Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

fieldandstream.com

59 pointsHR01157 comments

The solution is to eat them. It's humane and it's free range pork. Let rural butchers test and certify the meat and sell it to local restaurants as a super premium product, then leverage the now all electronic game tag system for supply chain management. The only thing standing in the way of solving the feral pig problem is the attitudes of the urban governing class toward people capable of hunting and our histrionic firearms regulations. Maybe the middle ground is to make it a military privilege to hunt feral hogs where you need to be a reservist, and if you join you get a lifetime rural open carry and hunting permit.

Canada is uniquely vulnerable to feral pig problems owing to what can only be described as a popular resentment of rural culture, which makes solutions like commercial hunts and culling by hunters non-viable. Maybe I should move to a U.S. border state and operate a commercial hunt business.

Just hunt them. You can't eat them all without going to huge expense having all-terrain refrigerator trucks to pick them up with. Vultures and other animals and just nature will take care of the carcasses. That's what people do here in Texas, where we have the largest wild pig population in the U.S., and it's a big big deal. There are hog hunting festivals. I've only ever seen videos of this, but this is one of those cases where an AR-15 is one of the most excellent firearms for hunting.

It's not as simple as 'just hunt them'. For one thing, if you don't pick the right ammunition, that will damage the vulture population, as well as other scavenger animals.

https://projectvulture.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lea...

The open hunting season in states like California and Texas actually creates a perverse incentive among hunting guides and private land owners to deliberately introduce and maintain feral pig populations, in order to act as supply for their business.

It’s widely accepted among wildlife ecologists that hunting has minimal control effect and might actually be causing more spread.

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/reports/Wildlife%...

That shows how little you know about this. In Texas you can hunt feral hogs all day every day of the year and you don't even need a license. That's how much of a pest they are. There are more than enough feral hogs in Texas to last a lifetime of hunting and then some. No one releases hogs into the wild in Texas so there's more to hunt.

From the USDA source I cited:

“While recreational hunting for feral swine is popular in many states, it is generally not considered an effective management option. Significant population reductions typically do not occur and feral swine behaviors or movements may be altered such that they impede other removal operations (e.g., trapping). Hunters usually target large males instead of females, which has little impact on overall population reduction. Additionally, recreational hunting creates incentives to maintain feral swine on the landscape and move feral swine to new areas for increased hunting opportunities, which has largely been attributed to the expansion of feral swine across the United States. Although controversial, several states have outlawed hunting in attempts to better manage feral swine populations. Research has shown that feral swine removal via hunting is often negated by the use of bait to attract feral swine. The supplemental food source increases fecundity and population growth despite hunter harvest.”

In Texas there's enough food for the feral hogs. That's why they're here. The amount of trapping and hunting cannot make much of a dent in their populations, and there's no need to bait them -- affected farmers and ranchers know that they are affected. Hunters do not hunt males to the exclusion of females because there's no time to decide their sex and which to target, you just shoot the ones you can.

Ah here is the issue, feral pig meat isn’t really pork the way most people know it. It’s gamey and often parasite ridden.

I'm pretty sure I've eaten feral pigs before. I remember it as being good quality. It's common to eat game in autumn where I live. Especially in rural areas.

I think this might be one of these cases where meat consumption might be ethically sound and good for the environment.

Feral pigs are hard to contain. They are smart, greedy, dangerous. They seem to be very similar to us humans in many regards, just less dominant overall, but the pigs we are talking about here also multiply very fast.

There are very few animals who can fight large feral pigs, and even fewer who have good chances of not getting severely injured. Pigs come in packs and they can assess situations much better than typical prey. They can fight off wolves or scare them away, especially when they have a numbers advantage. So the typical wolf strategy often doesn't work. Wolves might have the stamina and composure, but the risk/reward isn't there.

I don't think the article mentions it, but pigs track the schedule of human hunters. They know roughly at which times they will show up, so they carefully try to pick up the hunter's sent and track where they go in order to plan safer paths through the wild. So even if you hunt them actively, it's not an easy task at all.

I've eaten wild board and it's gamey but tasty, a relative often does salami from a mix of wild board and axis deer. But I understand that feral and wild boards are different.

I've had Wild Boar in Borneo with the tribe that was many years ago the "head hunter" and "poison blow dart" tribes we know of from yore... Super fatty, greasy and gamey.

Washed down with the alcohol they drink in thee Borneo Jungles, which is a certain leaf fermented in human spit.

An experience, yes. Not one I'd seek out again, but a great memory.

That sounds awesome.

Wild boars here don't have almost any fat, neither does deer.

I think "greasy" is a better word for it..

Gamey me I can handle. But parasites? Count me out.

“Regular” pork has parasites too, that’s why you wanna cook it to the “safe” temperature.

Not really. Compared to the number of domestic pigs, parasite infections (like the deadly for humans Trichinellosis) are almost inexistent.

And domestic pig meat is tested for parasites nevertheless.

With all that I feel uneasy eating raw meat, although salami and prosciutto are very tasty and sometimes I submit to temptation. Feel like running the Russian roulette everytime although the probability of an actual parasite infestation is extremely low.

Wild pigs would probably be okay if processed into I dunno, pasteurized canned meat. If that's guaranteed to kill parasites it should be okay for human consumption provided the meat is tested before nevertheless.

One thing I'm thinking of is this problem: as far as I know testing the meat is a slow, manual process, where a human is required to take slices of the meat and check them under a microscope. Therefore it's only done on a statistical basis. That's enough for farm pigs, if a pig from a larger culture is parasite free, chances are very high that all are parasite free.

But this is not possible for wild boars. Every pig they shot needs to be tested coze you never know otherwise. This is again feasible for the occasional hunt (here at least). Hunters will send a probe to the lab before consuming the pig and that's doable because it's like ... one or a few pigs. Not really possible if you massacre 1000 of them.

So unless some technology is developed for automating this testing procedure, you can't safely eat the meat of a wild boar mass slaughter.

I thought cured meat was safe for consumption.

Wild bear which is a popular hunting game here has a very high trichinosis occurrence, but regular cooking methods render it safe. My understanding is that high temperatures kill all parasites, but if that’s not the case I’d love to learn about it.

The USDA inspects for parasites and rejects any animals that have signs of them. Very little US farmed pork has parasites.

I think this is also the case for salmon? First time I had wild salmon at home, I was... rather surprised by the number of parasites on it.

It really is impressive how well farmed meat does at keeping that out. I don't think many of us have any sort of intuition for just how parasite ridden food was even a half century ago.

That is why all commercial sales of wild salmon are frozen to kill the parasites. If you catch it yourself you need to either freeze it thoroughly or be very careful.

I’ll think twice before my next sashimi!

Confidently incorrect!

Maybe the solution is to kill the parasites, through detection and processing technology, and spraying habitats.

If we really can't eat them, the other solution is to use chemistry to make something that feral pigs get addicted to and that they will give up food, sex, and nursing their young in pursuit of, and which is a human controlled substance we can manage. Drop enough of it in their habitats that they can always become dependent. If you just try to poison them, you kill off their own competition for food and just create more resilliant ones, but creating a chemical dependency where they will seek out sources that humans control would provide the lever to manage the population.

This solution is related to one I commented on about the rat population in new york city. Just make something they want. I should do a startup, we could call it Pied Piper.

It’s very difficult to kill the parasites of precisely one species with broad applicability.

Also, your goals and the goals of environmentalists seems to be quite different here. You’re suggesting farming them, but environmentalists don’t actually want them there at all.

Animals in non-contrived normal environments don't actually do that. Furthermore poison of any variety is unlikely to be sufficiently targeted to just kill pigs and most isn't very humane.

This is true. You don't kill feral pigs for meat, you kill them for the same reason you kill rats. It's not the kind of meat you'd eat if you had any other choice.

Wild pig meat tastes fine if the animal is young, fit, and healthy. It is very lean and tough, I did an 18 hour slow cook and it as pretty good.

well some stuff might but that's why you cook pork more than beef. it's not that gamey (depends on what it eats) but if you don't care for it, makes a good sausage with rabbit or squirrel.

> The solution is to eat them.

To quote a certain president: sounds good, doesn't work.

Over here in Poland despite having open season for boars all year round and eliminating 185k specimens due to ASF a few years ago there are still a lot of them.

The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork.

I mean, they disrupt ecosystems with their omnivoracity and propensity to multiply at a high rate so their population should be regulated, but you can't really compete on price with factory farming.

> The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork.

Is it actually wild boar?

We have butchers and farms selling “wild boar” products in Canada, but it’s actually farmed from descendants of recent “adoptions” of wild specimens.

It’s wild in terms of genetics; which might still be better; but isn’t accomplishing much in terms of culling.

> Is it actually wild boar?

There isn't much of a market for farmed boar, because it's still expensive.

We have a strong hunting lobby (many members of parliament are active hunters) so there's actually more bureaucracy with maintaining a farm of them than hunting. Farms probably exist(never heard of any), but it's not a particularly profitable business.

Becoming a hunter is actually one of the two most popular ways of acquiring a firearm permit(the other being sport).

During the ASF epidemic there was controversy regarding the origin of some of the meat on the market because, according to the law, boars culled due to ASF can, ahem, only be eaten by the one who hunted them, so the spike in supply was suspicious.

Ah gotcha. In Canada, it's basically prohibited to let game meat enter commercial trade. Still happens informally, but nobody is going to be able to walk into a butcher and buy it.

We ate almost all large animals on the planet to extinction with just stone tools. If we wanted to wipe the pigs out it can definitely be done with automatic rifles.

An automatic rifle is a "machine gun". Hunters, by and large, don't hunt pigs with machine guns.

The term you seek is semi-automatic rifle, which is a rifle firing one shot with each trigger press. These are what hunters use.

In North America some persons are allowed to use machine guns to shoot pigs. But doing so is a challenge from both an efficiency and a safety standpoint:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/texas/ar...

Except among mass killers, the machine gun is hardly the tool of choice for hunting (any animal including humans).

> Maybe the middle ground is to make it a military privilege to hunt feral hogs where you need to be a reservist, and if you join you get a lifetime rural open carry and hunting permit.

I can't make out whether you're in the US or Canada, but where I live (Washington State) if you're out in the sticks, not only can you open carry but if you're hiking, fishing, hunting, etc. you can have a concealed weapon without a permit. Are you telling me there are states out east where you're no longer allowed to even *open* carry a gun in the woods?

(Also the reservist tie-in is a little bit weird. I'm 50, I ain't drawing no TA-50. That makes me ineligible?)

There’s no concealed carry in Canada. In fact handgun acquisition has been banned last year. Hunting requires a license and then additional per species license. Except for species like wolves and coyotes, I think.

https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/firearms/authorization-carry

There is, but it's not very common at all, and not in the sense that you can just grab a gun and wander wherever you want.

I've always wondered if they process the application without any of the work check boxes checked. I assume the answer is "no".

Seems like a suggestion by someone that isn’t aware of the classes and education that are needed to get a hunting license or concealed weapon permit.

You have what is believed for instance to be hundreds of thousands of wild pigs in Saskatchewan Alberta and Manitoba. Sows are capable of producing up to 12 piglets per year. Meanwhile those 3 have a combined population of 7.3M around 18% living in rural areas or about 1.3M.

You can already legally own some rifles in Canada and hunt pigs in accordance with the law however you need to kill around 70% of the population each year just to keep the population the same size due to fast breeding and the survivors being about as smart as dogs do learn and become harder to kill.

It's not obvious that either gun control nor well earned disdain for the rural population are a meaningful contributor to the problem whatsoever. Nor is it obvious why any sane person who isn't already inclined to join the reserves would do so for the purpose of obtaining essentially a hunting license nor why tossing in rural open carry would improve the bargain. Instead such a license ought to be free since you are in effect doing the government a favor.

It seems more likely that people just aren't sufficiently inclined to kill enough of them because its a lot of work that wouldn't be sufficiently rewarded. Establishing a demand for harvesting and marketing them is something you would have to do the ground work on BEFORE people are inclined to put in the effort and furthermore it seems incredibly unlikely that the market should demand enough at a price that would support the amount of harvesting at a high unit cost required to even stabilize the population.

I would suggest government pay employees directly to shoot a shit ton of pigs. It is far cheaper than trying to store and process them and avoid incentivizing breeding them by not paying independent agents per kill.

People in Canada and the northern U.S. should report any sightings of feral pigs to their local conservation officers and to the Squeal on Pigs program

Why do they have a link at the end of the article asking people in Canada to report the pigs to the Montana government? [1] Are the US and Canada putting in a temporary agreement to allow Montana hunters into Canada to thin the herd and if so are they bringing disease testing centers into the loop? Or is this just a wording issue and I am interpreting it incorrectly? Perhaps they meant respectively?

[1] - https://invasivespecies.mt.gov/montana-invasive-species/sque...

The brochure there says that hunting is banned. Whoever is authorized to do the culls is apparently trained to eradicate entire groups, so that they don't further disperse and/or learn to avoid hunters.

The eradication in Montana appears to be relatively successful.

> article asking people in Canada to report the pigs to the Montana government

This is too laughable, and it's not even that far out of context.

What do you mean by disease testing centers?

Hunters have animals tested for a myriad of diseases prior to being consumed. There are some diseases that spread to humans and some that have not yet spread but will be world changing events when they do. Deer and Elk around me for example are tested for Chronic Wasting Disease which is a misfolded prion disease with no cure. [1] It's why I make 30 food piles for 28 deer every day.

Feral swine can carry several diseases that can be passed to humans such as leptospirosis, toxoplasmosis, brucellosis, tularemia, trichinellosis, swine influenza, salmonella, hepatitis and pathogenic E. coli. [2] They can also spread this to your pets and livestock. Brucellosis has been a recent problem in Montana for example.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_wasting_disease

[2] - https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/wildlifedamage/ope...

In Texas we trap them, blow them up, shoot them from helicopters, and shoot them from quads while chasing them at 50mph. They're too smart to shoot them from a standing position.

I've seen packs of 15-20 running along together while riding my motorcycle along county roads in the middle of nowhere, San Saba County. But they normally stay out of sight; they're super smart.

Good luck.

>In Texas we trap them, blow them up, shoot them from helicopters

This is exactly what we in Europe imagine Texas to be like. I'm not disappointed.

I've seen videos of hunting them from sitting positions. It's... scary, because they can run at you, so you'd best have large magazines.

I wonder if you can shoot them from drones? That could be interesting.

(Assuming you mean a small drone a citizen could be licensed to operate): Do drones have the ability to stabilize the recoil from a gun powerful enough to kill a pig?

You could certainly air drop explosives on them but that connotes serious risk to the environment and extremely inhumane injury or death to the pigs.

I wonder if some kind of dart could be used to euthanize them, though it would likely cost more than bullets and still lack accuracy.

What an awful topic though. The pigs have no idea they’re invasive. They’re such intelligent creatures, it’s an incredible shame that we’ve caused this.

>(Assuming you mean a small drone a citizen could be licensed to operate): Do drones have the ability to stabilize the recoil from a gun powerful enough to kill a pig?

The FAA defines drones as being up to 55lbs, so yes. Most of the off-the-shelf octocopter cinema drones could probably handle an appropriate firearm with some minimal modifications. Now, whether the FAA and ATF will throw a tantrum over a remote control weapons platform like that is a different story...

> whether the FAA and ATF will throw a tantrum over a remote control weapons platform like that

I Am Not A Lawyer, and attempting to build an armed drone without the advice of one one will probably earn you an ATF raid with your dog shot, your spouse sniped, you arrested, your house burned down, a cabinet appointment for the raid leader, and you put on national news with the option for a Netflix documentary 20 years later.

The FAA has a regulation prohibiting the operation of "Dangerous Weapons" attached drones without prior approval [0], so that's your first and biggest hurdle.

A servo-actuated trigger is likely going to get deemed a "machine gun" by the ATF, as it's one firmware tweak (or bug) away from firing more than once per "trigger pull" by the human user. Now if you were to become an NFA firearms manufacturer (Type 07 FFL+Class 2 SOT) you would be manufacturing, demonstrating (remember that FAA approval) and selling hog hunting drones officially.

To reiterate: Do not even think about doing this without actual legal counsel.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/drones-and-weapons-dangerous-mi...

IIRC flying a reaper drone and firing hellfire missiles is insanely expensive, so unless those pigs are terrorists, fly spy balloons, have massive oil reserves or made up weapons of mass destructions, it'll never come to drone strikes.

Maybe we can get them to the negotiations table and broker a peace deal with the super pig regime and turn them into an ally.

If I was a defense contractor, I would kick off a research program for an explosive weapon that was guaranteed to kill the hog and reliably cook the giblets into instantly edible bacon.

For any VCs reading this, please wire me funding at your convenience.

firing hellfire missiles is insanely expensive

Mass production can change that! The more we use on pigs, the less per unit!

"shoot them from quads"

Can you elaborate? I'm only aware of the traditional helicopters.

ATVs, something like this https://www.amazon.com/X-PRO-110cc-Youth-Wheeler-Wheelers/dp...

(never buy an ATV from Amazon, obviously)

never buy an ATV from Amazon, obviously

But sir, it says "SMART DEALS NOW". Are you sure one shouldn't buy?

The Chinese scooters in a crate are lovely: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/B00OMB4IFQ

Bit of a pain to get titled, though.

ATVs...

d'oh

Shooting from quads sounds very dangerous (for the shooter).

There's lots of videos of it on youtube.

selling wild game appears to be illegal in Canada like it is in the US. Ostensibly the reason is because of risk of illness but it's likely also due to lobbying by farmers.

I think there's a solution staring at us in the face here

Most of those pigs are, by western standards, inedible. With the exception of the very young adults (and the piglets), their meat is tough and has a very objectionable gamer/musty/garbage-y flavor.

Texas is contending with a similar problem, and if Texans can’t find a way to eat them, you know that meat is worthless.

> very objectionable gamer/musty/garbage-y flavor

Uncastrated males do, certainly -- the same is true of domestic hogs. Females don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar_taint

Is this a problem that can be solved with enough chili powder? I'm not a terribly picky eater or familiar with wild game, just have a lot of confidence in gastro science.

Not safe, and not good meat.

Don't take my word for it, here is proof by inference: hunters in Texas aren't barbecueing it already, thus it's not edible, QED.

How much chilli powder does it take to kill parasites?

Does cooking not kill the parasites?

There are also toxins to worry about. Many toxins bioaccumulate.

Wild animals spend most of their waking hours looking for and chewing food (and humans labored under the same constraint till they invented cooking); even when they can tell there is something wrong with some food, they usually cannot afford to reject it.

Toxins are present in a lot of farmed 100%-grass-fed meat, too. I stick mostly with 100%-grass-fed lamb raised in New Zealand or Australia and won't eat grass-fed buffalo anymore even if it were free.

Some prion diseases cannot be destroyed by cooking the meat.

Cooking does, but the best thing about the pig is that you can turn it into sausage, and improperly prepared sausage puts the consumer at risk for trichinosis.

Gamma irradiation is very effective at killing trichinosis in swine flesh and is approved for this purpose in America.

A cobalt source for the home? That's plainly nuts.

In Europe they dealt very successfully with trichinosis by inspecting pig carcasses. But I have no idea if you can take a muscle sample from a porker you shot yourself to your local large-animal veterinarian to see if it's trichinotic. (In rural areas they just might that service - back then in my home village we had that pharmacist who was a devoted mushroom hunter, and people would run their mushrooms past him for identification if they weren't really sure.)

In Germany at least inspection is mandatory, even if you've hunted for personal use.

Obviously food irradiation is done at specialized processing facilities where hunters would send their kills, not at home. Here's a clue for you: it's already the case that most hunters don't process their own meat.

> That's plainly nuts.

You're the one who said it, so right back at you buddy. Stop pulling absurdities out of your ass and attributing them to other people to have something to disagree with.

Not sure if your average family-owned deer processor would want a gamma source with all the required safeguards in their facility. And they'd have to get it past the customers too, there's going to be resistance with at least some of them.

A friend from school, his parents owned a butcher shop where they killed and butchered their own hogs (not beef, beef would have been to large for the facility). If anyone had asked him what he wanted - irradiation or inspection plus proper treatment of the meat (boil, fry or hot-smoke) the reply would have been unequivocal and loud.

> specialized processing facilities where hunters would send their kills

Have you ever met a hunter? They do not send their kills to "specialized processing facilities" they send their kills to their buddy Jim who butchers it in his shed. Maybe they know a commerical butcher that will do it for them, and even then it's the butcher down the road. Specialized processing facilities, that's hilarious.

More than you I think.

> very objectionable gamer/musty/garbage-y flavor

Speaking as a gamer, I can relate.

But isn't that true of most any game meat?

I've heard that bear meat can be tough and grisly, but I was told it depends on how you butcher it.

I've eaten deer, moose and even beaver from hunting and trapping. They will taste amazing if handled well and given early to a butcher.

Old bucks don't taste as good, but younger deer have amazingly tender meat.

> But isn't that true of most any game meat?

Most so-called "gamey" meat is down to poor handling of the meat. Hogs are an exception... uncastrated males do taste bad to many people.

I always thought gamey was from high activity of the muscles. Farmed animals certainly don’t run around forests fending for themselves

I always thought gamey was from high activity of the muscles

An animal's diet affects its flavour. Eating all manner of random foods, makes partially the gamey flavour.

Yes but we can process the shit out of the meat and add msg etc. It doesn't have to be bbq

That's what I'm thinking too. There are a lot of products that are made from highly processed unidentifiable meat stuff.

My dogs certainly wouldn't object to feral gamey pig meat either. I sometimes think the more disgusting the food the more they like it...

What if you slathered the meat with barbecue sauce and chili peppers? Then there might actually be a chance.

The original reason for banning sales of wild game meat in NA is because species were being driven extinct or extirpated due to hunting. https://www.grandviewoutdoors.com/big-game-hunting/should-yo...

Unfortunately allowing selling of specific species we don't like that reproduce easily would probably just lead to private land owners promoting habitat and food for that species on their land. That's what's happened in Texas on a lot of private ranches due to the popularity of pig hunting. Texas is mostly private land, unlike Montana which is mostly public but still.

Hunters caused the problem, we shouldn't encourage them to make it worse.

https://www.agweb.com/news/livestock/pork/pigs-dont-fly-fera...

I mean, I have no doubt there is some regulatory capture going on here. That said, this is also the kind of regulation that was written in lives lost. Wild game can be done safely, sure. But typically not at large, and best to let the folks taking the risk be the ones eating it. That is, it works now because there is no incentive to just at mass capture any feral/wild animal that you can, butcher it, and sell it. As soon as that incentive does exist, expect lots of problems.

Canadian hunter here.

From my understanding this is mostly to avoid poaching.

At least here in QC hunting laws are extremely strict to protect the populations. I believe other provinces have similar laws (it's a provincial jurisdiction)

It's too bad that the meat from these is inedible, but I wonder if it's related to their diet. Maybe some soy field diet would make them more palatable?

Canadians should simply rise up and eat these pigs.

The nature needs predators. Maybe stop killing wolves like madmen.

Feral pigs are no piece of cake very much unlike typical prey. They can fight off wolves and scare them away. They are smart and dangerous animals.

Wolves rely on causing panic, isolating few individuals and then hunt them over a long period of time. They have high stamina, good coordination and composure. However pigs can just decide to run at you and fuck you up. Wolves often don't like these odds.

Canada has a large and healthy wolf population, especially out west. The Manitoba wolf population numbers in the thousands and it’s also got one of the worst feral pig problems, according to the article. Maybe the wolves just can’t deal with them.

The wolves and the pigs might not live in the same places. Manitoba is huge.

Admittedly I am not an expert, but I'm fairly sure US and Canada has learned that lesson a while ago

https://www.hcn.org/articles/wolves-was-yellowstones-deadlie...

CBC has an article [1] with more pictures of the pigs themselves, tusks and all, as well as their typical weight.

Over 300 pounds! Largest recorded was 640 lbs.

They remind me more of wild zebras than friendly farm oinkers.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/why-canadas-super-pigs-migh...

> Back in the ’80s and ’90s, Eurasian wild boar were brought here to be raised for their meat.

> A number of the animals escaped from their pens and mated with domestic pigs.

Yet another human caused issue. What a surprise.

Pigloos!!!

Do we have to wipe them out? Just because they’re surviving our extinction event doesn’t mean they’re evil

Siberian tigers are proficient predators of wild boars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar

>>A single tiger can systematically destroy an entire sounder by preying on its members one by one, before moving on to another sounder.

Siberian tigers are endangered due to poachers seeking to meet the demand for tiger body parts in traditional Chinese medicine, and could be well protected by Canadian conservation authorities on Canadian soil far from China.

A population could be transplanted to Canada and allowed to proliferate, to act as a natural wild pig limiter.

I mean I absolutely want tigers to be set loose in the countryside but I feel like that’s going to then end in people shooting tigers out of helicopters with a machine gun.

If people are willing to move on from the idea that we have to try and keep animals exactly where they were and preserve habitats (that we then wipe out) then we could probably save species like that. Tigers would do great in a nice forest full of pigs.

NIMBY.

Tiger meat is too tough, not tasty enough and there aren't enough recipes for preparation. I credit this to a scarcity of tiger hunts. Step 1 in every recipe ("kill the tiger") is always a bitch!

I'd much prefer being overrun with feral pigs than feral tigers. Bacon!8-))

> [The] reality is still that outside of the Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, there are no meaningful opportunities to hunt wild pigs, which is not allowed in Ontario and Quebec

In the southern United States it’s open season on wild pigs to keep the population under control.

In at least Texas, you can take a machine gun mounted to a helicopter to go hog hunting: https://www.helibacon.com/texas-helicopter-hog-hunting/

This article is light on the risks of an unchecked feral pig population. Pigs are dangerous. They’re mean, dirty, and can wreak havoc in ecosystems. Coming across a feral pig is dangerous, and they travel in squadrons so it’s likely you’ll cross a handful at a time. Unlike most animals that will leave humans alone unless they have reason, feral pigs will pick a fight.

That these researchers are saying the pigs are pushing into human settlements is cause for concern.

I'm a gun owner and support controlled hunting both for needed food for some people and population control when done properly. But beware perverse incentives and proper management. There have been plenty of articles and research about use of incentives and industry for dealing with invasive species, not just the feral pig problem but many others (nutria and lionfish for example [0]). And states that have made hunting easier do not seem to have necessarily benefited perhaps in part due to also creating an industry and economic incentives around feral pig hunting that actively encourages people to want more feral pigs to hunt. This has echoes to efforts going way back, a well meaning simple program might offer payment for some proof of killing a pest animal. This seems like a way to get people to go out and get them. But will they do that, or will some end up actively breeding said pest animals, harvesting them for the reward, and having plenty escape or eventually cause other issues? There definitely has to be some holistic thinking before just letting systems develop, particularly since it can be hard/impossible to unwind even if it was a mistake. Like all kinds of economic activities once people get into them lobbying and economic arguments can in turn shift the politics.

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0: "Review of harvest incentives to control invasive species" https://www.reabic.net/journals/mbi/2014/3/MBI_2014_Pasko_Go...

This is nonsense. No farmer or rancher in Texas wants feral hogs, and no one in Texas tries to promote feral hog populations. We have something like 4 million feral hogs. The problem is that avid 1 hunter can take out 20-30 in one night, but they don't go out to do it every night, and there's not enough feral hog hunters to make a dent.

Feral hogs cause enormous amounts of damage, and there's no hope of hunting or trapping them down to manageable numbers much less zero.

If I’m a hog farmer and I can make 200 smeckles for a standard hog or get paid 400 smeckles for each “feral hog” I hand over then logically I’ll just start breeding the feral ones instead.

The market finds the most profitable solution, not necessarily the best solution.

There is no market for feral hogs. Sure, casual hunters may pay to get to hunt a bunch of feral hogs, but professional hog hunters get paid a lot for it (they use helicopters, to give you an idea of how much farmers and ranchers will pay for that service). The value of a feral hog's meat on the market is zero.

You foolishly extrapolate to a market that has never existed (in Texas at least).

Sport hunting doesn't help keep the population down though:

https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-has-a-feral-hog-...

When I was younger my friends and I used to trap and kill dozens of them at a time. The sheer number of hogs and the rate at which they breed down in the river bottoms is insane.

Not sure how you'd ever get rid of them, they are pretty clever and once you use a trick unsuccessfully on them they tend to avoid it.

>Not sure how you'd ever get rid of them

Same how Australia fought the Emus in The Great Emu war

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wms8ZEtVQhg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War

Biological warfare, in one form or another, might be the only way, but that comes with risks that are probably unacceptable, even in light of the amount of damage they cause.

Put lions in - wolves are too small, and jaguar won't touch them, jaguar is solitary but pigs come in packs.

Lions can't handle the Canadian climate, Siberian tigers can, and they are proficient boar hunters.

| But if you just shoot one, the rest scatter.

But you don't shoot one. You shoot most of them. That requires thermal optics, semi-automatic rifles, high capacity magazines (and lots of them), ATVs or helicopters or well-planned stands with a good view of a clearing that hogs might hang out in at night.

It's nothing that increased farming won't solve. Farmers will efficiently eradicate any pest in their designated areas.

Wow, this is next level of killing living beings for pleasure.

> Pigs are dangerous. They’re mean, dirty, and can wreak havoc in ecosystems. Coming across a feral pig is dangerous, and they travel in squadrons so it’s likely you’ll cross a handful at a time.

Sounds a lot like humans.

It does!

What are you trying to say here?

The great ~~emu~~ feral pig war

pigs are arguably smarter than dogs and as many can attest, these pigs will avoid traps and hunters rather adeptly - this is a situation where we need to repopulate wolves - hobby hunting will never outpace their population growth, we need full-time allies

Wolves won't hunt 300lb hogs.

Desperate wolves have successfully hunted moose.

I suspect at worst they'd adapt a strategy to distract the hogs and eat the piglets. 24/7 hog harassers would be much more effective than sporadic hobby hunters. The stress of a constant wolf presence could also disrupt uninterrupted eating and breeding patterns.

They said that about chimps but then those chimps figured out you could chase them off a cliff and then eat them at the bottom.

Give them a chance and they’ll adapt. It’s either kill hogs or they starve.

Who would've thought that breeding pigs to both reproduce and grow to maturity faster could lead to a massive invasive species issue that has seemingly no solution?

Maybe we shouldn't be breeding animals to eat - but that's just me.

The pigs we breed stem from basically a single species that already had the properties of very fast reproduction and very flexible diet. They were already like that, which is why we breed them. Other species have been tried without success.

During the middle ages, our domesticated pigs were basically feral pigs that lived on farms and in towns, even in cities, as a bio garbage disposal. There are a lot of fun facts you can dig up there.

The these pigs in America are imported, yes but they became wild again very fast and are basically the same species as before domestication.

Meat is delicious and nutritious. I have no desire to move to a vitamin powder and soy extract based diet.

Checks notes, yes... Just you.

Why are they being called "super pigs"? Although that would be cool, it's not like they can fly, shoot lasers or be resistant to bullets.

So, why not hunt them down for sport?

I'm not sure why they're called that. They are, however, veritable super animals. They're incredibly intelligent, prolific, destructive and wiley.

It's impossible to dent their numbers using traditional means.

It's a problem here in Israel too!

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/world/middleeast/haifa-is...

And here, they feel very safe.

One natural resource that will never be fought over between Jews and Muslims.

Oh my. This surely falls under the category: G_d has a sense of humour.

I'm really hoping the other predictions in Neil Gaiman's System Shock aren't also coming true. But I suspect they will...

For the big ones I have it as 3/6 already. (Not detailing em to avoid spoilers :))

> Neil Gaiman's System Shock

Ehm... which book?

Are you thinking of Neil Stephenson's "Termination Shock"? That one involves feral pigs, and I'm not seeing "System Shock" as a book by Gaiman.

I'm pretty sure this is what OP meant; but, now, I am saddened we haven't seen the Neil's collaborate on a sci-fi graphic novel. Obviously, it'd be 12000 pages long.

Complete with 300 hour audio book version that describes each panel in the graphic novel.

Really, I thought it was more of a US phenomenon.

The feral pig population in North America is based on a hybrid species with the Russian Razorback. It makes sense that they wouldn't be able to invade old climates as well

I believe this was a feature of the techno-apocalypse in Oryx and Crake by our very own Margaret Atwood

Some people complain there are too many wild pigs, while other people complain they have nothing to eat.

Can't those problems be solved at the same time?

For a moment I though my ex-gf started posting to HN :/

(This was her love language, ok? Don't judge us)

I don't know why you were downvoted, this is adorable

A segment of HN is allergic to humor. Real Jabronis/Giambones.

I'm not exactly in tune with the discussion on invasive species, but in this case it seems to be too late.

Should we intervene in established ecosystems? These are natural systems and why not have a live and let live attitude to animals.

When hornets make a nest outside your garage, do you intervene or do you live and let live?

The city and the forest and two different places.

I don't think we should be gardeners of the whole biosphere.

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