Go to Lake Lure in North Carolina and take a boat tour and the guide will show you an island in the lake with nice houses on it and no access except by boat. The guide tells a story of how the snakes were cleared off the island when the lake was first flooded. The legend is that huge numbers of snakes, some of them venomous, were trapped on the island and no one knew how to get them off until a farmer showed up and guaranteed to get rid of them within a few weeks for a certain price. This was agreed on and the farmer showed up with a flatboat loaded with pigs which he released on the island. A few weeks later he came back and reloaded his now much larger, well fed pigs and told the people they could go on the island without fear. Pigs do eat snakes and are not much affected by snake venom, I know this from growing up on the farm, the rest of the story I don’t know about. What I am getting to is that maybe we need to haul a few aircraft carrier loads of pigs to release in the middle East.
Great idea, but man, I'd hate to be aboard for that trip. Nothing quite smells like pig sh*t.