreed. I can confirm; hunted pigs get educated and super skittish. It's like tracking the Viet Cong or something.

The article touches on this:

> 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).

> 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.

In Texas, it is legal to hunt hogs year round. The point about "surviving pigs spreading across the state" doesn't make any sense. If they have no predators, their population is going to expand no matter what you do, until they hit a natural limit on food.

I remember reading about the rationale elsewhere. The gist of it was that if you attack a pack, you should not leave any survivors. The survivors learn of the danger of being hunted and adapt to it, making it very difficult to hunt them (and perhaps their descendants?). So it's best to leave hunting them to professionals who would ensure they get the whole pack, rather than amateurs who get one or two, but make the rest a much bigger problem.

There was a JRE episode with a coyote expert who touched on this. It was relatively easy to eradicate wolves, because they have a strong pack mentality and will stick together even as members die. Pigs and coyotes would disperse into groups of two and three, widening their geographic range and still breeding.

Yes, but they are going to naturally do that anyways. If a specific area can only support, say, 100 pigs and they keep breeding and breeding, some will have to spread out to other areas to find food. All animals do this. They will expand their numbers and geographic range until they hit a limit based on access to resources or predation.

If the options are declaring open season and not doing anything, you are correct that open season may be better (I say may because I do not know about feral pigs breeding patterns, etc. For example, some animals do not breed when they have a young child, so separating them from their children will have an opposite effect). But there is a third option that is better than both and that is having professionals do the eradication.

If your concern is limiting the spread of an invasive species to minimize the damage they produce on the environment, then furthering their geographic spread is not a good idea. Coordinated campaigns to clear out entire groups would be good, teaching them to run from hunters and spread out would be bad.

We don't put effort into things sooner because the effort and side-effects seem so terrible, but this is short-sighted thinking for an infestation that will become permanent.

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.

Open season without limits should be an easy way to deal with many of them. This is usually true for most "nuance animals"

Why track them and remove?

West of Ontario in Saskatchewan, wild board are considered to be pests and it is open season.

https://www.rgsl.ca/wild-boar-in-saskatchewan/

The scale of the problem - at least in some states - makes eradication impossible. Feral hogs have a gestation period of only 115 days and reach sexual maturity in just 6 months. Texas has 4 million feral pigs. They need to kill 75 percent a year just to keep the population stabile. Texas already has 24/7, 365 open hunting (with dogs, traps, helicopters, etc) and it is not adequate.

"hunting" almost seems like a euphemistic term when people are shooting machine guns and automatic shotguns out the side of a helicopter. I realize they are an invasive species and can't be allowed to multiply unchecked, but it makes me sad to think of fairly intelligent animals being slaughtered en masse, often with no intention of recovering the meat. I do understand they are quite dangerous and destructive creatures, but still...

When it comes to hogs, it's a matter of extermination, not 'hunting'/sport. Pulling punches with notions of sportsmanship and respect for the animal totally misses the point. These aren't elk.

Of course, even the extreme measures taken against hogs (explosives, machine guns, etc) seem to be doing little good.

it seems like we both agree that "hunting" is not quite the right word for what is going on. to be clear, I'm not saying extermination is morally wrong in this case; it's clearly necessary to protect the local ecosystem. what's tragic is that we created this problem in the first place, and it seems the only solution left is to kill as many of them as we can as efficiently as possible.

It's curious.

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.

I’m reminded of Australia’s unsuccessful war against emus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

The term 'culling' is also in common use, and I can see where one would prefer it.

If you have a couple hundred, hunting might work. If you have 80,000 and hunting them makes them run up to 100 miles away and turn nocturnal, it can make everything worse.

To be fair, some might count "the hogs ran 100 miles away" a local success, if their chief concern is hogs in their backyard where their small children play.

It's like combatting black mold with bleach-filled paintballs. The impact of cleaning one spot is that the infection spreads to a wider range. As the diaspora grows exponentially, it will quickly return to the spot you just cleaned.

Turning them nocturnal probably makes them less efficient food consumers/breeders right? Otherwise it seems like they would turn nocturnal without the presence of hunters.

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?

Re-read the article. The 'big risk' isn't attacking humans (tho it's a concern), it's destruction of ecology and agriculture. If you're going to dig up and eat the farmers crops, doing at night is worse for the farmer. And there's another farm 100 miles away. Further, there's nothing in the article that indicates the hogs are less efficient at night. Since hogs already have poor eyesight and extremely good smell, there's no reason to believe night is much impediment.

This approach is painfully naive.

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.

Without the hunting though, it would be even worse. If these hogs have no natural predators, the only thing that would check their population is running out of food.

Texas problem is a land problem. You can't just see hogs in a field and shoot them. You need permission from the land owner (this goes for pretty much everywhere). Texas is particularly bad because owners see hunting as a possible revenue stream since there is literally no state land open to hunting so they don't grant permission to just anyone.

Right. Imagine if they instituted that policy when there were only 500 of them. Maybe even offered a $1000 reward. They couldn't afford that today, but this other place should do all of that right now.

It would have likely worked back when US had enough hunters - there's no shortage of species that were wiped out in that manner before effective regulations were instituted. But these days, it doesn't even have enough to keep deer in eastern states in check, much less hogs (which multiply and spread faster).

>Why track them and remove?

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.

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