It is great they are trying to help, but I think the hogs multiply faster than anyone can trap and shoot them. The last numbers I saw for the OK hog population about a year ago was an estimated 1.6 million. At a max of 40 hogs per trapping incident, we'll never win the war. Texas has even more, at least 2 million, and they've been talking about using warfarin bait to kill them. While the prospect of dead feral hogs sounds appealing, I don't like the idea of a warfarin bait being used in the wild---other animals could eat it and die. What about vultures that feed on the feral hogs? It seems like trapping and shooting still is the best method. These things are worse than a plague of locusts.

They have warfarin peoe here testing. Supposedly it doesn't kill anything except the hog........

Kim, I'll believe it when I see it. I know they mean well, and I know everyone is increasingly desperate to stop the explosion in the feral hog population, but I cannot imagine that the warfarin bait does not, ultimately...somehow...end up hurting more than hogs. It always worries me when they come up with these great solutions that we only learn after the fact were perhaps not so great after all.

I read something the other day that said even if you can kill off 60-70% of all the feral hogs, their population rebuilds so quickly that in 2 or 3 years it is back to what it was before. That makes me wonder how in the world anyone ever will get the population back to even a manageable level and also keep it there. I'm thinking we need some sort of injectable birth control for the hogs......and it has to be strong, 100% fail-proof and long-lasting.Even then, who injects it and how? I am picturing something like a tranquilizer dart gun, but carrying birth control pill type stuff. (If I'm gonna dream, I'm gonna dream big!) Breaking the reproductive cycle somehow has to play a role in stopping the population explosion.

The only other thing I can think of is predators, but who wants to import enough large predators to control the feral hogs because we know those predators would not only go after the hogs, but everything else as well.

Dawn

I have a (rather distant) cousin down in southwest Texas who is a professional helicopter pilot (owns his choppers and business), and a large proportion of his business is feral hog control...from the helicopters. He pilots and his employee fires on the hogs out the window once they're in range. Uses the wind from the blades to flush them out. I imagine they use automatic/semiautomatic rifles to pick off as many as they can at once. It's up to the landowner to clean up. Everything else he does (search and rescue, fire control, crop dusting, wilderness adventures, etc) is pretty much secondary to this, it's needed so badly.

Yes, it is a huge business down there, and desperately needed.

If you've never walked across a piece of property dug up by feral fogs, it is hard to comprehend the amount of damage the can do. When we have gone to wildfires on land torn up by feral hogs, it is hard to walk two steps without stepping in the big holes they have left...and twisting an ankle or a knee or falling, and then the very next step you take, it is the same thing all over again. The first time I saw it in person, I was speechless. The damage is just beyond comprehension.

Another time we went to a wildfire on a farm that had a gopher mound about every square foot. I couldn't see it at first---just saw flames and smoke, and then as we got closer, (it was late winter or early spring), I realized we were driving across an abandoned cantaloupe field with dried vines and rotted melons. I couldn't understand why anyone abandoned a huge field of melons. Then I got out of the truck and was standing on gopher mounds---new gopher mounds under every step I took. So, I suspected that the gophers were eating the melons and there were too many gophers to stop, so the family abandoned the field. THEN we had to walk maybe 150 yards towards the river, and we hit the part of their fields torn up by feral hogs. Again, it made walking nearly impossible. Well, walking was possible, but staying upright was challenging---especially while carrying 5 gallon buckets filled with bottled water and Gatorade. That was only the second time I'd walked in a feral hog field. After the fire was out and we left, all the gardener in me could think about was that the family that owned and farmed that land couldn't win---what could they possibly grow with that sort of continuous assault from both feral hogs and gophers? To someone like me who has tough old clay, sandy soil sounds wonderful, at least until you see how the varmints tear it up. Clay soil has its problems, but once it is amended with organic matter, almost anything will grow in it, and the hogs can tear it up, but it seems like they prefer that sandy soil.

One year we had coyotes so bad that they were killing all the little foals born out in the fields and the horse ranch people were just beside themselves. The state sent in small aircraft carrying sharpshooters to shoot the coyotes from the sky. It was quite newsworthy at the time since it was such a rare occasion. Nowadays, shooting feral hogs from the sky is just another day at the ranch, so to speak.