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Comment by poulsbohemian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Pigs are literally in the top three meats consumed.

Not wild ones.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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