for a non-hunting animal rights advocate
Part Two
By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)
Wild hog 101: Let’s start at the beginning.
As detailed in Part One, my friend’s farm had recently suffered an invasion of feral pigs – also colloquially called wild hogs or wild boars. Like most non-hunters, I was oblivious that feral/wild pigs/hogs were a problem. But I quickly learned that my friend’s farm was on the cutting edge of an ecological disaster now sweeping through Virginia and North Carolina – and much of the rest of the country – having long since overwhelmed the rest of the Southeast.
Don’t think a few feral pigs can explode into a disaster of near-nuclear proportions? Then you are as sadly uninformed as I was: a decade ago, Virginia had wild hogs in three counties; they are now in more than 20 counties and are projected to be in 50-75% of the state within three years.
If you still don’t see the issue, consider that people in Texas didn’t use to worry about them either: They now have an estimated 2-3 million wild hogs. Hogs are mainly harmful to farmers’ crops, pets, wildlife, and native plants and shrubs, but they do have that darker side: occasionally attacking and killing people.
Being uninformed, I assumed this was just another case of one native species out-competing another, and I was lulled back toward that live-and-let-live vegan perspective. Or live and let die in this case, I thought, after I saw a photo of a feral hog carrying a freshly killed white-tail fawn. The white-tail and the cheetah are my two favorite animals in this world, so knowing hogs killed fawns definitely increased the odds I might pick up a gun and shoot a few of them. Then I learned pigs and hogs (swine, et al) aren’t even native! All the more reason to take up arms. The peccary – or javelina – of the American Southwest, which I always assumed was the forefather of our domestic and semi-wild pigs and hogs, is native, but it isn’t actually a swine. [Wikipedia’s entry titled “Peccary”]
So, why is our country overrun with domestic and wild swine? Thank Columbus, the Conquistadors, and other early explorers and settlers. [“History of Feral Hogs in the United States,” Extension, a part of the U.S. Cooperative Extension System]
Or if you prefer a sort of down-home video version of hog history:
Now I had some weighty competing ethics: loyalty to an old friend versus a strident adherence to 30 years of non-hunting values; a desire to stay the course on a live-and-let-live philosophy with all creatures, while having to admit that not taking action against this group of invasive feral pigs would kill a lot more turkeys, bobwhite, and deer than Lee and his hunt-club buddies would kill in several lifetimes.
[Concludes with Part Three on Friday, September 11]
Part Two
By Paul Clark (aka motomynd)
Wild hog 101: Let’s start at the beginning.
As detailed in Part One, my friend’s farm had recently suffered an invasion of feral pigs – also colloquially called wild hogs or wild boars. Like most non-hunters, I was oblivious that feral/wild pigs/hogs were a problem. But I quickly learned that my friend’s farm was on the cutting edge of an ecological disaster now sweeping through Virginia and North Carolina – and much of the rest of the country – having long since overwhelmed the rest of the Southeast.
Don’t think a few feral pigs can explode into a disaster of near-nuclear proportions? Then you are as sadly uninformed as I was: a decade ago, Virginia had wild hogs in three counties; they are now in more than 20 counties and are projected to be in 50-75% of the state within three years.
If you still don’t see the issue, consider that people in Texas didn’t use to worry about them either: They now have an estimated 2-3 million wild hogs. Hogs are mainly harmful to farmers’ crops, pets, wildlife, and native plants and shrubs, but they do have that darker side: occasionally attacking and killing people.
Being uninformed, I assumed this was just another case of one native species out-competing another, and I was lulled back toward that live-and-let-live vegan perspective. Or live and let die in this case, I thought, after I saw a photo of a feral hog carrying a freshly killed white-tail fawn. The white-tail and the cheetah are my two favorite animals in this world, so knowing hogs killed fawns definitely increased the odds I might pick up a gun and shoot a few of them. Then I learned pigs and hogs (swine, et al) aren’t even native! All the more reason to take up arms. The peccary – or javelina – of the American Southwest, which I always assumed was the forefather of our domestic and semi-wild pigs and hogs, is native, but it isn’t actually a swine. [Wikipedia’s entry titled “Peccary”]
So, why is our country overrun with domestic and wild swine? Thank Columbus, the Conquistadors, and other early explorers and settlers. [“History of Feral Hogs in the United States,” Extension, a part of the U.S. Cooperative Extension System]
Or if you prefer a sort of down-home video version of hog history:
Now I had some weighty competing ethics: loyalty to an old friend versus a strident adherence to 30 years of non-hunting values; a desire to stay the course on a live-and-let-live philosophy with all creatures, while having to admit that not taking action against this group of invasive feral pigs would kill a lot more turkeys, bobwhite, and deer than Lee and his hunt-club buddies would kill in several lifetimes.
[Concludes with Part Three on Friday, September 11]
| Copyright © 2020 by Paul Clark |
Enjoyed the video. We don't seem to have that much of a problem with them around here. But then there are a lot of hunters around this area also.
ReplyDeleteEd may have hit on something there. Is the current rise in feral hog populations due to the decline of hunting? Pigs were always easy to hunt and good to eat, especially if you trap them and feed them on sweet corn for a few weeks. I've had a pig roast every year for my birthday for fifteen years, and we set up gate-traps for them, which are like an igloo with a one-way-in gate, a short run, and another one-way gate to the interior, which is sections of bars that fit together almost like sections of scaffolding. Put feed in the trap and bingo, you get hogs, often overnight. They're everywhere here. The grove crew bosses carry .357's to shoot them, and just leave them lay, there's too many to eat.
ReplyDeleteFeral hogs are now the second most killed big game; the white-tailed deer is still first. One problem is you have to kill 70% of hogs every year to keep the population stable, and that's almost impossible--unless you use advanced trapping techniques, as Roger described. Second issue is people secretly trapping and moving hogs to new areas so they can have year-round hog hunting; every state that went to a year-round season had an increase in hog numbers, not a decrease. When you think how the white-tail population has soared the past few decades with females generally only having two fawns, once a year; and then you think of hogs having two or three litters/year, with four to eight per litter, the math isn't promising for anything but the hogs.
ReplyDelete