Posted on 01/01/2011 2:49:31 PM PST by EveningStar
About 50 miles east of Waco, Texas, a 70-acre field is cratered with holes up to five feet wide and three feet deep. The roots below a huge oak tree shading a creek have been dug out and exposed. Grass has been trampled into paths. Where the grass has been stripped, saplings crowd out the pecan trees that provide food for deer, opossums and other wildlife. A farmer wanting to cut his hay could barely run a tractor through here. There’s no mistaking what has happened—this field has gone to the hogs.
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
Do you believe that part? 1 to 3 million in Texas?
In the article:
Texas allows hunters to kill wild hogs year-round without limits or capture them alive to take to slaughterhouses to be processed and sold to restaurants as exotic meat.
Hay can be a good cash crop but not if hogs have rooted it to Hell and beyond, so I sympathizes with your plight.
I realize that the hogs are destructive but hey, they can be killed and even exploited financially. Have you ever thought of putting out contraceptive-laced hog feed? Stopping the reproduction cycle while at the same time culling and/or rounding them up to sell for profit could go a long way towards eliminating the problem. Oh, and can electrified fences keep them out?
The problem we have here in southwest Washington State is coyotes. Oddly enough, something as simple as a decorative aluminum fence, the 7’ tall kind that look like a row of spears, actually keep out the coyotes plus deer won't jump the fence because of the points on the top.
Here in CA, we have to get tags, but can also hunt them yearround. The problem is that even though the state allows you to hunt them, you still have to find a place to do it. I hunt on BLM land, but the pigs are pretty smart and generally hole up on private property.
I have a friend that hit one in a Toyota van.
600 lb boar.
Insurance company totaled the van.
Warped the sub-frame and did so much other damage...wasn't worth fixing.
Popped all the air bags, broke the windshield, both side glasses, side sliding door wouldn't open, etc, etc.
My friend suffered a broken wrist and a badly bruised sternum.
He related that he had seen it standing in the road, but did not take extreme evasion actions, thinking "how bad can it be, to hit a pig?".
He remembers wondering, while waiting for the ambulance, if he had not really hit a huge white rock in the road.
He'll avoid them next time.
Oddly enough, central Europe is also being overrun by boars.
“Germany’s hunter’s association disclosed earlier this month, that it’s total bag during the 2007- 2008 wild boar shooting season had reached 477,000 - an increase of 66 percent over the previous season and a post-war record.”
I blame Al Gore. Those are his people. The swinish boars, that is.
I don’t know. Sounds high.
I do have considerable confidence in the Ag guys at A&M, who study these things, and they estimated 2 million in 2004. Texas Dept. of Agriculture is still using that number. http://www.agr.state.tx.us/agr/media/media_render/0,1460,1848_17053_40786_0,00.html
We didn’t have problem with these creatures in North Texas until the last decade, but they are rapidly becoming a scourge.
I was reading some hog threads on a hunting site last week. One of the posters went from hunting to trapping and said he can get up to 20 a night in large pen trap.
***And folks on this thread seem to think it’s funny and obviously haven’t read the Smithsonian article.****
Do your wild hogs have psudo-rabies as the wild hogs in Arkansas do? We are allowed to shoot them and leave them lay.
Gotta test those euro boars for radiation from Chernobyl.
You don’t even need a license in Texas if you are hunting with a land owner on his property that he is trying to clean up. I’m not sure the requriements the land owner has to use with the State.
My lord. Speaking as an Alaskan, this problem is as easy to solve as pulling a trigger on a .30-06 and serving up the chops. The same goes for those pesky white-tailed deer and turkeys and Canada geese back east, too, although a .22 would probably be better with the birds. LOL
That’s FOOD out there. Eat up.
Maybe if it was simmered 3 hours in a pressure cooker
If they supply the ammo I’d be happy to help them with this problem. I love shooting hogs, they are the only animal I kill purely for the fun of it.
I think all game animals get pretty smart about that. I used to have my best luck with rabbits hunting right along the outside of the state park boundaries, where they were relatively easy to approach. And everyone knows how docile the wild ducks act, when they are on a pond where they can't be hunted.
Mourning doves in my back yard aren't afraid of me, but just try getting close to one out in the wild. They usually light out 100 yards ahead of me.
I have advocated that for the last eight years. Would have saved a lot of American lives and avoided a lot of wounded.
I have advocated that for the last eight years. Would have saved a lot of American lives and avoided a lot of wounded.
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