Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 6 million wild hogs across the USA and Missouri has a plan

Missouri Department of Conservation, wraps up the first year of a five-year plan to eradicate feral hogs from the state.
by DONALD BRADLEY? | The Kansas City Star
TANEY COUNTY, Mo. (AP) � Dawn's early light belongs to the fog and a whip-poor-will.

A cool beginning to a spring mountain day. Only the bird's call stirs the wooded quiet.

Then, suddenly, a shrieking, frantic squeal. Hooves pound into the dirt. A wild hog races full speed across the makeshift enclosure and crashes headfirst into a wire panel.

Like a stock car into a wall. Then another one. And one after that. They try to climb atop one another.

Men nearby, their boots firmly planted, raise guns. Just in case the trap's panels give way. It's happened, but with bigger hogs. These are smaller, young and, most disappointingly, not nearly as many as the men want to find this recent morning.

�Look here,'' says James Dixon, a wildlife damage biologist for the Missouri Department of Conservation, which just wrapped up the first year of a five-year plan to eradicate feral hogs from the state.

Dixon kneels in the mud. Signs of rooting and wallowing from the night surround the pen.

�They were all here, but only these young ones went inside,'' he says. �The older ones are too smart.''

And big and fast and destructive and mean and ugly. Now factor in prolific and savvy.

Despite years of aggressive kill measures, including aerial shooting, trapping, snares and �shoot on sight'' requests to hunters, the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers today to the �expanding'' problem of wild swine in America.

An estimated 6 million feral hogs, up from 2 million 20 years ago, some with big heads and sharp tusks linked to Russian boars of generations past, roam the country in collective �sounders'' of 15 or so, rooting up land and crops like four-legged diesel equipment.

The hogs used to be mainly a rural Southern problem. But now they're in 38 states and moving north, even into New England. They're encroaching on cities and treating parkland, gardens and golf courses like their own pigpens.

Sounders are as close to Kansas City as Truman Reservoir.

In Missouri and other states, conservation workers and farmers are constantly frustrated by people bringing in truckloads of the animals from other states and turning them loose. Kansas jumped on the problem early by banning sport hunting of hogs and is now a model for the rest of the country.

Costs of feral swine annual damage and control efforts, nationally: more than $1 billion, according to the USDA.

Jeremy Thomas is paying some of that. He farms bottom land along Indian Creek in McDonald County in the southwest corner of Missouri. On a recent day, he stood in a field and looked at a slight furrow running the length of a corn row.

Perfectly straight, as if made by machinery. No, hogs.

�Best I can tell, they put their snouts down and go to rooting,'' Thomas said. �They get to the end of the row, turn around and come back.''

They're after the hybrid seed corn he'd just put in the ground. At $250 per bag, he's reluctant to replant.

�They could be anywhere, just watching,'' Thomas said.

And waiting.

Wild hogs are like big rats. Three hundred pounds of nasty with sharp teeth. They kill small livestock and eat ground-nesting birds. They contaminate streams and cause erosion. They carry diseases, such as brucellosis and pseudorabies, both of which can be passed to domestic swine.

They devastate hunting areas because they compete with deer and turkey for food.

�They outsurvive other wildlife,'' Dixon said.

The rules on hunting these critters? Virtually none. Shoot on sight (in areas that allow hunting). As many as you want as often as you want. Out hunting and see a hog? Conservation officials say drop him, please. Drop two or three. Leave them for the sun to bake and coyotes to eat. Go on, treat the vultures.

Nobody cares.

�We're not out to manage them,'' Dixon said. �We want to wipe them out.''

So what is it exactly that makes the feral hog the neo-Nazi of the animal kingdom?

They have no friends. Nobody's out waving signs to �Save the Feral Hog.'' People who love wildlife and nature hate them. People who like them like them for one reason: to shoot them.

Please, can somebody say something good about this animal?

�They're easier to train than puppies,'' said John Mayer, who started studying wild hogs 40 years ago and tried to raise one in his house. �They're cute when they're little. Until they start to turn over furniture.

�And they're good eating. Except big boars stink when you cook them. I had a guy tell me once he had to bury a skillet in the backyard.''

Really, that's the good? You have to bury the skillet?

The bad?

�They are the worst, most invasive animal on the planet,'' said Mayer, the manager of the environmental science group at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C. Mayer also co-authored �Wild Pigs in the United States: Their History, Comparative Morphology, and Current Status.''

Feral swine are not native to the U.S. They can be traced to hogs brought to the country in the 1500s by Spanish explorers and allowed to roam free. According to the USDA, the ranks of those early hogs multiplied over time by domestic hogs turned loose into the wild.

At some point, hunters brought in Russian wild boars, which mixed bloodlines with existing sounders.

Now we have gangs of tusked feral hogs that can run 35 mph, jump 3 feet high and, somehow, manage to climb out of a pen with sides 6 feet high. A common saying: �If a fence won't hold water, it won't hold wild hogs.''

They are highly intelligent, can live anywhere in any climate, and have sharp teeth and no natural predators.

Now add in two litters a year, six to 10 to a litter, and you get a �national pig explosion'' to the point that the USDA has asked for an additional $20 million in 2014 to fight the problem.

In Missouri, the Conservation Department has teamed with the USDA, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the Army Corps of Engineers to kill more than a thousand hogs in the first year of the state's eradication effort. No telling how many more have been killed by property owners and hunters.

�No state has a good handle on this, but we don't want to get like Texas, Florida and Georgia,'' said Rex Martensen, the state's feral hog coordinator for the Conservation Department.

Dixon talks about tales of hogs attacking humans. Overblown, he says. Like other wild animals, hogs will almost always run from people. They can be scary, though, he adds. One day he walked through high Johnson grass and surprised a bunch of hogs. They surprised him, too.

�Nothing but snouts and hooves,'' he says. �That'll make you jump.''

As I just posted on another thread, we've caught or killed 61 pigs on our place (about 1,000 acres) in the last 14 months. No telling how many we didn't get. We'd killed about 7-8 total in the previous 10 years.

I haven't check lately but it used to be that people with hog problems just wanted to bitch. Ask them to hunt the hogs and it was a quick, Hell no. miles

Letting people hunt them with no fees from land owners or govenment would help and lot. If they want fees let them live with the mess.

We all want something for free it would seem. A bunch of rednecks you don't know running around your property with rifles, what could go wrong..

Why don't they address the feral horse, cat, and dog problems at the same time?

Well I guess they can keep their damn hogs then. miles

I like to take the kids down to Walmart around 5:30, 6:00, when most folks are home for dinner. Most evenings that's when the feral people come out. I just tell the boys, "You stay close by me, don't stare, don't make any fast moves, just watch 'em."

The article hit on it, Kansas outlawed killing of wild hogs to prevent outfitters from dumping trailer loads of them to create a hog population. So far so good over there, only a couple of herds that the state keeps mostly in check with aerial gunning.

Here in Missouri more bears are being spotted where bears aren't supposed to be spotted. Maybe the state is releasing bears to go after the piglets?

There are rumors of wild hogs down in the central part of the state. Hoping they don't come up here, knowing they probably will.

I'm glad there's an up side.

TN took them of the Big Game list and you can't shoot them now without landowners permission

Wild Hog Status In Tennessee
Wild hogs cause extensive damage to crops, wildlife habitat, contribute to erosion and water pollution, and carry diseases harmful to livestock and other animals as well as humans. The damage they cause has become more common and widespread as during the last fifteen years as they have gone from being present in 15 counties in Tennessee to being present in nearly 80 of a total of 95 counties. In 1999, TWRA made an attempt to control the expansion of the wild hog population by opening a statewide wild hog season with no bag limit. Unfortunately, it was during this period of unlimited hunting that the wild hog population expanded the most. Disjointed populations of hogs began to occur in areas of Tennessee where they had never existed before as the result of illegal stocking by individuals whose goal was to establish local hunting opportunities.
In 2011, new regulations were enacted that changed wild hog management. Wild hogs are no longer regarded as big game animals in Tennessee. In order to remove the incentive to relocate wild hogs, they are now considered a destructive species to be controlled by methods other than sport hunting.
It is illegal to possess, transport, or release live wild hogs.

Wild Hog Control For Landowners
Landowners have more opportunity than ever before to control wild hogs on their properties. They can shoot wild hogs year-round during the day without limit and trap with bait outside of big game seasons. Furthermore, landowners may obtain an exemption from their TWRA regional office enabling them to kill wild hogs at night using a spotlight, and to trap year-round. In addition, landowners in a four-county (Fentress, Cumberland, Pickett, and Overton) experimental area may use dogs as a wild hog control method. Family members and tenants that qualify under the Farmland Owner License Exemption and up to ten additional designees may help private landowners with wild hog control efforts. For properties over 1000 acres, an additional designee per 100 acres may be assigned. No licensing requirements exist for landowners or their designees. In order to renew each year, exemption holders are required to report the number of hogs killed on their property and the manner in which they were killed to TWRA. Landowners may also take advantage of technical assistance provided by TWRA to help with a trapping program or additional wild hog control techniques.
ATTENTION: ON JULY 31st, 2014, LEASE EXEMPTIONS FOR HOG ERADICATION WILL EXPIRE. Hunting lease members that were assisting landowners with wild hog eradication efforts will need to be placed on a landowner exemption if they wish to continue with eradication efforts. Restrictions on the number of individuals per exemption may apply.

Wild Hog Control For Public Land
In Region I, on the Land Between the Lakes WMA, wild hogs may be taken incidental to any hunt.
In Region III, wild hogs may be taken incidental to deer hunts on the following WMAs: Alpine Mountain, Bridgestone-Firestone Centennial Wilderness, Catoosa, Skinner Mountain, Standing Stone State Forest, and Tellico Lake. Wild hogs may be taken on any deer or bear hunt on South Cherokee WMA. There are also the following wild hog control seasons in which the use of dogs is permitted: two five-day control seasons on Catoosa WMA and one three-day control season on Skinner Mountain WMA.
In Region IV, wild hogs may be taken on any big game hunt on the North Cherokee; any deer or turkey hunt on Kyker Bottoms Refuge; and on any hunt, small game or big game, on the Foothills WMA and the entire North Cumberland WMA.
On the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, wild hogs may be taken with a special permit during any deer hunts and by small game hunters after the deer season.
Refer to the regulations for individual WMAs and public hunting areas to determine how and when hogs can be taken.
Wild hogs can also be taken incidental to scheduled bear-dog hunts.

Illegal to shoot wild hogs in Nebraska without permission from the state.

To date I think there's only been a couple hundred wild pigs found and killed in the state, many of them along the border of Kansas. Hope it stays that way.

The article did not actually say what the state was "doing" to eliminate the hogs - except banning "sport hunting". I'm assuming all you folks who think you should be allowed to hunt for free on private land will consider yourself "sport hunters" - or do you expect the landowners to pay you to invade their property? A biologist in Louisiana famously stated, "Boys, we ain't gonna BBQ our way out of this hog mess!", but I don't see that banning or limiting hunting is a positive step. In Texas, it is illegal to buy, sell or transport FEMALE feral hogs for relocation. You can stock boars to hunt, but not sows, as boars without sows don't reproduce real well. In addition, no feral hog can be sold except to a state-licensed hog buyer, and they must be alive, so the proper inspections can be made of the meat before and after slaughter. Even at that, I think they are only for the export market.

As a landowner, albeit of a fairly small piece of land, I have had more problems with trespassers that with hogs. The hogs don't steal from me, break into facilities, or shoot holes in things - and I can shoot the hogs without having to fill out a police report and call my attorney. USED TO BE, people would ask landowners politely if they could hunt on their property, mind their manners, and obey the law. That doesn't happen so much anymore, and anyone behaving as though it is their right to hunt on private land, or that they are doing the landowner a great big favor by hunting on property he has a large investment in may be disappointed.

If I had a larger piece of property, I would gladly invite hog hunters, but they would be expected to pay a fee which would help me with the cost of the property, taxes, upkeep, expense of stands and feeders and my time in maintaining all this, plus disposal of hog carcasses and "guts". There would also be a fee for skinning and quartering, for those who did not want to do it themselves. The hunters would get the chance for an exciting hunt at a reasonable expense (a bargain compared to other "big game" hunting), and I could recover at least some of my expenses and figure a property tax savings in the bargain. Personally, I think if MORE interest were shown by state game departments in "managing" feral hogs as a sporting animal they could provide extra income to both the state and private landowners. One only has to look at the ads for special hog hunting ammo, guns, scopes, lights, attractants, scents, and other products to understand there is a market for hog hunting - and the folks who buy thins stuff probably don't ask the manufacturers to give it to them, because hogs are a problem.They are also not really being utilized as a source of food, leather, or other products that make domestic hogs valuable.

We've been over this before here, but I will gladly keep "my" hogs before I'll let strangers have free access to my property to hunt (actually, I don't allow paid hunting, either, as my property is too small to provide a marketable hunt). I'll think about ya'll while we're eating sausage, hams, pulled pork, fried backstraps,ribs, and pork roasts. They weren't free for me, either.

By the way, a 300 pound feral hog is a BIG hog, and not as common as the news media imagines.

They will never make it in Wisconsin. There are 600,000 deer hunters, 300,000 bow hunters that will shoot them. We can track them in the snow 24/7. I know many southerners that think I'm crazy though. We have nothing to do all winter and tracking them in the snow with dogs is a way many hunt coyotes with a lot of success. They can't dig roots in the frost all winter neither so baiting them with corn should be very effective. As for southern farmers, I always here them complain about hogs on these hunting threads. Not one ever lets others hunt them on their land without a good chunk of change up front. Us hunters will gladly make a deal. We hunt your land and shoot pigs that are supposedly ruining your crops. The government agencies ( that can't do anything under budget) will not be needed. Everyone should be a winner. I don't know why this needs to seem so difficult. I understand Steelhead not wanting any "hunter" on a piece of land. On the other hand we are moslty decent people and shouldn't be a problem for most of us.

I personally wouldn't ask to hunt hogs , the land owner would have to ask me if he is having a problem and needs them hunted and shot.

Why?

Because i would rather spend my time hunting and calling Coyotes

That would work if hunting them was that easy. It's not.

A friend of mine is working on his PhD In College Station, Texas. Another Grad student who is graduating soon asked him to take over for him hunting hogs on a local farmers property after he's gone. The farmer had asked him to find another student to take over.

Now my friend is a redneck running around on someone else's property with a gun. At least when he's not working on his dissertation.

Bb