Texas Monthly.

By the age of thirty, a time when most people are just beginning to think about their mortality, Austin Riley had already conquered his fear of death. He’d come exceedingly close to dying on multiple occasions, including a few months before his first birthday, when doctors discovered a golf ball–size tumor growing inside his infant skull. He would go on to spend much of his childhood in and out of hospitals, enduring high-risk brain surgeries and grueling recoveries. Then, in his mid-twenties, he was nearly killed by a brain hemorrhage that arrived one night without warning, unleashing the worst pain he’d ever felt. He emerged from that experience reborn, feeling lucky to be alive and convinced that his life had been spared by God.

So as he sat in a pool of his own blood on a beautiful October evening in 2022, he couldn’t help but acknowledge the morbid absurdity of his current predicament. He’d spent decades conquering brain injuries only to be killed while doing mundane chores on his family’s 130-acre Hill Country ranch in Boerne. “After all I’d been through,” he said, “I just couldn’t believe that this was how it was going to end.”

As he slumped against a fence and his mangled body began to shut down, Austin’s mind went into overdrive. He thought about his girlfriend, Kennedy, whom he’d never get a chance to marry, and the children he’d never be able to raise. He thought about how much he loved his parents and how badly he wished he could thank them for the life they’d provided. He thought about the land stretched out before him, a rustic valley accentuated by crimson and amber foliage that seemed to glitter in the evening light, and realized it had never seemed more beautiful than it did in that moment.

But mostly, he thought about the animal that had just used its razor-sharp, seven-inch tusks to stab him at least fifteen times. The attack had shredded his lower body and filled his boots with blood, and then left gaping holes in his torso and neck. Had any other animal been responsible, Austin would’ve considered it a random attack. But this was a pet he’d trusted more than any other: his lovable, five-year-old warthog, Waylon.

It wasn’t just an attack, as far as Austin was concerned, but a murderous act of betrayal, one that shattered everything he thought he knew about the deep bond between man and pig. “For years, that animal trusted me everyday and I trusted him,” Austin said. “I put blood, sweat, and tears into his life, and he decided to kill me.”

They’re not pets. Feral hogs will kill you, folks.

Wild boar tries to steal some snowboards pic.twitter.com/tT3s4GdnhK

— Crazy Clips (@crazyclipsonly) February 7, 2024

They attack out of pure meanness, or spite, or just because they can, or for no reason at all.

And the hog doesn’t seem to me like it’s having any problem at all dealing with the cold and snow.

And just imagine – some folks want to keep them around, idiot rewilders, they are.

We’ve discussed the contradictions, confusion and befuddlement in the rewilding movement before.  From the destruction of dams in California in an attempt to save the river fish, only to introduce beavers who then build dams, to the massive solar farms that divert water and kill plant species making for essentially dead deserts, they can’t seem to make their minds up about much of anything except that they hate humans.

The reintroduction of wolves into Colorado has peaked the interest of rewilders everywhere. In fact, it’s practically romantic.

“It was so perfect. You could look around, and it felt like at any moment John Denver was going to show up. It was ‘Rocky Mountain High’ in every direction,” said Joanna Lambert, a wildlife ecology and conservation biology professor at University of Colorado Boulder and director of the American Canid Project. The stars rolled up last: five wolves, silent in their crates but omnipotent in the waft of their musky aroma. It smelled like the wild, Lambert observed.

But why would they care? Well, you see, they think it’s better for the environment.

The study was conducted by scientists at CSU’s Warner College of Natural Resources, focusing on the effects of three apex predators: wolves, cougars, and grizzly bears in Yellowstone. These carnivores, positioned at the top of the food chain and not preyed upon by other animals, had populations that were depleted over time.

The return of wolves to the park in 1995 was concurrent with the natural recovery of cougar and grizzly populations. Their absence for nearly a century had significantly altered the park’s landscape and food web, transforming regions rich in willow and aspen along small streams into grasslands due to intense elk browsing.

Too many Elk, they say. But they didn’t think that way when they were throwing bales of hay over the fences to the Elk when they thought they needed feeding in particularly harsh winters, causing the Elk not even to return to Yellowstone (when you’ve got a handout, why leave?).

But why are grasslands bad? The rewilders believe that trees are a more productive means of carbon reduction. But is that correct?

Forests have long served as a critical carbon sink, consuming about a quarter of the carbon dioxide pollution produced by humans worldwide. But decades of fire suppression, warming temperatures and drought have increased wildfire risks — turning California’s forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources.

Well, we’ve discussed the stupidity of fighting forest fires before, but let’s continue.

A study from the University of California, Davis, found that grasslands and rangelands are more resilient carbon sinks than forests in 21st century California. As such, the study indicates they should be given opportunities in the state’s cap-and-and trade market, which is designed to reduce California’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

So if the rewilders are wrong, does it matter? Not to them. It’s an evolving religion, you see.  And even the most absurd claims can be made on behalf of carbon sinks and the environment.

An unscientific bias against “feral” or “invasive” animals threatens to undercut one of the great stabilizing trends making ecosystems healthier, a new paper argues.

Introduced species such as feral pigs, horses, donkeys and camels represent a powerful force of “rewilding”  — the reintroduction of wild animals into ecosystems where humans had eradicated them — according to a study published Thursday in Science.

The study argues against widely held beliefs about whether invasive species are harmful — or what Lundgren described as the quasi-religious perception that some species inherently belong in a given landscape and others don’t.

That belief is the driving force behind a wave of expensive and often futile campaigns since the 1990s that eradicate species including feral hogs in Texas, wild horses across the American West and donkeys and camels in Australia.

We’ve discussed feral hogs at great length here on these pages.  Feral hogs adversely affect water quality, attack pets, destroy the environment they are a part of, dig up crops, spread diseases and parasites that only they can carry,

What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?

Oh, not much. They just eat the eggs of the sea turtle, an endangered species, on barrier islands off the East Coast, and root up rare and diverse species of plants all over, and contribute to the replacement of those plants by weedy, invasive species, and promote erosion, and undermine roadbeds and bridges with their rooting, and push expensive horses away from food stations in pastures in Georgia, and inflict tusk marks on the legs of these horses, and eat eggs of game birds like quail and grouse, and run off game species like deer and wild turkeys, and eat food plots planted specially for those animals, and root up the hurricane levee in Bayou Sauvage, Louisiana, that kept Lake Pontchartrain from flooding the eastern part of New Orleans, and chase a woman in Itasca, Texas, and root up lawns of condominiums in Silicon Valley, and kill lambs and calves, and eat them so thoroughly that no evidence of the attack can be found.

And eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “‘Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.

Feral hogs have run farmers in Georgia and Texas completely out of business.

But if rewilding is your newfound religion, you can make any claim whatsoever and it’s okay, because mother Gaia.  Or something.

But remember what I told you about mother Gaia.  “The problem with mother Gaia is that she’s a silent nag, a cruel and uncommunicative bitch.  She hasn’t authoritatively spoken like my creator.  So while she may expect you to worship her, she won’t tell you how or why.  So the advocates of carbon-free footprint, depopulation, and rewilding, just make it up as they go, spending massive sums of money on things that end up doing more harm than good.”

Prior:

Canadian Super Pigs Poised to Wreak Environmental Havoc and Spread Disease in Canada

Can Whitetail Managers Take Back Feral Pig Country?

How You Know That Dummies Are Making Suggestions About Containing The Feral Hog Problem

Hogs in Houston

Hogs Are Running Wild in the U.S.

Feral Hogs in Canada

Woman Killed by Feral Hogs Outside Texas Home

Houston-Area Suburbs Now Suffering from Feral Hogs

Hog Apocalypse in Texas

Save the Planet – Buy an AR!

Very well done video documentary.

First, Canada sends their geese, and now these. Imbedded video includes an infographic depicting the spread. Apparently, they also build “pigloos.”

The cross between a European wild boar and a domestic pig is migrating south, to the US, as their numbers swell in Canada.

A cross-bred “super pig” from Canada is poised to wreak havoc on the environment in the United States and must be dealt with aggressively and immediately, a wildlife expert told Fox News Digital.

“These pigs are easily the worst invasive large mammal on the planet,” said Dr. Ryan Brook, an assistant professor in the department of animal and poultry science at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

These “super pigs” are actually a cross between a European wild boar and a domestic pig, Brook said.

The pigs “cause crop damage, destroy natural environments, get into cities, destroy water quality and can spread disease to humans, livestock, pets, and native wildlife,” he also noted.

The pigs are coming into the U.S. from Canada as their numbers swell there, causing populations to migrate south. Left unchecked, these “super pigs” could negatively impact just about everyone, Brook emphasized.

“The only people who should be worried about this is anyone that lives in North America and eats meat, or eats vegetables, or eats any foods based on grain crops or spends time outside for any reason,” he said.

[…]

The “super pigs” began with a unique set of circumstances, said Brook.

“Wild boar farmers were told to cross the wild boar with domestic pigs to make a bigger and longer animal,” Brook said.

He said a domestic pig has an extra set of ribs and has larger, more frequent litter.

“This was great for wild boar farmers, but [it] was a huge problem when [these animals] got into the wild,” he said.

The animals’ size, along with their intelligence, has made the “super pigs” capable of survival in harsh conditions and therefore hard to eradicate, said Brook. He noted they’ve even learned how to tunnel into snow caves to keep themselves warm.

“It is much warmer under than snow than on top of it,” said Brook.

Eradicating these wild pigs must be done as “quickly as possible,” he emphasized.

There must be “a rapid and highly aggressive response, just like dealing with cancer or forest fires — that is really the only option.”

He added, “Once [the pigs] are established, you will have them for another 500 years.”

Traditional hunting techniques are not effective in pig eradication, said Brook.

“Large traps and tracking Judas pigs (wild pigs with a GPS collar that will lead you to other pigs), ground removal teams, fencing, and education are all key,” he said.

Failure to quickly eradicate the pigs will result in devastation to the environment.

But how do they taste?

Outdoor Life.

America’s hunters and wildlife managers are well into the feral hog war. More than 6 million wild pigs roam the country, gobbling down native flora and outcompeting native fauna. They’re also hell on agricultural crops. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, hogs cause $1.5 billion of damage annually.

“Researchers think that number may be closer to $2.5 billion now, but more research needs to be done to determine an accurate figure,” says Ben Westfall, the National Deer Association’s conservation coordinator.

There are massive efforts by government agencies and private landowners to cull feral hogs and stop their spread. Whitetail deer managers are at the tip of the spear, because pigs can also have a negative impact on deer.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of formal, university-led research on how pigs impact whitetails.

There doesn’t need to be university-led research.  Those are the same pointy head idiots who recommend against hunting to cull the hog population (but recommend government sponsored “sharp shooters”).

I can tell you what happens.  They compete for the same sorts of food and bedding areas.  If the feral hogs come in, the deer leave.  It’s that simple.  The deer won’t fight the hogs.  But I think the article does get to that.

When hogs first appear on the scene, whitetails tend to avoid them, meaning they settle for lower quality bedding areas and food sources. This is even truer for mature bucks, which seem to have less tolerance for hogs than younger bucks, does, and fawns do.

However, in areas where hogs have been present for years, deer seem to get used to them.

Well, that last part is only sort of true.  They are still displaced and still compete for the same food and bedding, they do learn to live in the same geographical area, but if you want to deer hunt in an area heavily populated by hogs, you’re best bet is to move on.

“Based on my observations, deer do adapt to hogs if they’ve been present a long time,” says, Dr. Grant Woods, a renowned deer biologist and founder of Growing Deer TV. “I see deer in South Florida ignoring hogs unless they get within 30 yards or so. I’m sure where hogs are new neighbors, deer give hogs more space. There’s certainly more food for deer if hogs are removed, and I suspect they’d be a bit calmer.”

Still, whitetails can be forced to move out of areas if hogs over-browse habitat and dominate resources. The higher the hog densities, the worse this problem gets.

That’s what I just said.

“It’s more about the food sources in the area,” he says. “If the hogs eat all the food, the deer will move to a new food source and return once the food source is available.”

The good news is that when hogs are removed (or severely culled) from the landscape, deer seem to bounce back. Anecdotes from the field are somewhat mixed but they are mostly promising. According to most deer managers I spoke with, whitetails generally return soon after hogs are removed. This can take longer in areas where the habitat is seriously degraded, but under average conditions, whitetails often return rather quickly. This is especially true in areas that offer adequate bedding areas, along with food, water, and security cover.

Once feral pigs become established, landowners can remove most of the hogs from their property. However, management is often very costly, and if neighboring landowners aren’t applying equal or greater management efforts, hog populations will continue to grow.

That’s why feral hogs can’t be eradicated.  Culling the population on a 100 acre plot of land (whether by hunting or trapping, or both) does no good if the neighboring farms don’t do exactly the same thing, and as I’ve pointed out before, that’s very, very, very expensive.

Feral pig managers have a mighty steep hill to climb. Typical hunting tactics have proven to be mostly useless as management tools. Sure, hog hunting is fun. And it might remove a porker or two from the property. But on a landscape population level, it doesn’t accomplish much, and it can make pigs even warier. Even when running dogs, hunting doesn’t remove enough hogs to decrease overall population densities.

Furthermore, fertility control isn’t in heavy use yet. The heavily debated toxicant called Warfarin isn’t permitted in any state, and there’s a chance it won’t ever be.

Good Lord.  There’s that awful, horrible idea floated again of putting a toxicant into the environment.  For heaven’s sake, don’t do that.  We have enough toxicants in the environment already.  Besides, the unintended consequences of such a introduction could be terrible.

Generally speaking, it’s easier to trap pigs when food is scarce in the winter and early spring. This is when bait is most effective. It’s also best to trap when the most sows are pregnant. (This is easier than trying to trap sows and their piglets together.) Capturing the entire sounder is the goal—from the biggest sows down to the smallest members of the group. Of course, hogs like to stay closer to water, so bottomlands, marshes, swamps, and other lowland areas are all good locations to try.

As I’ve said, sounders don’t stick together in proximity the way this tactic makes is seem.

“The best thing the average land manager can do is cooperate with their state wildlife agency and familiarize themselves with the management efforts taking place as well as various programs that may be available to them,” Westfall said. “Many states have hog specific or cost-share programs in which they will work with landowners to help control the problem. It is our responsibility as landowners, managers, and hunters to know what our state wildlife agency is doing, understand that their efforts and methods are based on scientific research, and do our best to assist with their efforts in any way that we can.”

The best thing land managers can do is kill as many hogs as possible as quickly as possible, whenever and wherever they can.  This means trapping, hunting, night vision, game cameras, research, communication, and all the things they already know about.  I would find it hard to believe that land managers in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and other states, don’t already know all about the problems.  I’m sure they’ve been engaged in this war for years now.  If they haven’t, they need other land managers.

I didn’t respond to this comment at the time because I wanted it to “soak” a while first.  Here is Steve Kellmeyer’s comment on a previous post.

Shooting individual hogs is a VERY bad idea. The only way to eradicate feral hogs is to capture an entire SOUNDER, the whole thing, at one time. If you just kill individual hogs, they break into multiple sounders which all go their separate ways. You turn them into quicksilver and they spatter everywhere.

There are ways to catch whole sounders at once. Do that. You get more meat for the poor, you actually eradicate the population.

Steve isn’t a thinking man.  No one is going to “eradicate” the feral hog population.  Hear me now and hear me good.  Feral hogs are around for good.  They will not be eradicated.  Period.  Full stop.  But this comment goes further by asserting that “If you just kill individual hogs, they break into multiple sounders which all go their separate ways.”

Steve has never hunted hogs before.  That isn’t how any of this works.  Hogs sometimes travel in sounders, sometimes not.  Sometimes if there is a sounder, it might consist of a few hogs, mostly sows, but even sows run alone sometimes.  I’ve seen it.  Boars mostly run alone.  They may come back to a sounder from time to time for copious mating, but they don’t necessarily stick around other hogs all the time.  When you see hogs, you may see one, or you may see two, or you may see twenty at a time.  The boars that are alone aren’t in some sort of panic to get around a sounder because he loves his pigs.  Wildlife biologists are anthropomorphizing hog behavior.

They travel in the day, they travel in the night time hours.  They adapt and adjust rapidly, and no one tactic will be successful all the time and in all circumstances.  They feed in the day, they are nocturnal feeders.  They defy strict categorization, regardless of what “Steve” says.  Ask me how I know.  I know partly because I’m not a pointy head wildlife biologist who thinks he can write a journal article or be interviewed for the newspaper, or contract a hired hand, and make things okay.

That seems to be the way of things at the moment while time is ebbing away to cap their population.  Witness this article concerning Canada’s exploding feral hog population.

What Manitoba does have are provincial rules that allow wild pig hunting any time of year with no bag limit, or restriction on number of animals they take. In B.C., “hunting is the only control measure,” the Invasive Species Council wrote in 2019.  In Saskatchewan, although “wild boar may be shot by Saskatchewan residents without a licence to protect their property, hunting is not a recommended control measure,” Sharks explained in an email.

Alberta’s strategy incentivizes hunting directly, offering to pay hunters $75 per set of ears. The CBC reported last fall that zero kills had been made in the bounty program, but Brook is not a fan of the idea.

“I have been vocally saying that a bounty is a great option if you want more wild pigs. That is a fantastic strategy — if you want to double your pigs,” Brook said sarcastically.

He explains that research shows hunting actually accelerates the spread of wild pigs, as they flee to new areas to evade hunters.

Instead, the wildlife biologist recommends hiring a professional trapper.  Next up, this stupid article.

An open hunt intended to eradicate Alberta’s wild boar population may instead make the feral swine more elusive to bounty hunters, a researcher warns.

The province has placed a price on the heads of wild pigs — re-establishing a bounty program designed to root out stubborn populations of the invasive species.

The hunt must be carefully managed, said Ryan Brook, an associate professor in the agriculture department of the University of Saskatchewan and director of the Canada Wild Pig Research Project.

Sporadic hunting will make the animals harder to track, Brook said. Wild boar quickly learn to disperse and evade threats — and will pass these tricks onto their young.

They already know those lessons, Ryan, and if they don’t, they’ll learn them in a single day when your local trapper puts out corn feeders and drops cages on them.  I could go on and on with these articles, but you get the picture.  Some of them want to hire professional “sharpshooters,” as if he can do something that a hunter can’t or his shot won’t scatter a sounder while a hunter’s shot will (by the way, neither will happen).  They want to use tactics that will be equally found out and learned by the hogs.  Additionally, those methods are affecting the known, visible hog population, not the ones we know are there but not cataloged by the pointy head wildlife biologists.

I repeat, feral hogs won’t be eradicated.  It’s not going to happen.  It’s far too late for that.  These hog cages dropping on corn feeders require expensive material and construction, cameras, people watching and patterning them, and they’re good for about as long as one or two catches, and then it’s over.  The hogs won’t come back after investing weeks of patterning the hogs and ensuring that they are healthy with good food.  And the trappers charge a lot of money.  Besides, this video shows what happens fairly well – the catch of this massive operation is about 50 hogs with two cages.

There are more than 1.5 million feral hogs in Texas alone.  That estimate is probably very low.  At 1.5 million hogs, 50 per massive nighttime operation, and assuming 10 such catches per night over the state (consider the cost of an operation like that), it would take 3000 days or 8.22 years to make your way through the population assuming no reproduction at all.

Do you see the scope of the problem?

So follow the pointy head wildlife biologist’s advice and trap if that’s what you want to do.  Also, hunt them, individually and collectively, alone and in sounders.  Don’t poison them as I’ve seen some idiots suggest because that poison will make its way into the ecosystem.  That may be the dumbest solution I’ve seen floated.

But to assert that killing a hog will make the problem worse is the most asinine advice I’ve witnessed.  Feral hogs don’t fit neatly into your Aristotelian categories.  Your error is in trying to categorize them at all.  Don’t categorize them – kill them.

They don’t do what you would predict, and they won’t do what you want.  If you want to cap the feral hog population, do everything possible to kill as many as you can by any means you can wherever and whenever you can.  Hunters are not the problem and the solution isn’t another tax and public works project.

Got it?

As one might expect, here’s another article on the destructiveness of feral hogs.  Homes, golf courses, farms, graveyards, you name it.  They destroy everything in their path.  Here’s the money quote for me.

Jamie Sugg, the Texas A&M Agrilife extension agent in Walker County told Houston Media last week: “It’s not a case of if you have a hog problem, but when. They are everywhere.”

I suspect this was referring to Texas, but it could just as well have been America.  It’s not a matter of if, but when you start suffering hog problems.

Glenn Reynolds post a link to hunting feral hogs from a helicopter in Texas.  Bacon, Glenn says.  Nope.

My hog gave me shoulders (what you would know as the ham), ribs and backstraps (what you would know as pork tenderloin).  A lot of all of it.  Feral hogs are too lean to give you bacon.

Anyway, feral hogs aren’t just a problem in the South as the link alludes to (” … an invasive species in the southeastern United States“).  Where do they get these “journalists” anyway?  That’s very old and outdated information.

Based on this report, I pointed out that “They reproduce faster than lethal removal can take them out, they’ll adapt to their surroundings, they’ll dig up the ecosystem to the point it looks like a rototiller came through, they’ll kill indigenous game, and they’ll come after humans too.”

They’ve adapted to the harsh, cold weather in Canada.  If you consider these like any other animal you’ve ever studied, you’re on the wrong track.  They defy your expectations.  They’re warm weather animals.  They’re cold weather animals.  They’re nocturnal, and they eat in daylight too.  They will come after you.  They will even attack horses.  On the other hand if they see a means of escape, they’re runners and refuse to “bay up” and even the dogs can’t catch them.  They reproduce at a rapid rate, they’ll eat virtually anything.  They destroy everything around them, and are costing millions of dollars in damages to farmers.

In fact, the Northwest is bracing for a hog invasion.  They’ll get it too, of that you can be sure.  Better journalists than the one cited above have begun to catch on.

Today, around six million feral swine run hog wild in at least 35 U.S. states, where they can grow more than five feet long and weigh more than 500 pounds. They’re adaptable creatures, capable of thriving in nearly any environment. For instance, the animals are also increasingly widespread on myriad Caribbean Islands and in Mexico, from the Baja to the Yucatán Peninsula, as well as Canada, where even deep snow and bitter cold can’t slow them down. (Read how feral hogs are moving into Canada and building “pigloos.”)

What’s more, females can begin reproducing at just eight months of age, and each can produce up to two litters of four to 12 piglets every 12 to 15 months. This allows the species to multiply rapidly and colonize new territory with unparalleled efficiency. Feral swine also ravage agricultural crops, and can harm people who corner them. But those outcomes aren’t what really worry experts.

It’s their diseases.

According to the USDA, feral swine can carry a litany of pathogens that could potentially spread to people such as leptospirosis, toxoplasmosis, brucellosis, swine influenza, salmonella, hepatitis, and pathogenic E. coli.

But there’s another concern—new diseases we don’t even know about yet.

“Swine, in general, are considered a mixing vessel species, because they’re susceptible to human viruses, like influenza viruses,” says Vienna Brown, a USDA staff biologist with the agency’s National Feral Swine Damage Management Program. “And when those get into swine,” she says, they could “create a novel influenza virus.”

“So I would argue that our risk from swine is greater than it is from other, more traditional wildlife species, in part because of their gregarious nature, our proximity to them, and just sheer numbers.”

[ … ]

Scientists are also tracking how diseases move through feral swine in the wild. Officials in Great Smoky Mountains National Park started monitoring feral swine health in 1959, but it wasn’t until 2005 that it saw its first case of pseudorabies. Like ASF, this virus is not a threat to humans, but it can cause aborted fetuses in pigs and death in other animals, such as wild raccoons and opossums and even pet cats and dogs. (Learn more about the battle to control America’s most destructive species.)

“The prevalence increased from basically zero to roughly 20 to 40 percent, depending on the year,” says William Stiver, supervisory wildlife biologist for the national park. “But it’s certainly here, and we’ve watched it sort of migrate across the park through the pig population.”

Leptospirosis, which is caused by a bacterium, has also been found in the park’s feral swine. If left untreated in people, it can cause kidney damage, meningitis, liver failure, respiratory distress, and death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kill them when you see them.  You benefit society when you do that.  There’s the added benefit of good eating, but make sure to cook them well.

Prior:

Feral Hogs in Canada

Woman Killed by Feral Hogs Outside Texas Home

Houston-Area Suburbs Now Suffering from Feral Hogs

Hog Apocalypse in Texas

Save the Planet – Buy an AR!

Outdoor Life.

Hunting wild hogs is great fun, and it’s a popular pursuit in many places around the country. But wild pigs themselves are a real problem for native flora and fauna. This is precisely why hogs have become a nationwide concern as they reproduce in astounding numbers and find ways to thrive in new environments.

According to a report from the Cowboy State Daily, Wyoming and Montana are currently free of wild swine. However, wildlife managers in these states are receiving reports of pigs in Colorado, North Dakota, and Utah. Landowners and hunters, meanwhile, are worried about hordes moving into Montana and Wyoming from Canada.

Alberta and Saskatchewan are already infested, which shows that cold weather and snow have little impact on the prolific pigs. If they can survive in Canada, so the thinking goes, wild hogs marching into Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming is entirely possible.

As wild hogs continue to spread throughout central Alberta, Ryan Brook, a University of Saskatchewan professor studying the pigs, says they could cause an “ecological train wreck” and bring “absolute destruction” to the native ecosystem.

We warned you and have commented before about this problem.

They reproduce faster than lethal removal can take them out, they’ll adapt to their surroundings, they’ll dig up the ecosystem to the point it looks like a rototiller came through, they’ll kill indigenous game, and they’ll come after humans too.

If you live up there, get your rifles ready.  Oh, Canada won’t let you have those.  Too bad.  If you live in the rest of the U.S., get your rifles ready.

That goes for Alaska too.  There aren’t enough bears to kill them all.

I’ve also commented on the hog problem in the South before they began to move North.

Woman Killed by Feral Hogs Outside Texas Home

Houston-Area Suburbs Now Suffering from Feral Hogs

Hog Apocalypse in Texas

Save the Planet – Buy an AR!