Jerky.
Bacon.
Dog food.
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
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 ...
They’re working both on contraceptives and plain-old poison, but the problem is that anything put out for the hogs also endangers good wildlife and livestock.
Nothing stops them easily. There are no natural barriers, and they do not honor fences. It would be impractical and impossible to fence them out with electric fences. They range for miles, the cost would be prohibitive, and they’d just rip through the wire.
Right now the most effective method of control — which is basically just keeping the population from growing — is aggressive hunting and luring them into pens with feed. But penned feral hogs are fierce creatures; it takes a trained tough-guy team to handle them. They will attack, and the big ones have nasty tusks. There are men who make money capturing the creatures and transporting them to processors, but that’s tough work.
We have plenty of Texas coyotes, but I can’t imagine one taking on a wild boar.
One bright side is that the meat of a healthy hog is very, very tasty.
Absolutely. I spend a lot of time in the outdoors in east and central Texas. Because hunting is a waning passtime in the US their numbers are exploding, along with many other wild animals. I shoot every pig I see and feel I have no impact on their numbers. Sows can have a litter of 6-12 piglets as many as 3 times a year.
I don’t know.
We can hunt them and leave them to the buzzards, or harvest the meat if we want it. As far as I know, there are no restrictions.
The young ones might be tasty but not the big ones.
“I personally saw one survive a razor-tipped arrow that went all the way through him back in October.”
Bullets work better than sharp sticks.
Evolve.
;-)
Apparently. ;-)
(However, in this case, it was deer bow season, and that was the available weapon when the spotted creature made its appearance.)
Jerky.
Bacon.
Dog food.
hehe
Most big ol’ hogs used to end up as pepperoni!
Not me........Here in Michigan I guess a bunch escaped from an exotic game ranch a number of years ago and now they are spreading throughout the state. I don't hunt but I guess the game guide says you can shoot these suckers on sight with no permit required...........
I just saw a plague of Horned Frogs in Pasadena.
How about a "bounty" on the pigs, have they tried that? Seem like good chow to me...with the cost of food rapidly increasing, maybe more hunting the critters?
Is it possible to trap them or are they too smart?
We used to live out in the country outside Franklin, TN years ago. On the way in to town, there was a field that evidently had been a home site years before, with daffodil bulbs in the yard. There was then a bunch of hogs in the field, and the bulbs had been spread and divided over the years. Every year, there were more and more daffodils blooming in the field. Haven’t seen the field in many years, but wonder if it still blooms like that.
Living here in SE Texas, I’d say it’s probably an understatement.
Would big game hunting weapons help?
Several weeks later he stopped in a small town just north of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.
It was a Saturday morning -- a lazy day -- when he walked into the general store. Sitting around the pot-bellied stove were seven or eight of the town's local citizens.
The traveler spoke. "Gentlemen, could you direct me to the Okefenokee Swamp?"
Some of the old timers looked at him like he was crazy.
"You must be a stranger in these parts," they said.
"I am. I'm from North Dakota," said the stranger.
"In the Okefenokee Swamp are thousands of wild hogs." one old man explained.
"A man who goes into the swamp by himself asks to die!"
He lifted up his leg. "I lost half my leg here, to the pigs of the swamp."
Another old fellow said, "Look at the cuts on me; look at my arm bit off!"
"Those pigs have been free since the Revolution, eating snakes and rooting out roots and fending for themselves for over a hundred years. They're wild and they're dangerous. You can't trap them. No man dare go into the swamp by himself."
Every man nodded his head in agreement.
The old trapper said, "Thank you so much for the warning. Now could you direct me to the swamp?"
They said, "Well, yeah, it's due south -- straight down the road."
But they begged the stranger not to go, because they knew he'd meet a terrible fate.
He said, "Sell me ten sacks of corn, and help me load it in the wagon." And they did.
Then the old trapper bid them farewell and drove on down the road. The townsfolk thought they'd never see him again.
Two weeks later the man came back. He pulled up to the general store, got down off the wagon, walked in and bought ten more sacks of corn.
After loading it up he went back down the road toward the swamp.
Two weeks later he returned and again bought ten sacks of corn.
This went on for a month. And then two months, and three.
Every week or two the old trapper would come into town on a Saturday morning, load up ten sacks of corn, and drive off south into the swamp.
The stranger soon became a legend in the little village and the subject of much speculation. People wondered what kind of devil had possessed this man, that he could go into the Okefenokee by himself and not be consumed by the wild and free hogs.
One morning the man came into town as usual. Everyone thought he wanted more corn.
He got off the wagon and went into the store where the usual group of men were gathered around the stove. He took off his gloves.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I need to hire about ten or fifteen wagons. I need twenty or thirty men."
"I have six thousand hogs out in the swamp, penned up, and they're all hungry. I've got to get them to market right away."
"You've WHAT in the swamp?" asked the storekeeper, incredulously.
"I have six thousand hogs penned up. They haven't eaten for two or three days, and they'll starve if I don't get back there to feed and take care of them."
One of the oldtimers said, "You mean you've captured the wild hogs of the Okefenokee?"
"That's right."
"How did you do that? What did you do?" the men urged, breathlessly.
One of them exclaimed, "But I lost my arm!"
"I lost my brother!" cried another.
"I lost my leg to those wild boars!" chimed a third.
The trapper said, "Well, the first week I went in there they were wild all right."
"They hid in the undergrowth and wouldn't come out. I dared not get off the wagon."
"So I spread corn along behind the wagon. Every day I'd spread a sack of corn."
"The old pigs would have nothing to do with it."
"But the younger pigs decided that it was easier to eat free corn than it was to root out roots and catch snakes. So the very young began to eat the corn first."
"I did this every day. Pretty soon, even the old pigs decided that it was easier to eat free corn."
"After all, they were all free; they were not penned up. They could run off in any direction they wanted at any time."
"The next thing was to get them used to eating in the same place all the time. So I selected a clearing, and I started putting the corn in the clearing."
"At first they wouldn't come to the clearing. It was too far. It was too open. It was a nuisance to them."
"But the very young decided that it was easier to take the corn in the clearing than it was to root out roots and catch their own snakes. And not long thereafter, the older pigs also decided that it was easier to come to the clearing every day."
"And so the pigs learned to come to the clearing every day to get their free corn."
"They could still subsidize their diet with roots and snakes and whatever else they wanted. After all, they were all free. They could run in any direction at any time. There were no bounds upon them."
"The next step was to get them used to fence posts."
"So I put fence posts all the way around the clearing. I put them in the underbrush so that they wouldn't get suspicious or upset."
"After all, they were just sticks sticking up out of the ground, like the trees and the brush. The corn was there every day. It was easy to walk in between the posts, get the corn, and walk back out."
"This went on for a week or two. Shortly they became very used to walking into the clearing, getting the free corn, and walking back out through the fence posts."
"The next step was to put one rail down at the bottom. I also left a few openings, so that the older, fatter pigs could walk through the openings and the younger pigs could easily jump over just one rail."
"After all, it was no real threat to their freedom or independence. They could always jump over the rail and flee in any direction at any time."
"Now I decided that I wouldn't feed them every day. I began to feed them every other day."
"On the days I didn't feed them the pigs still gathered in the clearing. They squealed, and they grunted, and they begged and pleaded with me to feed them."
"But I only fed them every other day. And I put a second rail around the posts."
"Now the pigs became more and more desperate for food. Because now they were no longer used to going out and digging their own roots and finding their own food. They now needed me. They needed my corn every other day."
"So I trained them that I would feed them every day if they came in through a gate. And I put up a third rail around the fence."
"But it was still no great threat to their freedom, because there were several gates and they could run in and out at will."
"Finally I put up the fourth rail."
"Then I closed all the gates but one, and I fed them very, very well."
"Yesterday I closed the last gate. And today I need you to help me take these pigs to market."
-- end of story --
My husband took our neighbor hunting and he killed a wild hog. His wife cooked it. They threw it out because the smell was so sickening they couldn’t eat it. She recently got a new oven and said the smell finally left the house when they carried the old oven out. I don’t even want my dogs to eat anything that stinky.
He takes them to a butcher who takes in game.
They make a good sausage and give back all the good cuts to Q.
He BBQs a a couple of the rear legs. Much better than a store bought ham.
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