Source.

Because an “educated” pig is harder to track or trap, Kentucky is taking steps to prevent the hunting of feral hogs known to damage crops, woodlands and potentially spread disease.

Kentucky wildlife management officials are finalizing a ban on the hunting of wild pigs in an effort to more easily capture them. Under the new regulation, pigs could still be shot if they’re damaging private land, although wildlife experts are encouraging landowners to instead contact the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources to have the animals removed.

Steven Fields, an attorney for the department, told lawmakers during a legislative hearing earlier this week that if a sounder — the name for a herd of wild swine — knows it’s being hunted, the sounder avoids humans and shifts its activities to night, making it harder to track.

The Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Commission, the governing board overseeing the KDFWR, voted in December to approve a regulation eliminating the existing year-round hunting season for wild hogs.

Ben Robinson, the wildlife division director at the state agency, told the board the department was trying to prevent “anybody from shooting a pig at any time” because it can make feral hogs hard to trap en masse, something state and federal officials have actively been pursuing.

“It goes against what we’re trying to do with our trapping efforts by educating these pigs, making them much more difficult to trap,” Robinson said in December. “We’re having a lot of success with our partners, [U.S. Fish and] Wildlife Service, USDA, in trapping these animals and keeping them out of Kentucky. So by allowing landowners to just shoot freely, that goes against what we’re trying to do.

Here’s a stunning prediction. This approach won’t work.

Source.

Ohio’s House of Representatives has unanimously passed House Bill 503, a critical piece of legislation aimed at controlling the population and movement of feral swine within the state. The bill, strongly supported by the Ohio Pork Council (OPC) and other agricultural groups, targets the importation, hunting, and feeding practices of these wild pigs to protect the state’s livestock industry.

House Bill 503 addresses key issues related to the management of feral swine, including prohibiting their importation and hunting, and outlawing the feeding of pigs with garbage.

That’s right. The best way to stop the invasion is to prohibit the hunting of feral hogs. They didn’t ban hunting over feeders or raising feral hogs in preserves, they outright banned hunting them.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Source.

Wayward pigs are causing issues in some parts of Connecticut – and it’s become enough of an issue that state lawmakers are looking into how to deal with it.

The legislature’s environmental committee on Friday heard testimony on how much trouble roaming swine can cause. The committee is considering a bill to form a task force focused on roaming livestock.

“The last thing that we want in Connecticut is a population of feral pigs,” State Rep. Doug Dubitsky said. “They’re incredibly destructive, they’re very dangerous, they can run 30 miles an hour, they can be 6 or 700 pounds. They can kill you and they will eat you. It’s pretty nasty.”

State Sen. Heather Somers says bands of pigs are roaming her eastern Connecticut district, causing tens of thousands of dollars in damages to crops and lawns. She says the pigs are biting and chasing farmers.

Congratulations, Connecticuters!  Whacha gonna do about it?

Oh, that’s right. Y’all don’t like guns and aren’t used to killing feral hogs. Right?

A committee.  That’s the ticket. Another public works project.  Talk to the experts about what to do. Run from them when you see them.

Actually, when you hunt them enough they become runners. If they’re chasing farmers and the farmers don’t carry firearms, you’ll never evolve them into runners. They’ll just come after you.

Congratulations.

Or how about hiring professional snipers to kill them? They won’t make a dent in the population, but it will make the committee feel better that they aren’t being mean to the hogs, or at least, someone else is doing the dirty work for them.

Unfortunately for you, there probably aren’t enough of them yet to advertise hog hunting in Connecticut as a sport.

Told you so.

That’s Wyoming, Montana, ND, SD …

Sight your rifles in, boys. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Texas Monthly.

By the age of thirty, a time when most people are just beginning to think about their mortality, Austin Riley had already conquered his fear of death. He’d come exceedingly close to dying on multiple occasions, including a few months before his first birthday, when doctors discovered a golf ball–size tumor growing inside his infant skull. He would go on to spend much of his childhood in and out of hospitals, enduring high-risk brain surgeries and grueling recoveries. Then, in his mid-twenties, he was nearly killed by a brain hemorrhage that arrived one night without warning, unleashing the worst pain he’d ever felt. He emerged from that experience reborn, feeling lucky to be alive and convinced that his life had been spared by God.

So as he sat in a pool of his own blood on a beautiful October evening in 2022, he couldn’t help but acknowledge the morbid absurdity of his current predicament. He’d spent decades conquering brain injuries only to be killed while doing mundane chores on his family’s 130-acre Hill Country ranch in Boerne. “After all I’d been through,” he said, “I just couldn’t believe that this was how it was going to end.”

As he slumped against a fence and his mangled body began to shut down, Austin’s mind went into overdrive. He thought about his girlfriend, Kennedy, whom he’d never get a chance to marry, and the children he’d never be able to raise. He thought about how much he loved his parents and how badly he wished he could thank them for the life they’d provided. He thought about the land stretched out before him, a rustic valley accentuated by crimson and amber foliage that seemed to glitter in the evening light, and realized it had never seemed more beautiful than it did in that moment.

But mostly, he thought about the animal that had just used its razor-sharp, seven-inch tusks to stab him at least fifteen times. The attack had shredded his lower body and filled his boots with blood, and then left gaping holes in his torso and neck. Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack. But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.

It wasn’t just an attack, as far as Austin was concerned, but a murderous act of betrayal, one that shattered everything he thought he knew about the deep bond between man and pig. “For years, that animal trusted me everyday and I trusted him,” Austin said. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into his life, and he decided to kill me.”

They’re not pets. Feral hogs will kill you, folks.

Wild boar tries to steal some snowboards pic.twitter.com/tT3s4GdnhK

— Crazy Clips (@crazyclipsonly) February 7, 2024

They attack out of pure meanness, or spite, or just because they can, or for no reason at all.

And the hog doesn’t seem to me like it’s having any problem at all dealing with the cold and snow.

And just imagine – some folks want to keep them around, idiot rewilders, they are.

We’ve discussed the contradictions, confusion and befuddlement in the rewilding movement before.  From the destruction of dams in California in an attempt to save the river fish, only to introduce beavers who then build dams, to the massive solar farms that divert water and kill plant species making for essentially dead deserts, they can’t seem to make their minds up about much of anything except that they hate humans.

The reintroduction of wolves into Colorado has peaked the interest of rewilders everywhere. In fact, it’s practically romantic.

“It was so perfect. You could look around, and it felt like at any moment John Denver was going to show up. It was ‘Rocky Mountain High’ in every direction,” said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecology and conservation biology professor at University of Colorado Boulder and director of the American Canid Project. The stars rolled up last: five wolves, silent in their crates but omnipotent in the waft of their musky aroma. It smelled like the wild, Lambert observed.

But why would they care? Well, you see, they think it’s better for the environment.

The study was conducted by scientists at CSU’s Warner College of Natural Resources, focusing on the effects of three apex predators: wolves, cougars, and grizzly bears in Yellowstone. These carnivores, positioned at the top of the food chain and not preyed upon by other animals, had populations that were depleted over time.

The return of wolves to the park in 1995 was concurrent with the natural recovery of cougar and grizzly populations. Their absence for nearly a century had significantly altered the park’s landscape and food web, transforming regions rich in willow and aspen along small streams into grasslands due to intense elk browsing.

Too many Elk, they say. But they didn’t think that way when they were throwing bales of hay over the fences to the Elk when they thought they needed feeding in particularly harsh winters, causing the Elk not even to return to Yellowstone (when you’ve got a handout, why leave?).

But why are grasslands bad? The rewilders believe that trees are a more productive means of carbon reduction. But is that correct?

Forests have long served as a critical carbon sink, consuming about a quarter of the carbon dioxide pollution produced by humans worldwide. But decades of fire suppression, warming temperatures and drought have increased wildfire risks — turning California’s forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

Well, we’ve discussed the stupidity of fighting forest fires before, but let’s continue.

A study from the University of California, Davis, found that grasslands and rangelands are more resilient carbon sinks than forests in 21st century California. As such, the study indicates they should be given opportunities in the state’s cap-and-and trade market, which is designed to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

So if the rewilders are wrong, does it matter? Not to them. It’s an evolving religion, you see.  And even the most absurd claims can be made on behalf of carbon sinks and the environment.

An unscientific bias against “feral” or “invasive” animals threatens to undercut one of the great stabilizing trends making ecosystems healthier, a new paper argues.

Introduced species such as feral pigs, horses, donkeys and camels represent a powerful force of “rewilding”  — the reintroduction of wild animals into ecosystems where humans had eradicated them — according to a study published Thursday in Science.

The study argues against widely held beliefs about whether invasive species are harmful — or what Lundgren described as the quasi-religious perception that some species inherently belong in a given landscape and others don’t.

That belief is the driving force behind a wave of expensive and often futile campaigns since the 1990s that eradicate species including feral hogs in Texas, wild horses across the American West and donkeys and camels in Australia.

We’ve discussed feral hogs at great length here on these pages.  Feral hogs adversely affect water quality, attack pets, destroy the environment they are a part of, dig up crops, spread diseases and parasites that only they can carry,

What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?

Oh, not much. They just eat the eggs of the sea turtle, an endangered species, on barrier islands off the East Coast, and root up rare and diverse species of plants all over, and contribute to the replacement of those plants by weedy, invasive species, and promote erosion, and undermine roadbeds and bridges with their rooting, and push expensive horses away from food stations in pastures in Georgia, and inflict tusk marks on the legs of these horses, and eat eggs of game birds like quail and grouse, and run off game species like deer and wild turkeys, and eat food plots planted specially for those animals, and root up the hurricane levee in Bayou Sauvage, Louisiana, that kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the eastern part of New Orleans, and chase a woman in Itasca, Texas, and root up lawns of condominiums in Silicon Valley, and kill lambs and calves, and eat them so thoroughly that no evidence of the attack can be found.

And eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “‘Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.

Feral hogs have run farmers in Georgia and Texas completely out of business.

But if rewilding is your newfound religion, you can make any claim whatsoever and it’s okay, because mother Gaia.  Or something.

But remember what I told you about mother Gaia.  “The problem with mother Gaia is that she’s a silent nag, a cruel and uncommunicative bitch.  She hasn’t authoritatively spoken like my creator.  So while she may expect you to worship her, she won’t tell you how or why.  So the advocates of carbon-free footprint, depopulation, and rewilding, just make it up as they go, spending massive sums of money on things that end up doing more harm than good.”

Prior:

Canadian Super Pigs Poised to Wreak Environmental Havoc and Spread Disease in Canada

Can Whitetail Managers Take Back Feral Pig Country?

How You Know That Dummies Are Making Suggestions About Containing The Feral Hog Problem

Hogs in Houston

Hogs Are Running Wild in the U.S.

Feral Hogs in Canada

Woman Killed by Feral Hogs Outside Texas Home

Houston-Area Suburbs Now Suffering from Feral Hogs

Hog Apocalypse in Texas

Save the Planet – Buy an AR!

Very well done video documentary.

First, Canada sends their geese, and now these. Imbedded video includes an infographic depicting the spread. Apparently, they also build “pigloos.”

The cross between a European wild boar and a domestic pig is migrating south, to the US, as their numbers swell in Canada.

A cross-bred “super pig” from Canada is poised to wreak havoc on the environment in the United States and must be dealt with aggressively and immediately, a wildlife expert told Fox News Digital.

“These pigs are easily the worst invasive large mammal on the planet,” said Dr. Ryan Brook, an assistant professor in the department of animal and poultry science at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

These “super pigs” are actually a cross between a European wild boar and a domestic pig, Brook said.

The pigs “cause crop damage, destroy natural environments, get into cities, destroy water quality and can spread disease to humans, livestock, pets, and native wildlife,” he also noted.

The pigs are coming into the U.S. from Canada as their numbers swell there, causing populations to migrate south. Left unchecked, these “super pigs” could negatively impact just about everyone, Brook emphasized.

“The only people who should be worried about this is anyone that lives in North America and eats meat, or eats vegetables, or eats any foods based on grain crops or spends time outside for any reason,” he said.

[…]

The “super pigs” began with a unique set of circumstances, said Brook.

“Wild boar farmers were told to cross the wild boar with domestic pigs to make a bigger and longer animal,” Brook said.

He said a domestic pig has an extra set of ribs and has larger, more frequent litter.

“This was great for wild boar farmers, but [it] was a huge problem when [these animals] got into the wild,” he said.

The animals’ size, along with their intelligence, has made the “super pigs” capable of survival in harsh conditions and therefore hard to eradicate, said Brook. He noted they’ve even learned how to tunnel into snow caves to keep themselves warm.

“It is much warmer under than snow than on top of it,” said Brook.

Eradicating these wild pigs must be done as “quickly as possible,” he emphasized.

There must be “a rapid and highly aggressive response, just like dealing with cancer or forest fires — that is really the only option.”

He added, “Once [the pigs] are established, you will have them for another 500 years.”

Traditional hunting techniques are not effective in pig eradication, said Brook.

“Large traps and tracking Judas pigs (wild pigs with a GPS collar that will lead you to other pigs), ground removal teams, fencing, and education are all key,” he said.

Failure to quickly eradicate the pigs will result in devastation to the environment.

But how do they taste?

Outdoor Life.

America’s hunters and wildlife managers are well into the feral hog war. More than 6 million wild pigs roam the country, gobbling down native flora and outcompeting native fauna. They’re also hell on agricultural crops. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, hogs cause $1.5 billion of damage annually.

“Researchers think that number may be closer to $2.5 billion now, but more research needs to be done to determine an accurate figure,” says Ben Westfall, the National Deer Association’s conservation coordinator.

There are massive efforts by government agencies and private landowners to cull feral hogs and stop their spread. Whitetail deer managers are at the tip of the spear, because pigs can also have a negative impact on deer.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of formal, university-led research on how pigs impact whitetails.

There doesn’t need to be university-led research.  Those are the same pointy head idiots who recommend against hunting to cull the hog population (but recommend government sponsored “sharp shooters”).

I can tell you what happens.  They compete for the same sorts of food and bedding areas.  If the feral hogs come in, the deer leave.  It’s that simple.  The deer won’t fight the hogs.  But I think the article does get to that.

When hogs first appear on the scene, whitetails tend to avoid them, meaning they settle for lower quality bedding areas and food sources. This is even truer for mature bucks, which seem to have less tolerance for hogs than younger bucks, does, and fawns do.

However, in areas where hogs have been present for years, deer seem to get used to them.

Well, that last part is only sort of true.  They are still displaced and still compete for the same food and bedding, they do learn to live in the same geographical area, but if you want to deer hunt in an area heavily populated by hogs, you’re best bet is to move on.

“Based on my observations, deer do adapt to hogs if they’ve been present a long time,” says, Dr. Grant Woods, a renowned deer biologist and founder of Growing Deer TV. “I see deer in South Florida ignoring hogs unless they get within 30 yards or so. I’m sure where hogs are new neighbors, deer give hogs more space. There’s certainly more food for deer if hogs are removed, and I suspect they’d be a bit calmer.”

Still, whitetails can be forced to move out of areas if hogs over-browse habitat and dominate resources. The higher the hog densities, the worse this problem gets.

That’s what I just said.

“It’s more about the food sources in the area,” he says. “If the hogs eat all the food, the deer will move to a new food source and return once the food source is available.”

The good news is that when hogs are removed (or severely culled) from the landscape, deer seem to bounce back. Anecdotes from the field are somewhat mixed but they are mostly promising. According to most deer managers I spoke with, whitetails generally return soon after hogs are removed. This can take longer in areas where the habitat is seriously degraded, but under average conditions, whitetails often return rather quickly. This is especially true in areas that offer adequate bedding areas, along with food, water, and security cover.

Once feral pigs become established, landowners can remove most of the hogs from their property. However, management is often very costly, and if neighboring landowners aren’t applying equal or greater management efforts, hog populations will continue to grow.

That’s why feral hogs can’t be eradicated.  Culling the population on a 100 acre plot of land (whether by hunting or trapping, or both) does no good if the neighboring farms don’t do exactly the same thing, and as I’ve pointed out before, that’s very, very, very expensive.

Feral pig managers have a mighty steep hill to climb. Typical hunting tactics have proven to be mostly useless as management tools. Sure, hog hunting is fun. And it might remove a porker or two from the property. But on a landscape population level, it doesn’t accomplish much, and it can make pigs even warier. Even when running dogs, hunting doesn’t remove enough hogs to decrease overall population densities.

Furthermore, fertility control isn’t in heavy use yet. The heavily debated toxicant called Warfarin isn’t permitted in any state, and there’s a chance it won’t ever be.

Good Lord.  There’s that awful, horrible idea floated again of putting a toxicant into the environment.  For heaven’s sake, don’t do that.  We have enough toxicants in the environment already.  Besides, the unintended consequences of such a introduction could be terrible.

Generally speaking, it’s easier to trap pigs when food is scarce in the winter and early spring. This is when bait is most effective. It’s also best to trap when the most sows are pregnant. (This is easier than trying to trap sows and their piglets together.) Capturing the entire sounder is the goal—from the biggest sows down to the smallest members of the group. Of course, hogs like to stay closer to water, so bottomlands, marshes, swamps, and other lowland areas are all good locations to try.

As I’ve said, sounders don’t stick together in proximity the way this tactic makes is seem.

“The best thing the average land manager can do is cooperate with their state wildlife agency and familiarize themselves with the management efforts taking place as well as various programs that may be available to them,” Westfall said. “Many states have hog specific or cost-share programs in which they will work with landowners to help control the problem. It is our responsibility as landowners, managers, and hunters to know what our state wildlife agency is doing, understand that their efforts and methods are based on scientific research, and do our best to assist with their efforts in any way that we can.”

The best thing land managers can do is kill as many hogs as possible as quickly as possible, whenever and wherever they can.  This means trapping, hunting, night vision, game cameras, research, communication, and all the things they already know about.  I would find it hard to believe that land managers in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and other states, don’t already know all about the problems.  I’m sure they’ve been engaged in this war for years now.  If they haven’t, they need other land managers.