Apocalypse Sow: Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion? | Hacker News Reader

Apocalypse Sow: Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion?

texasmonthly.com

21 pointsLastNevadan43 comments

Bring me their young:

https://portuguesecooking.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/130/

I understand we're talking about a massive scale, both in terms of numbers and geographic distribution, but... you are telling me that in a capitalist country you've got this tasty resource that is a burden to society and nobody has figured out how to turn this into a food supply chain?

I'm dumbfounded how in a country with more guns than people this problem can't be quickly brought to an equilibrium.

I would be genuinely shocked if it was legal to hunt and sell these pigs. Almost certainly, it all must be waste or for individual use, by law. We’re quite weird about food in this country.

No license required, no bag limit. They're tough to kill and tough to find in the brush. A decade of sport hunting them has not even made a dent. I hear you can bbq them but it's not the best meat, no experience there.

From the article: Miller authored the “pork chopper” bill, passed in 2011, which famously allowed licensed Texans to snipe at pigs from helicopters. Hunters, emboldened further by 2019’s Senate Bill 317, which waived the need for a license to kill wild pigs, now stalk them year round, on land and aerially.

Right, anyone can hunt pigs for their own consumption or give the meat away to friends for free. But it generally can't be sold commercially because the process doesn't comply with food safety rules.

Maui Nui has obtained USDA approval to sell commercially hunted venison. So presumably someone could do the same thing with feral pigs. Just have to follow the certification process.

https://mauinuivenison.com/pages/methods

> No license required, no bag limit.

This is very state specific. In California they are tag only. Each resident tag costs $25.92 and Non-resident wild pig tags are $86.97 per animal.

I think you greatly underestimate the difficulty and time in hunting them. Most non-hunters have no comprehension of the time and effort involved.

How much would I have to pay you a day to hike in the backcountry and hunt pigs?

It is simply not economical even if there were a legal commercial Market for the meat and if it were legal to hunt them where they are.

Hunting them is the easy part, relatively speaking. The hard part is what comes afterwards: getting the carcasses out of the bush and to a meat processing facility. It's not as though they turn into packages of pork chops and bacon when you shoot them, after all; butchering a pig is a substantial amount of work and it has to be done promptly to prevent spoilage.

Thats a factor as well. I guess the relative work depends on how good you are at finding and shooting them. If you do 10 hunts to find a pig, that changes the picture. I have a abysmal sucess rate hunting pig.

> if it were legal to hunt them where they are.

It already is - they're such a nuisance that it's generally always open season. It's just, as you say, a huge pain in the ass and they reproduce far too quickly for hunting to make a significant difference, even without limits.

not really. The many areas where they are include private land and national and state parks where hunting is not allowed.

Similarly, at least in my state of California, you have to pay for the privalege of hunting wild pig, and buy tags for each one.

> you've got this tasty resource

Probably not as tasty as you think. The taste of wild meat can vary pretty heavily depending on what the animal's diet is like, and with something omnivorous like hogs that could be damn near anything. There's a reason we generally only eat herbivores (at least when it comes to mammals).

But even if you do want to eat it, now you've got to just cook the hell out of it unless you want worms. Wild pork is very susceptible to parasites.

I wonder if meat that doesn’t have boar taint tastes amazing though. I had wild turkey once and it was like another universe of flavor compared to the sad tasteless thing we eat on Thanksgiving. If I recall, I have had wild boar before and it had the same very rich wonderful flavor difference that I experienced in the turkey and is like the difference between a store-bought tomato and a garden one.

And reading this-

https://www.aasv.org/shap/issues/v5n4/v5n4p151.pdf

If you read the “Consumers’ response to taint” section, it seems consumers can’t even detect boar taint in meat, only trained panelists in a lab; so you have a very weird Goodhart’s Law situation going on there.

And especially so in Ukraine, where feral hogs have been known to consume the bodies of dead russian soldiers. You can Google it, I don't want to link to it here...

Totally believable. Is not uncommon for the species to eat carrion when they found it.

Pigs are literally in the top three meats consumed.

Old males meat has a very strong pungent taste. Pigs at the supermarket are either young or castrated to remove the problem. Hunters favor also young boars over the older males (unless the goal is the trophy and in that case the meat could be entirely discarded). Is also a though meat. Some people marinate wildboar meat for a few days before cooking it to tenderize it.

You got to cook it in a pressure cooker, that’s how people in South Asia do it. Turns out super tender and isn’t gamey.

…that is: raised pigs of selected breeds, and more importantly: almost never uncastrated males, as their meat tends to have a bad taste (so-called boar taint, see link below) that makes it unsellable. That's why the overwhelming majority of raised-for-meat male piglets are castrated, so as to not develop that bad boar taint taste, at an age less than 14 days old. A cruel procedure by the way, which is at most places still done without any anesthesia or analgesia (pain relief). With feral pigs of course, none of that happened.

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

Not wild ones.

And it's easily within living memory that even farmed pigs were always cooked well-done because of the parasite issue.

Prion desease is not worth the risk, even if they were easy to hunt.

You keep saying this all over the thread but there is literally no evidence that wild boars can transmit prion diseases.

Thanks for correcting me. Looking now I was thinking of the other diseases boars can carry, which still require testing meat or preparation before consumption.

Preparation of pork-based meat is rather stringent in U.S.

https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/pork

For good reason. Prions are no joke

What do Prions have to do with pig preperation?

No infectius prions have ever be observed in pigs [1]. Furthermore, it isnt like preperation avoids CNS meat from going to market. You can walk into a grocery store and buy pig brains and they are put into all sorts of foods.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-96818-2

In this case it's not prions that are the concern, it's trichinosis.

Predators were designed for exactly this job

Pigs don't really have any effective natural predators

Coyotes, Foxes, Dingos, Racoons, Wolves, Pumas, Leopards, Jaguars, Alligators, Eagles, Bobcats, Owls, Hawks, Black bears, Brown bears, Boas, Anacondas, Wolverines...

In some places zoologists had reported up to 80% of wolves diet composed of wildboars, consistently around the year.

A mature feral hog may reach a shoulder height of 36 inches and weigh from 100 to over 400 pounds. The extreme larger hogs are generally not far removed from domestication. Males are generally larger than females.

I'd like to see an owl take one of those.

You need to think further. A piglet is also a pig.

Owls? Eagles? Against a 300 lb. hog? Regardless, half of those animals don’t even live in the U. S.

And raccoons?

I think we need to resurrect the sabertooth Tiger for the big adult hogs

That doesn't mean that they are effective predators at keeping boar populations in check.

In fact, eating lots of boars is the whole and complete definition of keeping boar populations in check.

Cougar are far more effective at hunting them than any group of entitled Elmer Fudds. It should be illegal to hunt cougar, and they should be reintroduced back to everywhere they were extirpated. But there's also a sense of what's been happening with coyote, which is the more they are hunted, the more pressure is put on them to proliferate, i.e. the more coyote hunters kill, the more coyote there will be. It may very well be far more effective to TNR or haze feral pigs, no matter how much fun killing things is.

Do you have a link to your Coyote example? From the outside it sounds like complete nonsense and I have never heard of an animal that works like that.

This is common biology knowledge and has been proven. Pigs do it also. Fishes also change its strategies under heavy predator's pressure.

Shouldn't be difficult to find examples on any decent ecology handbook

I studied biology and it wasn't in the curriculum I learned. If you have an ecosystem that can support 100 coyotes, how does shooting 10 make the ecosystem magically able to support 200?

There are some population management strategies where harvesting large mature animals allow an ecosystem to support a greater number of younger and smaller animals, but that is a very different phenomenon than what you described.

Well, you're going to have to do a little thinking for yourself. We've been slaughtering coyote by the hundreds of thousands annually for over a century, and in that time their range has expanded to 48 stages. The coyote population has tripled since 1980 alone. You think there are less hunters? No, there are a lot more. We've gotten really good at killing coyote, upwards of half a million a year. It is ineffective. Hunters are causing the problem, not helping it. When coyote are killed, this pressure increases litter sizes. That's why it's happening. And if hunters continue the way they have been, we're going to be literally swimming in coyote.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-killing-coyot...

Predators were… designed?

Reminds me so much of Neal Stephensen’s near-future climate scifi novel, Termination Shock.

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