Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Wisconsin free of feral hogs at last.

Thanks to U.S. Dept of Agricultural, Wisconsin is now feral swine free. Now they are going to take what's left of the $20 million congress gave them and concentrate their eradication efforts to the south.

Good luck the government is coming to help you.

http://www.swnews4u.com/m/section/163/article/26425/

Porcine marauder meets his match
David Krier
Apr 16, 9:04 a.m.
By DAVID KRIER

A 350-pound feral wild boar that had been tearing up the landscape around Bell Center for years recently met his match in the form of J. D. McComas, a USDA feral swine/disease technician who had been tracking the beast since last June and finally caught up with him thanks to the March 22 snowstorm.

“He was a fully mature, very evasive boar with plenty of food and places to hide,” said McComas, who is based in Sun Prairie but has been working with seven landowners along Sand Creek between Bell Center and Rolling Ground. “He disappeared for the winter, which was very unusual. I don’t know where he went.”

McComas had 12 trail cameras set up in the area and had photographed the animal, estimated to be 5-8 years old, a number of times over the past 10 months. He had also collected scat samples and recorded hoof prints.

But his big break came following the late March snowstorm when he caught the animal on his trail camera and was able to then track him through the snow, jumping him from his bed and fatally shooting the big boar.

McComas is part of the state’s Feral Swine Task Force, which is a collaboration between the DNR and USDA to eradicate feral pigs in Wisconsin. It is part of a national effort that began after Congress recently allocated $20 million to implement a national feral swine management program in all 39 states where there is a recognized feral swine population.

“We’re starting in the north and working our way south to states like Texas where the problem is huge,” McComas said. In Texas it is estimated that 3.5 million feral swine do $60 million in crop damage each year. Several counties pay bounties of $5-$10 per pig tail, with Caldwell County near Austin paying out 5,500 bounties in the first nine months of 2014 alone. Companies like Helibacon near Houston offer two-hour helicopter hog hunts with AR-15 machine guns for $1,800. Hog hunter Bubba Ortiz shot 469 feral pigs in the city of San Antonio last year alone.

In Wisconsin, the feral swine population is mainly located in central and northwest Crawford County. In September 2008, a 55-year-old former Gays Mills area game farm owner was accused of releasing 31 feral hogs near his farm on Feb. 9, 2002. It is believed those feral swine are the origin of the wild pig population in Crawford County.

Robert Scott Johnson, who owned the hard Rock Elk Farm on Little Haney Road, was accused of releasing a trailer load of wild hogs that he brought to the area from San Marcos, Texas. Witnesses said he wanted to establish a population of wild hogs around his elk ranch so hunters could also hunt them.

Over the years private hunters and the DNR have trapped and hunted the descendants of that first group of wild hogs to the point that they may have now been eliminated with McComas’ recent kill. At a public meeting in January 2009, the Wisconsin State Director of USDA Wildlife Services, Jason Suckow, estimated the Crawford County feral swine population at 10 animals.

Between 2002 and 2009, wildlife management officials estimated that nearly 300 feral pigs had been killed in the Gays Mills/Petersburg/Bell Center area.

“We can eliminate them right here, right now,” Suckow said at the 2009 meeting. “As long as we have co-operation from everyone.”

McComas said that time may have now arrived, although he couldn’t be positive that all feral pigs in the area had been eliminated.

"All I was able to detect in all this time was that one big board," he said. "We are going to continue to monitor this area for quite a while and we want to work with area land owners right away."

"the Wisconsin State Director of USDA Wildlife Services, Jason Suckow, estimated the Crawford County feral swine population at 10 animals."

If there are even 10 left, that can turn into a hundred or more in a year's time. Better keep after 'em until they are ALL eliminated.

Myron

Hog hunter Bubba Ortiz

is this his baptized name?

Hunted this area for years. Once in my teens I was squirrel hunting with a Ruger 10-22 on a large dormant farm. Heard something really noisy coming through the woods across a draw from me, and saw a couple large swine with about a dozen little ones. Never knew if they were feral or just escaped from a neighbors pen. I did know enough to just sit still and let them feed through.. rather than see whether the 40 grain .22 was a match for mama pig.

Ha.

Not going to happen in Wi.

Yet, people charge you if you want to come shoot some. Isn't that like me charging the Orkin man to come kills bugs under my house?

That estimate of 10 was in 2009, but you are right we must be vigilant.

roundoak,

Yes, I noticed that too, but how does anyone know when they are all gone? They are pretty good at staying out of sight, and there are too many square miles of territory to scout it all thoroughly.


We supposedly have a few in Ohio, but they seem to be kept in check by a few guys who hunt them aggressively. No limit, 24/7, year 'round with any weapon - rifle, etc.

Myron

Fun to shoot, good to eat, but they are vermin. I wouldn't wish them on anyone.

Exactly.

Hogs in Texas aren't a problem at all. If they were there would be folks begging someone to come kill them instead of charging an arm and both legs to kill one or two.

Several years ago my son and I went down to try and find a place to shoot a hog. Ended up talking with a game warden thinking he may know where problem hogs were, who, at the of the conversation gave me his card and asked me to call him if I found someone who would let us kill hogs.

Hogs in Texas are nothing more than a highly profitable renewable resource.

BS, you can't kill them all. Hogs will be back in greater numbers than ever. We shoot everyone we see on our place in Ms. We also trap them and run them with dogs and stab them. Once you think you have them under control. 50-100 more will show up.

Eddie

Hope we never see them here.

Typical reporter.

As a side note, USDA Wildlife Services is NOT a regulatory agency. They try to help with coyotes, hogs, invasive grasses, and the like.

They have also been doing so with a rapidly dwindling budget. Obama has basically de-funded them because the tree and bunny huggers don't care much for killing coyotes.

Perhaps this is the shot in arm the agency needed to continue.

Idaho has only 1 very small herd. It's been there for a long time and for some unknown reason, they haven't spread, possibly because it's a high desert area and there isn't enough feed. The IDFG website says that there aren't any but my partner saw some of them last summer while fishing. Considering where they are, they had to have been released. It's too isolated for them to have wandered in on their own.

Wisconsin free of feral hogs? You obviously haven't been to a tailgating party at Lambeau........

You think??

Hang around a while!!

Now, I might be wrong and the southern boys here will say I'm full of BS. I doubt Wisconsin would ever have a hog problem. The reason is cause the winters are very harsh, there isn't much to eat in the winter for them. In summer there is plenty of food but not for 3 months , the ground is frozen down for 3'. Also, in fall there is 300,000 bow hunters in this state and 600,000 gun deer hunters wishing there was a deer to shoot. If a hog comes by they would be shot on the spot. Coyote and bear hunters would be more than willing to track these hogs through the snow and kill them. Any hunter could track these pigs , or bait them in. Also, they can't reproduce nearly as fast as down south.. . And if we were down to 10 hogs with no help from the government, I think they made my point. I have also looked into " hog hunt" down south. Everyone wants me to pay them for a lease, or pay for a hunt of some sort . The excuse seemed to be,, ,,, ,, wweeelllll, hunters on my land is a liability. Ya, right.. Several of us on another sight replied, with some very negative posts to the land owners that were complaining , but then making excuses when several on the board offered to shoot some.

Why haven't wild hogs "taken over" Europe and Russia?

Are they simply filling an unfilled niche here in the USA?

Pretty much true. Same light as deer in some areas around here. Property owners b&tch like heck about them eating their little 2 acre lots up and that they stand in the road, but let you shoot them, NOPE.

The .22 LR is likely to over penetrate. Shorts are skookum.

LOL. So many folks think a 22 won't do it... close enough and lungs or brain and they are just flat dead unless huge. Huge, close enough and ear does it every time...

I agree with you to a point on paying for hog hunts BUT if you are a land owner you'd understand the liability part big time and you can use the money from the damage they cause, to help fix the damage....

But then some folks don't understand liability...

I wish they'd gain a little traction around here, would give me one more thing to hunt. We have them here, but they are few and far between. Those who know where they might be found are pretty tight lipped about it. I've seen one in the dozen years I've lived here, and heard of a couple more from guys I trust. I don't think they have a chance of ever really getting a big population here.

They are an invasive vermin. You DO NOT want them to "gain" a little traction around your parts.

I hope you're joking. They're as destructive and any animal in the country. You do NOT want them there.

I don't think we have much to worry about. They've been here for years and haven't exploded. Winters are too harsh, too many predators and they get shot on sight. So yeah, I'd like to see a few more of them, just enough to get a crack at a couple a year. I've got a general idea of an area where there are supposed to be a few, but so far haven't found them.

Dumb.

Have wild pigs ever established a healthy population in a northern state over a large area?

Why is it so dumb? Are they any more destructive than any other animal filling a niche?

Yes.

They eat everything and rip apart the very earth doing it. They breed like rabbits. Crowd out anything they don't eat directly, by eating all their food too. And they aren't talking about a couple of farm runaways, they are talking about generations old, hydrid Russians. Nothing much to prey them down any.

But winters in the north may be the only thing to hold them down.

But I have been to Madison and encounter a couple of them at a local bar.

It gets cold in Russia and Europe so I think they would adapt. Hogs adapt to pretty much anything.

Uh, Eurasian and Russian strain hogs have no issues with hard winter; like deer, they seem to grow larger as they move north and cropland/wooded food sources grow. Keep in mind that hogs will eat anything.

I would agree, most would be shot or eradicated like pretty much every other varmint in the Midwest, but any foothold in any heavier covered areas and they would definitely get out of hand.

Not Alberta cold. Not many boar in that kind of country in Russia.

Could be thats what it is, all I know is they have been around here for years but never took off. Something is knocking them off. Once in a while you hear about an area that has them, but that generally means someone heard about someone seeing one. Guys will sooner tell you about their best fishing spot on their favorite lake before telling where they saw a wild boar. So yeah, I'm not too worried about them getting out of hand. Still hope to shoot one some day.

Rancho;
Good evening to you sir, hopefully the weekend treated you and yours well.

I'm definitely on the same page as you on the subject of porcine invaders - they are bad, BAD news.

We had a small population escape from a farm a couple valleys to the east of us and I've heard of a single hog being shot in our valley but a couple hours north.

As they're classed as an invasive species here in BC there's no bag limit and no closed season, however we're not allowed to spotlight them.

The folks who've said they won't last in extreme cold should know there's a small population that's been a growing problem in east central Saskatchewan - where they're no stranger to winter and it can last from Halloween until way past Easter.....

They're pretty anti hog there too - I've been given to understand that they're mainly able to survive in coulees or thick enough brush that can't be accessed via snowmobile.

Anyway we're doing our best in two provinces to exterminate them all, but only time will tell if we're successful or not.

All the best to you and yours this week Rancho.

Dwayne

They're found in the Leningrad area which is about 60 degrees north, farther north than much of Alberta. They also have them across the northern border into Finland. I don't know how big the population is there, though.

I wonder if the ability to withstand the cold differs between true European wild boar, feral domestic breeds and the various hybreds of the two?

Since the outbreak of the hogs in Crawford County, WI I have saved newspaper stories about encounters with them. Some of the more interesting ones are.

1) Sow with piglets attacks a farmer on a tractor and he leaves the area, calls his son, who shows up on a ATV with a gun, is attacked by the sow and shot.

2) Two teenagers were calling for coyotes and a large boar shows up and was shot.

3) A wild boar busted into a domestic pig pen, kills the domestic boar and breeds the domestic sows. 100 and some days later the sows give birth to striped piglets.

4) Houndmen begin chasing the hogs and have good success.

5) Deer gun hunters and bowhunters bag several hogs.

Besides hunters, houndmen, roadkill, and DNR sharpshooters, Wisconsin has another limiting factor....wolves.

Thanks for the story roundoak. I killed 2 pigs in Bell Center back in May of 2007. It was a sounder of roughly 2 dozen, I picked out the one I wanted, shot it, they all ran and I was able to kill one more. That was seriously the best eating pork I have ever eaten.

379 Pete, I never hunted or seen a wild hog in Wisconsin, but had pork sandwiches a couple of times at a wild game feed at a local gun club. Mighty tasty.

Did the sow shoot him with his own gun or did she have her own?

Maybe, but there really isn't much difference between the most domestic of the domesticated breeds and the European boar. Put a hundred percent domestic one outdoors in the wild and pretty soon he is covered in hair. The next generation looks more like a wild boar. Within a few more generations they are mostly solid black with long gristly hair just like in Europe.

I have some game camera pics of a momma and about a dozen little ones. Seven or eight of the little ones are white or the typical multi-colored domestic piglet looking pigs. Four or five of them are brown with the light colored striped just like a European wild boar piglet.

Pigs aren't very domesticated.

I haven't studied swine genetics but I'm assuming that the wild characteristics are a common recessive trait. It wouldn't take too many generations for it to start to be expressed but it won't take over UNLESS the wild boars are much more aggressive breeders than domestic boars and do most of the breeding.

They go native pretty quick - straight tails, long hair, long noses.. They'll eat anything, tear up and eliminate mast crops, allow invasive weeds to grow in their rooting, and fugg your car up when you hit them.

I don't know much about cold climates, but I know a little about feral hogs. Up until the middle of the 20th century, livestock in east Texas was allowed to roam free. The animals were marked by various means (notching ears and branding). When it was time to sell, mark or eat something it had to be caught or killed. People (generally) respected each others marks and private property was, for the most part, open range. After WWII, open range began to be voted out, and the old way of doing business slowly stopped. The cattle were penned in barbed wire and the hogs were almost all killed, with exception of those raised in small pens. Any hog that was seen on (now) private or public property was considered feral and fair game.

At some point, timber companies realized that they could make a few bucks by leasing their property to individuals for the purpose of deer hunting. When they did, the "real" hog hunting ended. Hunters didn't want strangers with a pack of dogs running through their private property, killing the deer they were attempting to manage.

In the 1960's-70's, it was rare to find a wild hog, though a few were still around. Whitetail deer were not very common either. Then deer population skyrocketed,. But most "deer hunters" today come from a different background. They hunt mostly for sport and are not driven to kill everything in the woods. Unfortunately, most don't really know how to anymore. This is good for the deer, but great for the feral hogs, which reproduced exponentially. Also, there are expansive areas of "public" land, controlled by the Government, where baiting, hunting with dogs or killing hogs are illegal. These places are infested with hogs, and they don't stay there.

The moral to this story, is that they can be controlled, but only by killing them...a lot.

I suspect other places in the South are similar, maybe somebody else can elaborate.

I think a big part of the explosion in Texas has to do with how deer are hunted. It wasn't until the '70s and the '80s that hunters began to put grain feeders out. When they did, hog numbers exploded.

A hog doesn't need corn to survive, but what that did was make them even more prolific breeders. Sows that were well fed on deer hunters' corn year around could have even more litters of piglets than those relying on natural food sources.

As noted, hogs have always been around a little, but it has only been in the last thirty years that their numbers have exploded. That explosion seems to coincide with the change in deer hunting practices in the Southeast from hunting with dogs and the like to stand hunting over feeders.

It is just a theory of mine, but I think there is some merit to it.

Correct. It takes about two weeks for a domestic hog to become feral. With a litter produced every 105 days, averaging eight pigs, and breeding at 6 months of age, it doesn't take very long for them to revert.

Pigs will out breed deer by 10 to 20 times. A deer will have 1 or maybe 2 fawns a year. A pig in a warm climate can have 2 litters of maybe 10 piglets per year.

I guess I could have worded it better.

I agree. We have feeders at our place only to kill hogs. Deer will only rarely go around them because of the hogs.

Three litters...one approximately every 100 days, and as one biologist put it "For every 8 pigs, 10 survive". Almost nothing kills them but people. Wolves and mountain lions are the exception, and we have no timber wolves, and few lions in the eastern half of Texas.

One way feral/Russian hogs have spread is by either hunters or people wanting to sell hunts for hogs.

That is an often overlooked factor in all this.

They need their nuts kicked multiple times for this.

there are at least 4 hog hunting ranches in north Alberta from which lots have escapped seam to survive everything but lead.

norm

The damage, injury and death from motor vehicles is significant too.

Back to feral hogs in Wisconsin...
Wisconsin isn't really serious about getting rid of hogs, as shown by the requirement that to legally shoot hogs hunters must have a small game license.
Hunters with just gun and/or bow deer licenses can't legally shoot hogs. Does this sound like Wisconsin really wants to get rid of feral hogs? If Wisconsin was serious, any valid hunting license should permit shooting hogs. Or just permit shooting hogs on sight without any license needed.

I'll ask again--why do hogs not take over all of Europe and Russia (both the warm and cold parts)???

Wild boar are a problem in parts of Germany and they are now re established in the UK and their populations are growing quickly...

This is exactly why Nebraska has made it illegal to hunt wild hogs in here.

http://www.huntwildpig.com/state-specifics/nebraska/

Part of it is because native European pigs only farrow once a year, not 2 or 3 times like domesticated pigs. It's not uncommon in domestic animals for some breeds to reproduce several times a year while other breeds have a fixed rut and reproductive schedule. Goats are that way, too.

I'm kind of ambivalent about them. We don't have cows anymore, so they aren't messing up our pastures or anything. They are just as much fun to shoot as a deer and you can shoot them whenever you see them. So, I really don't mind having them around.

Admittedly, that is sort of a selfish view, but in my area at least, they don't seem to hurt deer numbers. There seems to be plenty of food for them all. Sure, they eat a lot of the acorns, but there is plenty of browse left for the deer. So, I don't mind having some around.

I reckon I'm the opposite end of the spectrum. While I enjoy shooting them, I am well aware of the damage they do. Not only to the environment, but to the economy as well.

If I knew I had the last wild pig in my sights and there would never be any more feral hogs after that, I would squeeze the trigger.

pretty much how I feel.

Free range pigs were so common all across the Frontier way back to the Seventeenth Century at least that our first major Indian War, King Philip's War in New England, was sparked in part by the sale and ownership of them, Indian hog products apparently underselling settlers in the Boston markets.

Relevant to Texas, in the 1830's there are accounts of a squatter underclass of Whites along the Sabine subsisting largely on feral hogs, in some places these hogs so bold and numerous that making camp along the trail was difficult. Certainly, much more than venison, pork and lard along with cornmeal had long been the staples of early settlement and even Frontier diet. More of 'em and easier to kill.

Birdwatcher

Feral hogs in those days weren't like feral hogs are now. They generally belonged to someone and were only "feral" in that they were free range. But people knew how many hogs they had and once a year after the first frost, they would be rounded up with dogs and butchered. When that form of raising livestock, so did free range hogs for the most part. In the '60s and '70s they were pretty rare. The infestation we have these days is new.

The thing lost of people these days is that they're really pretty easy to control and capture. With good dogs, you can clean them out pretty quick...IF there aren't more to just move right in.

Up through the '20s in my home town, they would take to the bottoms every fall and spend a week or so hunting everyone's hogs. When the dogs would corner them, they would shoot them and load them into the wagons. If you needed four to get through until next year, you took four. But they weren't feral, they had been intentionally turned loose for that purpose.

Main difference is that animals were hunted in the past primarily as food animals and populations were kept low enough that this limited growth. If you wanted meat you killed something in the woods if you found it. You killed enough to lay up for the entire winter. In the Old World the same, wild cattle basically eradicated, other large animals reduced as populations grew.
Now every goes to the grocery store and lives on pigs from farms or beef and chicken. There is little food hunting, which doesn't mean they aren't being eaten, it means they are not being hunted primarily for food, they are being hunted for sport, lots of hunters don't eat what they shoot.

Also, few large predators other then men now.

And now, there are crops everywhere, so lots of food sources.

So the swine population explodes and with more pigs, it grows even faster. When there are a dozen pigs, the young can get killed fast enough to keep populatons down, with hundreds, you can't kill them fast enough anymore.

In the past, those feral hogs belonged to somebody. THAT WAS MONEY and FOOD running around out there. You didn't forget about them unless something bad happened. And if it did, you can bet someone else would step in and get them.

These days, they are just vermin and no one cares enough about them to get them.

New York, of course, has it's own take on all this. From the DEC website:

Why is the Hunting of Eurasian Boars Prohibited?
New York wants to eradicate all Eurasian boars in the wild. To achieve that, the DEC had to ban the hunting of Eurasian boars. The most efficient way to eradicate Eurasian boars is by trapping the whole sounder (the name for a group of pigs) at one time. Research and management experience has taught us that this task is best accomplished by wildlife management agencies who are committed to total eradication. Trapping takes a lot of time, effort and money because boars are very wary and need to be slowly baited in and accustomed to the trap. When a hunter shoots at a boar, the animals in the sounder run off in all directions and don't always come back together again. Hunting prevents us from trapping all the animals in the sounder, makes the boars harder to trap during subsequent attempts (boars learn to avoid traps if they are shot at around a trap), and instead of one large sounder, we must now have to locate and eradicate two or more smaller sounders.

Hunting is an inefficient and ineffective way to control or eradicate a population of Eurasian boars. Because the boars have a high survival and reproductive rate, hunters must take 70-75% of the population each year just to stabilize the population. That is nearly impossible to do. Even in Texas where wild boar hunting is very popular, hunters take less than 40% of the population each year.

Lastly, the leading contributing factor in the spread of wild boars in the U.S. is the illegal release of boars by those who want to establish a boar population in areas where wild boars previously did not exist. By prohibiting hunting, we have eliminated any incentive to illegally release boars into the state.

The following wild hog problem in Tennessee illustrates the need to prohibit the hunting of Eurasian boars. In 1999, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) made an attempt to control the expansion of the wild hog population by opening a statewide hog season with no bag limit. It was during this period of unlimited, statewide hunting that the wild hog population expanded from two localized populations to 80 of the state's 95 counties. New populations of hogs began to appear in areas of Tennessee where they had never existed before, likely the result of illegal stocking by individuals whose goal was to establish local hunting opportunities. In 2011, the TWRA enacted new regulations to remove the incentive to relocate wild hogs. They are now considered a destructive species to be controlled by methods other than sport hunting.

So, basically it is an issue of control and ownership. Hogs are more or less the best-adapted animal to most environments, but we don't really like that much production.

I think so too...

And this is also true.

I hunt in Oklahoma and this, along with deer feeders, is why there are so many in the area I hunt in.

Whoever said pigs aren't real domesticated, is also correct.
A domesticated pig is a pig in a fence it can't get out of and has enough entertainment to not grow tusks, and that's about it. They used to have their snouts ringed, for further "domestication".

Which argument presumes that feral hogs were only to be found in the vicinity of human settlements. At the time of this account much of even East Texas was still very sparsely populated.

Point of interest, by the 1730's there was a Delaware Indian town on the river of that name in NY State which place name survives as "Cohocton", further west on the Susquehanna (same state) there's a Cohocton River, and from fifty years later (1780's) in present-day Ohio there is another major Delaware townsite who's name survives today as Coshocton OH.

It is my understanding that "Cohocton" and the variants thereof derives from the Delaware/Agonkian term for place of hogs or pigs.

Birdwatcher

Actually the State of New York DOES have a point, in our times at least regular hog hunting apparently cannot eradicate hogs. Shooting them by the tens and hundreds from helicopters may be a separate issue.

Birdwatcher

One cause I have heard suggested for Texas at least for our present hog population is the eradication of the screwworm fly.

You don't think Indians kept livestock?

As for my argument, it was made in rebuttal to your assumption that feral hogs were always present in East Texas. I'm here to tell you that for the most part, after free range livestock were gone, so were they. Sure, there were some, but they were much fewer and much more far between.

It is like the buffalo, the fact that there were herds of millions at one time, has little to do with populations today. They were largely extirpated and almost every herd today is not a remnant of those ancient herds, but stock that was reintroduced at a later date.

That is very sad

Spot on, and there was many a man killed over messing with somebody else's "feral" hogs.

Exactly. The whole Hatfield/McCoy thing got really kicked off over a hog.

Yup, and there were a lot more, and much more deadly feuds than that one. That one was just close to the New York Times.

A really excellent read: "The Backwoodsmen: Stockmen and Hunters Along a Big Thicket River Valley" by Thad Sitton. All about the way it was,
and why it was. This is a 310pg book from Oklahoma Press.

I'm not old enough to remember free range livestock, but I remember when anyone pretty much went wherever they wanted as far as land and hunting went. As long as you closed gates and didn't mess up stuff, nobody cared or was expected to care what you did. The only time you needed to watch where you went was that first week of deer season when you might not hunt in a certain area because that was where the "Johnson Camp" was located.

I actually remember not hunting areas during of our OWN property during that first weekend of deer season because that was a territory of another camp and they hunted there. Our camp was twenty miles away in the hills.

Things are different now. Leases finally killed that style. Once people got used to the idea of paying for a lease, they didn't want to waste any of their time messing around on somebody else's place. If they were paying for a lease, they wanted to be there. And if they were paying for it, they wanted to make sure that someone who wasn't paying for it wasn't there.

The land I lease is still open range. The last precinct, in the last county, in the State.

The issue then becomes to what extent did/do feral hogs require the presence of humans? The gist I get is that in our somewhat cherry-picked popular view of history the role of the hog in terms of ecological impact and economy is seriously overlooked.

Truly feral cattle for example, famously prospered in Texas after introduction even in the absence of humans, so did horses.

It could be, as implied here, that now that everyone and his brother ain't shooting every one they see as recounted here being the way it was in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, that hog numbers can explode.

Certainly way back in the late 17th/early 18th century the first arrival of free-ranging hogs were a major pain to the crop-dependent Indians of New England and the source of many complaints. King Philip's bunch eventually adapted to the point they were eating pork for sustenance and using pigskin for leather.

At present, feral hogs in Mexico, feeding on acorns as they do, are regarded as a threat to some populations of the band-tailed pigeon, which also depends largely upon acorns. Current thinking is an abundance of hogs along the advancing frontier may have been one more of the nails in the coffin of the acorn- and mast-dependent passenger pigeon.

Birdwatcher

I'm going to need a link for that because I studied the case of the passenger pigeon pretty hard and I do not recall ever seeing hogs mentioned at all.

The passenger pigeon was killed simply because it couldn't nest. Once the northeast was covered in rails and telegraph lines, it was simply too easy for hundreds and even thousands of market hunters to descend on roosting sites and kill millions of birds in a week or two. And when the adult birds picked up and moved away to a new spot, rinse, wash, and repeat.

According to National Geographic, the introduction of swine into the Big Thicket, along with hunting, was what eradicated the black bear. This, they believe, was because the bears needed the fall acorns to survive hibernation.

Holy Smoke! Best of all outcomes, an inpromptu google leads to cool info.....

http://www.passengerpigeon.org/states/Texas.html


Numerous references allude to the importance of oak mast (acorns) in fattening free-ranging hogs and to the competition between wild pigeons and pigs for this resource. Upon their arrival the immense flocks of pigeons quickly decimated the food available to hogs, as well as to squirrels, turkeys, deer and other species that also fed on mast. Given this consequence, arrival of the pigeons generated considerable anxiety. In 1872, pigeons were destroying the mast in Cherokee and Madison counties. During 1874 Marion, Grayson, Houston, Smith, and Titus counties were adversely affected. Depletion of the mast was so great in Anderson and Jasper counties during 1875 that it threatened the food supply for hogs. Concern for the mast crop was reported during 1881 from Houston, Nacogdoches, Van Zandt, Bastrop, Burnet, and Smith counties.

The case for hogs being a threat to passenger pigeon comes from Chapter 6 in the excellent book "Disguised as the Devil: How Lyme Disease Created Witches and Changed History" (2008).

Birdwatcher

So, your still all saying that hogs are the best-adapted animal to most of the N.American ecosystem. Why would we fight that again? And doesn't anyone realize that it is a losing battle?

Discounting politicians, I've not heard of such. Having seen what they can do, in very short order, you should be careful what you wish for.