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.
