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

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.