There's a great reply-all on Feral Hogs: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/n8hw3d that explores the tweet:
“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.”
“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