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

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)???