Archive for the 'Animals' Category

This happens because people don’t get out around feral animals. This could even be remedied by taking your children to farms and ranches.

Source.

We’ve covered it many times before. But here’s a good update on the financial cost of the feral hog problem.

As Congress advances reconciliation negotiations several conservation and animal health programs remain in limbo — including feral swine management initiatives left out of the most recent farm bill extension. At the same time, updated data from the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program (NFSDMP) and the National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) offers the most comprehensive economic assessment of the significant costs feral hogs impose on U.S. crop and livestock production.

This Market Intel highlights findings from the most comprehensive research to date on feral hog damage, which these new estimates put at over $1.6 billion in annual agricultural losses across just 13 states — covering impacts to livestock, pastureland and six major crops. These updated figures extend far beyond traditional crop losses, capturing broader economic consequences such as land-use changes, infrastructure damage and control costs.

I’ve said before that I don’t believe that government control programs are neither necessary nor effective. Those programs usually focus on catch and entrapment programs run by people who stand to make money by doing it, with the usual wildlife biologist from a local university who will tell you that hunting them scatters the sounder and makes the problem worse.

Feral hogs came to the US with European settlers, and have been on the landscape ever since. They’re the exact same species that humans keep in captivity for meat consumption. But NC Wildlife Biologist Falyn Owens says they’ve spread in the wild a lot more since the 1950s.

“A big part of it is also the intentional transportation and release of pigs for hunting purposes. Pigs being brought from one place to a completely different place so that people have an opportunity to recreationally hunt feral swine,” Owens said.

And that’s a big problem, they say, because hogs are terrible for the environment and farmers alike. They eat everything, chase off other animals, and carry diseases that infect livestock and humans.

“Feral pigs, cause a lot of ecological damage and monetary damage for farmers,” Owens said. “But at the same time, in order to hunt pigs, there have to be pigs there to begin with. So there’s an incentive to have pigs on the landscape in order to hunt them.”

And once they’re on the landscape, it’s challenging to remove them. The Federal government started a USDA program to control feral swine in 2014: Randy Pulley is one of its employees, and he is, more or less, at war with feral hogs in rural North Carolina.

“Hog trapping is it takes a lot of patience, because we don’t want to educate them,” he explained. “Don’t want to catch half the group and educate the other half.”

Educate them, as in unintentionally teach the remaining hogs how to avoid capture. Yes, hogs are that smart.

Pulley uses corral traps on farmers’ properties: big circular cages with guillotine doors. There’s a camera watching them and his phone alerts him whenever something comes near — and he has a dozen or more he monitors each night.

“Say you got 10 pigs, seven go in, but three won’t go won’t go in. They’re just hanging around the outside. You don’t want to drop the door then,” he explained. “What you want to do is keep re-baiting. Keep re-baiting. Maybe put a little bit of corn outside the door, because your goal is to get all 10 in one swipe. So none are educated. Because once you drop that door and a pig outside sees that — they’re very smart. He’s gonna, he’s gonna learn that — it’s ingrained in his mind. You’ll never catch him in a trap again.”

When that door falls, the entire sounder — that’s what a family group of pigs is called — starts sprinting around the corral. Some are even strong enough to lift an edge of the cage, though Pulley said he’d never seen one escape from a trap that way.

Biologists say trapping is the most effective way to take out feral hogs: you can kill the entire group in one go. But Pulley said you need a lot of tools in your toolbox to do the job, particularly because hogs don’t care about the bait in traps during the growing season. Not to mention the educated hogs.

“I have some properties where corral traps, I know they don’t work anymore. I can’t even use a corral trap on that property, because they — the hogs leave. Pigs leave. So you have to adjust some properties. They’re harassed so much using traps. It’s not even a question. It’s just, you know, take them out via firearm,” he said.

Moreover, there aren’t enough trappers or traps to handle the population now. We’ve far exceeded that point in the U.S.

If you want the hogs alive and running loose in order to charge hunters, you’re probably making the problem worse. If you hold the hogs in a hunting preserve, that’s fine. But if your focus is on eradication to save farming, hunting is necessary. Hogs will be around as long as we want them to be around. Otherwise, it’s time to grab your rifle and go hunting.

But be careful. If they are runners they will flee. If they bay up, the boars have tusks that can gore you, and if they hit your femoral artery you’ll probably bleed to death in the bush very quickly. Take sidearms as well as rifles, and be prepared to use all of them.

You see those spots of feral hog populations in the north (North Dakota and Michigan)? They are now acclimated to the cold. They are virtually everywhere now, and the sounders from the north will expand southward and the sounders in the south will expand northward.

For what it’s worth, I have found rounds as small as 6mm ARC effective, but you have to nail them right behind the ear. I’d rather use a .444 Marlin or 45-70.

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The comments are interesting.

This is my neighbor. No one is mentioning the bear went into his camper and pulled him out!

FYI, the Florida state record bear is 760 lbs, shot in 2015.

That’s my backyard. Shout out from Collier county Naples Florida. Living off Everglades boulevard touching on alligator Alley. The bears are everywhere and they have always been a big problem really tough to keep farm animals and chickens out in the glades.

This is how a Coyote becomes when he’s hungry. This is perhaps a stupid move but also notice the teamwork.

That means be wary when you go on walkabouts. This includes wearing snake boots during hunting season.

Video.

Dean Weingarten.

Vitaly Aleksandrovich Nikolayenko was a prominent Russian brown bear researcher (Asian version of the American brown or grizzly bear) who routinely and closely approached bears without a firearm. He did this for 33 years, from 1970 to December 2003. In December 2003, he followed a bear that had come out of hibernation in the winter until the bear attacked him, killed him, and ate him. His use of bear spray had failed to stop the bear.  His was the first recorded fatal failure of bear spray. The killing was the culmination of several lucky escapes over the years of his association with brown bears.

It won’t be the last either. Dean also recounts the life and philosophy of Timothy Treadwell, a sorry excuse of an adventurer because he went into the bush with naivety.

Judge: "Constitutionally protected resource like bears."

Me: Where in the constitution does it mention bears?

Alaska Judge Halts Bear Cull Program, Calls It Unconstitutional https://t.co/Mal83wDTDR

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) April 3, 2025

Cowboy News Daily.

A North Carolina man took a creative and goofy approach to bear deterrence —stepping out of his house in a bear suit to spook away a black bear that had plunked down on his lawn.

It worked for Rodney Clark of Asheville, North Carolina, as evidenced by media interviews and a video making the rounds on news outlets and social media.

However, some Wyomingites said trying that tactic on a grizzly bear would probably get a person mauled, possibly killed — or perhaps even worse — molested by the bear.

[ … ]

In an interview with “Inside Edition,” he said that the bear costume has proven effective in pushing bears off his property.

He told “Inside Edition” that bears sometimes “stop and pause and look back. They’re not really sure what that is.”

What happened to a Marlin 45-70 lever action rifle? What was this man thinking?

This is an ill-advised strategy, regardless of what kind of bear.

Source.

Because an “educated” pig is harder to track or trap, Kentucky is taking steps to prevent the hunting of feral hogs known to damage crops, woodlands and potentially spread disease.

Kentucky wildlife management officials are finalizing a ban on the hunting of wild pigs in an effort to more easily capture them. Under the new regulation, pigs could still be shot if they’re damaging private land, although wildlife experts are encouraging landowners to instead contact the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources to have the animals removed.

Steven Fields, an attorney for the department, told lawmakers during a legislative hearing earlier this week that if a sounder — the name for a herd of wild swine — knows it’s being hunted, the sounder avoids humans and shifts its activities to night, making it harder to track.

The Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Commission, the governing board overseeing the KDFWR, voted in December to approve a regulation eliminating the existing year-round hunting season for wild hogs.

Ben Robinson, the wildlife division director at the state agency, told the board the department was trying to prevent “anybody from shooting a pig at any time” because it can make feral hogs hard to trap en masse, something state and federal officials have actively been pursuing.

“It goes against what we’re trying to do with our trapping efforts by educating these pigs, making them much more difficult to trap,” Robinson said in December. “We’re having a lot of success with our partners, [U.S. Fish and] Wildlife Service, USDA, in trapping these animals and keeping them out of Kentucky. So by allowing landowners to just shoot freely, that goes against what we’re trying to do.

Here’s a stunning prediction. This approach won’t work.

Source.

A 72-year-old Montana man shot and killed a grizzly bear after it attacked him while he was alone picking huckleberries, according to the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

The man was hospitalized after the encounter, which happened Thursday evening near Columbia Falls on Flathead National Forest lands, the agency said in a news release.

FWP’s wardens and bear specialists referred to the incident as a “surprise defensive encounter.”

The man reportedly shot the bear with a handgun after the adult female grizzly charged him, the release stated. FWP responded to the incident and confirmed the bear was killed.

Neither the article or the press release says what make, model or caliber the handgun was. We would like to know this information.

It’s likely the man is alive because he quickly deployed a handgun rather than following the stupid advice to try bear spray first.