Feral Hogs Are Taking Over America; Hunters Have a Solution

OKEECHOBEE, Fla.—On an 1,800-acre private preserve about 15 miles from Florida’s massive Lake Okeechobee, taxidermist and rancher Ian Hall offers a service some experts say is a critical solution to the explosion of invasive feral hogs across the U.S. mainland: guided hunts.

For a flat $350 fee, you can hunt a feral hog from atop a swamp buggy with a semi-automatic rifle, deep in the mossy pine hammocks and swamp lands of south central Florida, within a fenced ranch that houses other game animals, including alligators, bison, and multiple species of deer.

“Hunting doesn’t always get a good rap. It gets a negative rap, and then a lot of people that are anti-hunting, they never lift up the layers to see the positive side of hunting,” said Hall, who traps invasive feral hogs that enter his property from public land and releases them behind fenced areas on his ranch for clients to hunt.

Descended from both wild boar and escaped domestic pigs, feral hogs have overtaken at least 35 states in the past 40 years.

Often weighing between 75 and 250 pounds, feral hogs are large, fast, and destructive. They cause billions in damage to agriculture every year and foul soil, native plants, crops, waterways, and grasslands, making them one of the most harmful invasive species in the United States.

They are also extremely dangerous to humans and small animals.

“I had a friend in high school who shot a wild pig that turned around, ran at him, and before he could shoot it again, it took a tusk and ripped up his calves, and he almost died from the infection,” former Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 administrator Josh F.W. Cook, who is an expert on invasive feral hogs, told The Epoch Times.

“Feral pig tusks are the most infectious, disgusting thing you will ever find in biological sciences.”

Cook said experts have tried everything from trapping and poisoning to putting up exclusion fences to slow the spread of invasive feral hogs, but hunting and shooting the pigs is required to combat their destructive impacts on the environment.

“It’s like a giant wrecking ball through an ecosystem where they don’t belong,” Cook said.

“There are places that get so bad they have to come in and have massive kills. ... Once the pigs reach a certain population, they just become a huge health hazard in the amount of disease they carry around—and then the damage that they’re doing—and so they have to then take measures to stop them.”

However, some scientists who have long studied the explosion of invasive feral hogs argue that hunting alone is less efficient and more resource intensive than trapping, using bait stations with poisonous toxicants, or shooting hogs from helicopters.

“When you take a look at hunting, the reality is it’s manpower intensive from a sheer number of man hours to get an individual animal,” said Auburn University ecology professor Stephen Ditchkoff, who is a leading expert on feral hogs and co-author of “Invasive Wild Pigs in North America: Ecology, Impacts, and Management.”

Trapping ensures the highest body count with the least resources and time spent, but he said the best solution is toxicants because they can wipe out entire colonies of feral hogs in days or weeks.

“It’s astronomical; it’s manpower-light. The pigs are coming, consuming the bait, and dying. We just have to put up the bait,” Ditchkoff told The Epoch Times.

Population Explosion 

Feral hogs are not native to North or South America and have been introduced in waves over the last millennium, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Polynesian settlers first brought pigs to the Hawaiian Islands between 800 and 1,000 years ago, and then European settlers released a wave of domesticated pigs to the mainland during the 1500s.

After these pigs eventually escaped captivity, they became the ancestors of today’s feral hogs, and another wave of pigs—this time Eurasian and Russian wild boar—was brought to North America in the late 1800s.

Modern-day feral hogs are descendants of escaped domestic pigs, wild boar, and hybrids of both. Their populations, driven by sows having up to two litters of four to 12 piglets a year, are exploding.

In the past 40 years alone, the USDA estimates that feral hogs have spread to at least 35 states with a population of more than 6 million.

“People say, ‘Oh, those animals, they breed like rabbits.’ If an animal’s really serious about breeding, it’ll breed like a feral pig, because they put rabbits to shame,” Cook said.

But it’s not just their pervasive breeding habits that contribute to their spread; humans have intentionally transported and released feral hogs from previous habitats into parts of the country they have yet to reach, simply for the means of sport hunting.

“Pigs move across the landscape very slowly, but they move on the highway at 70 miles an hour,” Ditchkoff said, referring to humans transporting them on vehicles across state lines.

“People started putting out pig hunting shows [on cable TV]. And all of a sudden, people in Kentucky and Illinois and Michigan and Kansas started saying, ‘Oh my goodness, I could be hunting pigs, and this is something we could turn loose on the landscape.’ And I think that’s where it came from.”

Environmental ‘Wrecking Ball’

The diversity of feral hog food sources is one of the many ways they become “wrecking balls” for the environment, as they are incredibly resilient and can survive on everything from fruits and nuts to human garbage.

While scouring and rooting the ground for food, feral hogs damage pastures and kill critical species that grow within them. They also devastate crops by eating them, rooting, trampling, and wallowing in them.

Some of the crops most often targeted by feral hogs include sugar cane, corn, grain sorghum, soybeans, wheat, oats, peanuts, and rice, as well as a range of vegetables and fruit.

Feral hogs also damage orchards and vineyards, and have taken to gnawing through the pseudostems of banana plants in Hawaii.

The hogs have contributed to the decline of nearly 300 native plant and animal species in the United States alone, according to a report from the USDA.

The USDA estimates that feral hogs cause upwards of $2.5 billion in damage to U.S. agriculture every year.

“Six hogs can go and do $100,000 worth of damage in one night to a golf course, shut that green down, and it’s months before they’re able to use it again,” Hall told The Epoch Times.

A study published in Pest Management Science last year found that pig invasions have caused $3.4 billion in overall annual damage to the United States, including impacts to agriculture, health, the environment, and property.

Feral hogs are particularly dangerous because of the number of diseases and parasites—30 and 37, respectively—they can carry and transmit to livestock, pets, wildlife, and humans, including pseudorabies, swine flu, toxoplasmosis, tularemia, trichinellosis, and porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome.

But they also carry a host of zoonotic pathogens—or bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites that spread between animals and humans—that experts say are considerably threatening to public health, including brucellosis, bovine tuberculosis, leptospirosis, Salmonella, E. coli, and hepatitis E.

These pathogens and diseases are not just a threat to livestock and other animals, but can be transmitted to humans in the event of an attack, such as what happened to Cook’s high school friend.

These pathogens can also get into drinking water sources due to feral hogs spreading into meadows and marshlands, Cook said. He believes states that don’t manage their invasive impacts should be fined under the Clean Water Act.

“It’s scary what they’re doing to water quality,” Ditchkoff said, explaining how Auburn has conducted water quality tests before and after feral hogs have been removed from specific areas.

“Once we got rid of pigs, the water quality just improved astronomically.”

The U.S. federal government also worries that feral hogs could eventually spread African swine fever throughout the United States, since it has already been introduced in Europe, he added.

“Because if we have African swine fever introduced, it’s going to devastate our pork industry,” Ditchkoff said.

Stopping the Spread

There are only a handful of ways to mitigate the spread of invasive feral hogs, experts say.

Some pigs are trapped, maintained in certain areas with high “exclusion fencing,” poisoned, and shot from helicopters in certain places, such as Texas.

“I mean, it sounds brutal. It sounds cold. It sounds like whatever adjective you want to attach to it. But the hard fact is, if you stop doing it, Texas is in the millions [of invasive feral hogs], and the only way they can control them in Texas is from the air, from the helicopters,” Hall said, describing how people will shoot the hogs with semi-automatic rifles while aiming out of moving helicopters.

While trapping and poisoning are successful at reducing feral hog numbers, helicopter shooting is even more effective, according to Ditchkoff. A single person aiming a semi-automatic rifle at open landscape in Texas could theoretically take out 300 pigs on a good day.

“It doesn’t get them all, but you can substantially reduce numbers to the point to ease the pressure on agricultural production,” he said.

Another solution that is giving researchers like Ditchkoff hope, in addition to the focus and funding from the federal government to respond to the feral hog threat, is the use of contraceptives alongside “lethal control” to prevent and slow the pigs’ breeding process.

Beyond cracking down on the illegal transport and release of feral hogs and trapping and poisoning them, one of the most widespread mitigation methods is controlled hunting.

Despite the sheer popularity of hog hunting, Ditchkoff is careful when discussing its efficacy in preventing the spread of invasive pigs, in part because the initial demand more than a decade ago is one of the factors that led to the animals spreading to so many states.

“Any dead pig is a positive contribution to pig control,” Ditchkoff said.

“I don’t want to say that it doesn’t help, but I think we’ve pretty much demonstrated over the last 30 years that hunting does not control pig populations. It may reduce the population growth trajectory a little bit. It may help us stay in place, but it’s not really helping us reduce numbers for the most part, in most cases.”

Hunting can reduce numbers in particular locations, but from a numbers standpoint, trapping is still more effective at wiping out large populations of feral hogs to a point at which an area could remain hog-free for upwards of six months under the right conditions, Ditchkoff said.

Florida has made it legal to trap or hunt feral hogs on private land year-round without licenses or permits. Hunters can use any legal rifles, shotguns, crossbows, bows, pistols, or air guns, and there are no size or bag limits.

The laws are similar for wildlife management areas, though management area permits are necessary, quotas may be enforced depending on the area, and hunting is only allowed during certain times of year.

This is where Hall’s Florida Hunting, Fishing, and Outdoor Adventures hunting ranch comes in. It is one of roughly 20 licensed feral hog hunting preserves in the state, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

After driving along winding roads through the heartland of Florida’s agricultural industry, one can find Hall’s ranch off the beaten path near the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, less than 15 miles north of the town of Okeechobee.

The preserve attracts hunters from around the world, in part due to its drivable proximity from both Orlando and Fort Lauderdale.

Hall, who is also a trained taxidermist, has owned the property for 30 years, starting with beef cattle ranching before he started farming and breeding white-tail deer, which is now in its 8th season.

His ranch provides hunting opportunities for a range of species, but combating the spread of feral hogs and lowering their numbers in the state holds the most importance, said Hall, who often takes in hogs from other places in the state to release them on his fenced ranch.

On his ranch alone, hunters eradicate roughly 5,000 hogs every year.

“If you stop that process of taking that many out off the side of the road, and you quit doing it, can you imagine what would happen?” Hall said.

Hunters interested in one of Hall’s nighttime swamp buggy or tree-stand hog hunts will equip themselves with AR-style semi-automatic rifles, which are critical for their fast reload capabilities, as hogs can run upwards of 30 miles per hour and are extremely dangerous when they feel threatened or cornered.

It might seem brutal to some, but it’s one of the few reliable ways to lower populations of feral hogs, which—beyond destroying the natural environment—are increasingly spreading into suburban areas, where they directly threaten humans and small animals.

“With people, when a hog is wounded or cornered, especially a big hog, he’s coming at you. He’s not going to run away from you,” Hall said.

“And it’s dangerous. And people are killed because what happens is they—see the big teeth in that hog right there?” he said, pointing to a taxidermied hog bust in his living room.

“They’re like razor blades. They’re gonna get a femoral artery. They’re gonna get you, and you’re gonna bleed out.”