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Comment by wgerard | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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.

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