>> The province of Ontario has an emerging population of a few hundred pigs, and it’s educating the public, collecting data, and testing how to track and remove swine.
Just tell the hunters you have a problem and invite them in to eradicate them. I feel like government bodies whose job is to deal with such things never want to "solve" a problem completely, but would rather "manage" it so they can keep their job.
Some day these few hundred pigs will be 10's of thousands or more and they'll look back and wonder why they didn't put more effort in sooner.
As it says in the article, there are problems with hunting: pigs are smart and become nocturnal to avoid hunters, making them more difficult to track; also because they are smart, pigs start traveling when they find they are being hunted and sounders can scatter, spreading feral pigs to a new, larger territory.
As other comments have mentioned, most of Texas' population lives in large urban areas. Even though hogs are starting to show up in and around cities (I have personally seen them right next to I-45 in The Woodlands/Conroe area immediately north of Houston), it's illegal to shoot them there. And there are only so many people willing to spend their own time and money to leave the city and go kill them.
If we're talking straight theory (and this is HN so why wouldn't we), all it should take is enough predators to reduce/eliminate any given prey population to the desired number. The predator count that is needed could itself be reduced if more effective predation methods are available, but it's still a numbers game.
> And there are only so many people willing to spend their own time and money to leave the city and go kill them.
Have permits and bounties been discussed? It has backfired with cases like cobras in India, but I don't see such a risk here. I'm not always one to go for a market based solution but it looks like it could help here.
I'm not sure if Texas Parks & Wildlife has discussed bounties to encourage culling. Such a program would probably require increased taxes to fund, which is not likely to be popular... though with the apparent increasing coverage of the issue, maybe that wouldn't be a problem. If everyone is on board, then it's just a question of how much the people (read: the government) are willing to spend.
I would also be concerned about unintended consequences, like you mentioned. I know for a fact that there are people today who, if they manage to trap the right pigs, would try to sell them. Their market would be landowners that offer canned hunts on a high-fenced property (say, $300 for a guaranteed large hog kill). Sure, the hog is still dead - but what if it breeds first? What if the piglets then escaped? Personally I'd feel dirty if I didn't cull the animals I trapped immediately, but if I were less financially secure, maybe not.
Gaming the system could be a problem but I think an equilibrium can be reached where the payoff is attractive but won't cause huge problems. If the boars are as destructive and dangerous as stated, it seems like a poor payoff to take a risk and corral them compared to more traditional farming/ranching.
I'm guessing a real blocker is tax funding as you say. It is a little odd since solving this seems like it should be appealing to a wide range of people on the political spectrum for various reasons.
Agreed. It's clearly a known problem in the state legislature, as they specifically removed the requirement to have a hunting license on private land for feral pigs. I hope they're at least considering adding incentives.
The scale of the problem - at least in some states - makes eradication impossible. Feral hogs have a gestation period of only 115 days and reach sexual maturity in just 6 months. Texas has 4 million feral pigs. They need to kill 75 percent a year just to keep the population stabile. Texas already has 24/7, 365 open hunting (with dogs, traps, helicopters, etc) and it is not adequate.
"hunting" almost seems like a euphemistic term when people are shooting machine guns and automatic shotguns out the side of a helicopter. I realize they are an invasive species and can't be allowed to multiply unchecked, but it makes me sad to think of fairly intelligent animals being slaughtered en masse, often with no intention of recovering the meat. I do understand they are quite dangerous and destructive creatures, but still...
When it comes to hogs, it's a matter of extermination, not 'hunting'/sport. Pulling punches with notions of sportsmanship and respect for the animal totally misses the point. These aren't elk.
Of course, even the extreme measures taken against hogs (explosives, machine guns, etc) seem to be doing little good.
it seems like we both agree that "hunting" is not quite the right word for what is going on. to be clear, I'm not saying extermination is morally wrong in this case; it's clearly necessary to protect the local ecosystem. what's tragic is that we created this problem in the first place, and it seems the only solution left is to kill as many of them as we can as efficiently as possible.
The US is a heavily militarized state, spending a lot of money on it's use of weapons. However, these weapons tend to be very expensive and hyper targetable.
But just killing literal pigs, in the wild, with really no restrictions at all, and practically no need to track the kills or process them for food, is a nearly impossible task. Just pure, cheap, blunt weapons will do the job more than fine. But there just isn't enough, even with the massive spendings.
If you have a couple hundred, hunting might work. If you have 80,000 and hunting them makes them run up to 100 miles away and turn nocturnal, it can make everything worse.
To be fair, some might count "the hogs ran 100 miles away" a local success, if their chief concern is hogs in their backyard where their small children play.
It's like combatting black mold with bleach-filled paintballs. The impact of cleaning one spot is that the infection spreads to a wider range. As the diaspora grows exponentially, it will quickly return to the spot you just cleaned.
Turning them nocturnal probably makes them less efficient food consumers/breeders right? Otherwise it seems like they would turn nocturnal without the presence of hunters.
So it still seems like an improvement, unless there are frequent night attacks on humans or something that don't happen in the day (if being driven nocturnal to avoid humans I wouldn't think so).
Running 100 miles away, if there is food heir they would eventually breed themselves over to their anyway without hunting anyway wouldn't they?
Re-read the article. The 'big risk' isn't attacking humans (tho it's a concern), it's destruction of ecology and agriculture. If you're going to dig up and eat the farmers crops, doing at night is worse for the farmer. And there's another farm 100 miles away. Further, there's nothing in the article that indicates the hogs are less efficient at night. Since hogs already have poor eyesight and extremely good smell, there's no reason to believe night is much impediment.
The State of Texas--which is absolutely full of hunters and gun owners and such--has "shoot on sight" rules for hunting feral hogs. There are no limits and the season is always open.
Without the hunting though, it would be even worse. If these hogs have no natural predators, the only thing that would check their population is running out of food.
Texas problem is a land problem. You can't just see hogs in a field and shoot them. You need permission from the land owner (this goes for pretty much everywhere). Texas is particularly bad because owners see hunting as a possible revenue stream since there is literally no state land open to hunting so they don't grant permission to just anyone.
Right. Imagine if they instituted that policy when there were only 500 of them. Maybe even offered a $1000 reward. They couldn't afford that today, but this other place should do all of that right now.
It would have likely worked back when US had enough hunters - there's no shortage of species that were wiped out in that manner before effective regulations were instituted. But these days, it doesn't even have enough to keep deer in eastern states in check, much less hogs (which multiply and spread faster).
Because people get their panties in a knot over the idea of loosening other hunting laws enough to let an open season make a difference. As long as it's not ok to just shoot a hog on the side of the road a baseline population is going to exist in perpetuity in rural/suburban areas where property owners don't generally tolerate people shooting hogs off their front lawn from the road.
> The latter method [encouraging recreational hunting] has sometimes backfired dramatically when surviving animals spread across the state. In some places, for-profit hunting outfits have worsened the problem by importing feral pigs
Basically, it doesn’t seem to work for pigs (thus why Montana banned hunting them).
> it doesn’t seem to work for pigs (thus why Montana banned hunting them)
According to the article, this is because Montana doesn't have any pigs. You can't hunt pigs without bringing them in if there are no local pigs. But that's not an issue that applies to places that have too many local pigs.
In Texas, it is legal to hunt hogs year round. The point about "surviving pigs spreading across the state" doesn't make any sense. If they have no predators, their population is going to expand no matter what you do, until they hit a natural limit on food.
I remember reading about the rationale elsewhere. The gist of it was that if you attack a pack, you should not leave any survivors. The survivors learn of the danger of being hunted and adapt to it, making it very difficult to hunt them (and perhaps their descendants?). So it's best to leave hunting them to professionals who would ensure they get the whole pack, rather than amateurs who get one or two, but make the rest a much bigger problem.
There was a JRE episode with a coyote expert who touched on this. It was relatively easy to eradicate wolves, because they have a strong pack mentality and will stick together even as members die. Pigs and coyotes would disperse into groups of two and three, widening their geographic range and still breeding.
Yes, but they are going to naturally do that anyways. If a specific area can only support, say, 100 pigs and they keep breeding and breeding, some will have to spread out to other areas to find food. All animals do this. They will expand their numbers and geographic range until they hit a limit based on access to resources or predation.
If the options are declaring open season and not doing anything, you are correct that open season may be better (I say may because I do not know about feral pigs breeding patterns, etc. For example, some animals do not breed when they have a young child, so separating them from their children will have an opposite effect). But there is a third option that is better than both and that is having professionals do the eradication.
If your concern is limiting the spread of an invasive species to minimize the damage they produce on the environment, then furthering their geographic spread is not a good idea. Coordinated campaigns to clear out entire groups would be good, teaching them to run from hunters and spread out would be bad.
We don't put effort into things sooner because the effort and side-effects seem so terrible, but this is short-sighted thinking for an infestation that will become permanent.
Right now, those huge killer wasps from Asia are nesting in Washington State. There is a silly ineffective effort to track down the nest, as if there would be only one nest. That won't work, and the pests will eventually spread all across the Americas. We could solve it, at the cost of a short-term ecological mess. Simply dump pesticide from aircraft, covering a 100-mile diameter region, in quantity sufficient to kill every member of the order Hymenoptera. We won't do it, and so both North America and South America will eternally be infested.
This episode was amazing. They use the tweet, which mostly just fueled a day of twitter memes, as a jumping off point into a really fantastic dive into the entire issue. The tweet author is also involved and it's so great.
Strange how they didn't even address the main point, which is that if your young children are being swarmed by 30-50 feral hogs you probably aren't going to disappear into your house, unlock your gun safe, retrieve and load your gun then come back to their rescue 5 minutes later. That just seems like a gratuitous excuse to shoot 30-50 feral hogs.
And yet, it sounds like this is literally what the guy did.
PJ: Willie told me the reason his wife was scared is these weren’t like, barnyard pigs, they were feral hogs. They’re more like wild boars – some have big sharp tusks, they’re much bigger, with longer legs. They move really fast. And that moment, there was a bunch of them swarming around his 4 and 5 year old. It was scary.
WILLIE: I went to my safe. I got my gun. I got my shells. Went right out on the back porch.
PJ: And how were the hogs acting? Were they like moving quickly? Were they–
WILLIE: Well, yeah. You know, they’re running all through the yard from the back of my yard all the way to the front. And then I pick out, of course, the ones that look the meanest. The one with the tusk. These are two or three hundred pound hogs. I’m not letting them near my family.
PJ: Yeah–
WILLIE: So, just for lack of a better term, I just start laying them down.
I don't disagree, but there was no mention of rescuing the children from the line of fire. Maybe that's obvious from context in the states, but it sounds like the guy went "wild pigs are attacking my kids, I need to shoot the wild pigs that are very close to my kids who may or may not be moving erratically and unexpectedly due to them being attacked by bloody dangerous wild pigs"
> [...] if your young children are being swarmed by 30-50 feral hogs you probably aren't going to disappear into your house, unlock your gun safe, retrieve and load your gun then come back to their rescue 5 minutes later.
I may be misunderstanding your comment, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Retrieving a gun doesn't take 5 minutes.
Let t be the time at which the hogs arrive.
I can sprint from my basement to the top floor in a bit over 5 seconds. I can find something in a closet in about 5 more seconds. That's about 12-13 seconds to having a gun in my hands, but let's account for opening the gun safe and fumbling around for magazines. The clock is now showing t+30.
Let's now assume the gun isn't loaded. I'm probably a bit stressed by all of this, but almost anyone can load a magazine-fed rifle in 5 seconds. t+35s.
Now I have two choices:
1. Open the bedroom window (~3s), take aim (~2s) and fire. => t+40s
2. Sprint down to the ground floor (~3s), run out the back door (~2s), get into a shooting position (~3s), aim (~2s) and fire. => t+45s
A conservative estimate has me shooting hogs in 45 seconds. If I live in a place where this is a problem, I'm also likely to take steps to prepare. I might keep the gun safe in a more accessible place (e.g. the garage). I might store the firearm in the gun safe with a magazine already seated in the well. I might keep my eyes open and notice the hogs at a distance, giving me the time to fetch a gun sans the frenzy. In some parts of the world, it's common to keep a rifle at hand when outside.
I don't live in a part of the world where I have to deal with feral hogs, but this doesn't strike me as a "gratuitous excuse to shoot 30-50 feral hogs". Nor does it strike me as diagnostic of unsafe firearm handling, as others have suggested.
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EDIT
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The most worrying thing here is the idea of shooting in a place where little kids were running around/playing just moments ago. While this kind of situation can be handled safely, it's also where dramatic accidents tend to happen. A big problem with firearms handling is that it's a perishable skill. You forget. You get rusty.
A hurt pig can turn into a really dangerous creature, will charge against any human, including children, so shooting them is the worst idea possible. Females are social. Killing one of the small pigs will 100% grant triggering a vicious attack from their mother and aunts. Just running towards the children and allow the pigs an escape route would be a much safer move.
The tale looks much more like an excuse to explain having a lot of furtive hunting in the fridge IMO.
I haven’t been confronted with feral pigs, so I’ll take you at your word. What I can say with great confidence is that it doesn’t take 5 minutes to get a gun, so the fact that someone manages to shoot pigs in their back yard doesn’t in itself point to furtive hunting.
It is strictly legal to hunt feral pigs any time of the day or night (!!), any time of the year, without permit in Arkansas, so long as it's on private property. You can even do it on public property if you have a generic hunting license, though there's time-of-year and time-of-day restrictions in that case.
There is no bag limit. You can even do it with night vision.
But yes, shooting pigs with small children playing nearby isn't good. I don't know the context, maybe it was very obvious that the kids all got safely inside and accounted for.
If it was Europe I would say 100% excuse to poaching. I had seen similar cases here of hunters claiming that there are too much wildboars so they must be granted a special permit to hunt more out of season. Cameras at the same time don't show the wildpigcalipse that newspapers claim
... but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.
If this is a concern in some areas, just a small stone wall around the kids's playing area would deter the pigs to enter. They do not jump very well.
I think this relates to the specifics of the situation.
If you're on farmland, and you've ensured your family is in a safe place, it's pretty safe. The danger -- as I mentioned in a previous comment -- is that this kind of situational awareness is a perishable skill. If it's not being practiced (ideally by all parties involved), it's easy to make mistakes. It's definitely not like riding a bike.
> .. but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.
It is only legal in a handful of states, usually those with insane quantities of feral pigs.
In a lot of the US, it would be illegal. However in Arkansas where the person in question was, it was legal on private property.
In nearby Alabama or Louisiana you need a permit, likewise in California. So in those states it would have been illegal. In Arkansas, Texas, or Oklahoma, there's no permit.
In Texas, it's legal on public property even. Texas has a feral pig population nearing 2m, which causes almost (supposedly) half a billion dollars in damage annually. Or $50m. Or a billion. It depends on the study.
I’m trying to come up with a thoughtful reply, but I can’t figure out how you managed to interpret my comment as “you should shoot at your kids, or otherwise handle firearms unsafely”.
Are you perhaps projecting onto me some ideas you have about the kinds of people who discuss guns?
Maybe because the whole premise of your hypothetical is how quickly you can start picking off hogs in the yard while the kids are out there? In what way would ANYONE consider it reasonable or safe to start shooting with kids in the range of fire?
I am definitely interpreting your lack of concern for small humans as someone who does not have kids nor understand their lack of ability to do whatever it is you think they should do when being shot at.
Your original comment discusses the time it takes to go from having no gun to being in a position to fire your gun at wildlife that has bypassed your garden fence. You make no mention of the time it takes to actually retrieve the children from the garden who are too small and not strong enough to fight their way past the enormous number of hypothetical hogs. Those children need to be picked up and carried to safety before you can unload into the sea of brown fur that 30 to 50 feral hogs would become if packed into a small garden. Ideally, if those hogs are violent and armed with tusks that could break an arm, you should be rescuing the small, weak, juvenile humans before taking any other action.
> I might keep the gun safe in a more accessible place (e.g. the garage). I might store the firearm in the gun safe with a magazine already seated in the well.
In many U.S. states a gun safe or other secure storage isn't required. (And even when required people don't necessarily obey it.) Getting your gun might be as simple as grabbing it off the living room wall. It might even already be loaded. Even in households with children--that's why accidents happen.
It also sounds like, going by your interpretation of the chain of events, that they shot at the pigs while the kids were still in the garden that was swarmed by said pigs.
All the while seeming to ignore the fact they have a rather large hole in their fence if multiple colonies of feral hogs worth of feral hogs can enter the garden in a very short space of time.
given their apparent absurd capabilities (eats anything, breeds like rabbit, grows to absurd sizes) I'm not clear what stops them from overrunning any environment they exist in, including their native environments in europe?
All of the natural predators coming up from googling seem to be fairly "weak" at population control -- alligators, cats, large birds (preying on the young) -- so it seems to be the wild hog has both the traits of an apex omnivore, but also comical rates of breeding; combined with their ability to eat just about anything (including each other), it almost as if the inevitable outcome should have been complete and total domination of the world centuries ago
It's very hard to get control of invasive species. In a story here about tumbleweeds I said these were an invasive species from Russia, wondered what from the Americas had invaded the rest of the world, and a bunch of responders provided examples [0].
Senestech's system for controlling rodents [1] is an ovary poison that stops female rodents from reproducing. The system is deployed continuously to keep rodent populations down in cities. But trying to kill all the rats in a city is probably not a good idea either: "A Vancouver rat study is showing us how pest control can backfire... " [2]:
>> [Rats] may be just as much a part of our city as sidewalks and lampposts. We would all be better off if, under most circumstances, we simply left them alone. [2]
Invasive ferrel/hybrid pigs are not comparable to rats, and I don't think a case can be made to let them alone. Maybe something like contrapest [3] could be developed for these invasive hybrid/ferrel pigs.
What of Alberta's rat control? From what I've heard it's not perfect, but still pretty good. Good enough for Alberta to generally be considered 'rat free.'
My limited experience doesn't mean much in the big picture, but this comment struck me as funny because one of my few memories of Alberta was seeing two rats chasing and fighting over the lid of a food container. I guess I got lucky.
Alberta still has native 'pack rats' which could perhaps be mistaken for 'true rats' (the sort Alberta is ostensibly free of.) They are still actively fighting them, it's a constant battle I suppose, but at least in theory there aren't any permanent breeding populations of true rats in Alberta. You're not even allowed to own a pet rat there.
This is largely a result of geo politics and geography. They only need to watch the eastern border, and understanding is that there are occasional hot spots found inside the province there
I think this is more or less correct, but I'm not aware of any conclusive evidence tying COVID to "meddling with nature". I guess you could consider dense, highly-connected human settlements to be an example of this, increasing susceptibility to pandemics, but I don't think that's a very useful criticism.
Sounds like a myth to me. Humans were at the top of the food chain even before farming.
Relying on what can be foraged/hunted would keep the human population in check instead of being propped up by agriculture -- and all the problems that brings.
Any proof that cannibalism was prevalent in preagricultural era, or are you just dropping in some more mythology?
Also there are more slaves in absolute terms today than at any other time. Not sure what agriculture and messing with ecosystems has to do with the human urge to enslave and kill each other.
We have copious evidence of prehistoric cannibalism in the form of human body proteins in preserved coprolites, and human bones with butchering marks and human teeth marks.
Yeah it's not even vaguely controversial, just something people don't want to hear, because they confuse their food taboos and morality for some kind of human universal, or moral absolute, and think I'm saying "evil" when I say "cannibal". How dare I call them evil, I never even met them!
Nah. Cannibalism is basal human behavior. Strong taboos against it are a good idea, but also a relatively recent one, viewed across all of human history.
Even assuming that the average lifespan is solely due to child mortality (it wasn't), would you prefer that to be that much higher? This isn't even something that has to be discussed abstractly - it was much higher not all that long ago, and we have plenty of personal records from those who were directly impacted by it. Going further back, it only gets worse.
The reality is that humans playing with larger ecosystems is only as destructive as humans make it - it's not inherently destructive, it just needs to be done with appreciation of long-term effects, and it's something that we're still learning to do as a species.
The reality, also, is that any group of humans that goes there, is going to stomp any other group that doesn't, because things like agriculture are necessary to produce a surplus that's needed for the society to maintain specialists - who become specialists because they don't have to spend most of their life foraging for food, because other people can produce more food than they need just for themselves. This category includes professional soldiers.
I'm in Texas. This is a big problem in this region of the USA. Texas has allowed open season all year round for hunting feral pigs/hogs. I'm curious what this has done to the population per the article.
This is partly due to urbanization and city ordinance. This is an issue near and dear to me here in Texas. Feral hogs are, like many other wild animals, adapting to the ecosystem created by humans. One downside though is that you cannot hunt/kill them in city limits. It's very commonplace for feral hogs to bed down in suburbs and populate there, so no matter how many people go on hog "hunts" from helicopters with rifles, it won't change the fact that in that neighborhood park you have hogs rutting in a no-kill zone.
There's no nice, fully socially acceptable answer, because even in Texas the majority of city folks are not comfortable with the reality of killing another living creature, and they certainly aren't comfortable with people using firearms inside the city. Unlike deer issues, you can't do crossbow hunts for feral hogs because they're dangerous and travel in packs. You need firearms with high magazine capacities to safely do feral hog abatement hunts.
In addition to all of the above, Texas is uniquely difficult to resolve this situation for because of the size of the state. Texas is big, and feral hogs range across the entire state. In many ways, there's simply not enough people who are interested and able to spend their free time during the week shooting hogs. Because of population centralization in cities, people do it as a weekend trip and usually with a company that charges them to handle the logistics, because it's also not okay to just walk on random land here as every part of the state is private property unless otherwise designated. Managing the feral hog problem here costs the state billions of dollars and is like trying to hold back the floodwaters by putting your finger in a collapsing dam.
Why can't animal control tranquilize them and transport them outside of city or suburb limits? To some location where presumably hunters would be able to shoot at them? Surely tranquilizers would be cheaper than continuously cleaning up damage to parks.
If they manage to tranquilize one inside the city limits, why would they transport and release it? Just kill it. They're 300-900 pounds, fast, and angry, tranquilizing it isn't easy. Once you have it down releasing it outside of town doesn't do anything to solve the problem. Feral hogs are a menace.
From my research public land pigs in TX have been pretty much hunted out of existence, so if you want to hunt them you pretty much have to pay someone for the privilege of hunting their land. This leads me to believe that the problem is either less severe than its made out to be and/or that it is being propped up by people who are profiting by its continued existence.
Would you mind sharing a source for your research? Anecdotally, there are plenty of pigs running around the national forests in East Texas, and no shortage of land owners who are happy to have hunters and hog-doggers volunteer to clear them out. Outside of deer season, anyway.
They are quite the nuisance in parts of California. If you're hiking, adding feral pig encounter to the existing mountain lion or bear encounter, can be overwhelming.
I found it interesting how hunting backfires (scatters them and increases their range) as it seems to be always pounded into me "hunted out of existence" was a common thing that hunters would do if left to their own devices (I know, there is a LOT of propaganda in this space!) That said, I'm surprised there are not more trapping & slaughtering programs in place.
The engineer in me wants to slaughter the pigs, use the cesium capsules at Hanford to irradiate/sterilize the meat of all bacteria and parasites, and then turn it into free bacon and/or jerky for whomever needs it. Impractical for sure but free bacon right?
Well if you were making jerky the salting process might not kill all the parasites. But it was more a nod to the story that came across HN a few days ago about Hanford having all this Cesium around that they weren't using. And it is in Washington state (a state with a pig problem) and the engineer in me likes the synergy of turning two problems into a public good.
It seems you might be aware of this already, but irradiation of pork to kill parasites is an established practice in the food industry. Food irradiation in general is safe and effective, but weirds a lot of the general public out (particularly those with low scientific literacy. Irradiated food doesn't become radioactive!) There may be something to be said about the hazards of handling a gamma source like Cs-137 safetly and making sure nobody drops it in the city dump or steals a truck carrying it, but X-ray and electron beam irradiation don't have these drawbacks. Many people today eat irradiated food without ever realizing it, though if they did realize it they might balk.
I was under the impression that Cobalt-60 was more common for food irradiation (it's not soluble in water and has a shorter half-life, so less potential eco-impact). But, yeah, food irradiation is a really common process with few downsides once you get past the whole "made in a reactor" part.
I find that reading about nuclear accidents actually helps here. Assuming you’re not standing next to something unbelievably “hot” (don’t do that!), the main issue is the dust that tends to settle onto everything and keep irradiating you. So radiated food is fine, but food that’s been coated in radioactive dust is emphatically not fine.
A lot of cooking styles do not throughly and consistently heat all food to the required temperature for the required time to be 100% safe. And if you try to cook for extra time just to be safe, you end up drying out the meat a lot.
That's where souc vide helps. You don't dry out the food (due to the containment in the bag) and you can keep the food in the required temperature range for plenty of time (because the immersion circulator keeps the water bath at a constant temperature range).
> Dumb question, doesn't cooking also kill parasites just as effectively?
Technically yes, but how many households typically have a (meat) thermometer? A lot of people go by the "not pink" or "clear juices" rules of thumb, which work well enough for typical grocery store 'industrial' packaged meat, but may not be good enough for more 'uncontrolled' meat.
A 6.5- to 7.0-log_10 reduction in pathogens (salmonella) is generally hit at 158F/70C (with beef) where there is 'instantaneous' destruction of the pathogen(s), but lower temperatures can also be reached as long as they are held for longer periods of time, e.g., 140F/60C for 12 minutes. Poultry has slightly different numbers, also dependent on the fat content, but a similar principal of a time/temperature 'curve'. Ditto for fish†, pork, etc.
If you mess up the temperature you can have a really bad day.
† And the type of fish can mean different temperatures. The fat content of wild versus farmed salmon means few degrees' difference could result in a dry versus juicy result:
Cooking will kill parasites/microbes but won't necessarily denature the poisonous byproducts of their metabolism. Irradiating as close to time of butchery minimizes the amount of time the critters can excrete their grossness into the food.
> Food irradiation in general is safe and effective, but weirds a lot of the general public out (particularly those with low scientific literacy. Irradiated food doesn't become radioactive!)
Frankly, if labeling was available I would actively seek out irradiated food (specifically bread and fruits). This would be great to reduce food waste due to spoilage and pathogen risks (either from spoilage or otherwise present in the food).
I suspect most(if not all) of the "unprocessed" food I eat has not been irradiated.
I ran into 3 feral pigs on a walk in San Jose last weekend. They were pretty chill, though, rooting around and ignoring everyone 10 feet away from them on the path.
You should use extreme caution around feral hogs. You could easily be gored or killed. A full grown feral hog can easily weigh. 3-900lbs. Imagine getting hit by an entire football team running at full speed. Or a small car with two knives strapped to the front.
The better solution to control them, whereas cleaning parasites at the same time, is clearly stablished and available. Research found that wolves yearly diet is composed of 80% of wild boar in some areas of Europe.
While a real and recognized phenomenon, it isn't common or universal. I haven't ever noticed it in wild boar and have not heard of it from any other hunters. Internet forums of full of hunters arguing over if it exists at all.
I imagine there's also some selection going on with people (primarily men) who cannot detect it or find it inoffensive and people who hunt boars and post about it on the internet.
I don't hunt boar because I don't like eating it, at least.
> it seems to be always pounded into me "hunted out of existence" was a common thing that hunters would do if left to their own devices
Haha yeah, people say that, but recreational hunters typically have a vested interest in maintaining something to hunt...
I say that as a recreational hunter - I started hunting after encountering starving deer in very poor condition in eaten out forest, they had even eaten all the mountain beech seedlings[1] which is a sure sign of desperation. And an obvious part of population control is shooting the hinds...
...which makes me somewhat unpopular with other recreational hunters. Although trophy hunters, at least, realise that lower populations lead to better antlers due to better nutrition for an individual animal.
The relationship between hunters, the state, and conservation are very complex. It doesn’t help that hunting tends to generate strong emotions in people.
Australia fought a war against invasive wildlife in the 1930s, and was famously defeated by the Emus. America is much more powerful than Australia, but it has had trouble winning wars recently. On top of that, this one would be fought on its own soil, which is something it has not experienced in more than a century. And of course, pigs are much stronger and much smarter than emus. Americans would be wise not to underestimate the threat.
They are rather tough to kill for the average predator in North America. Heck, there is a reason that knights hunted the things to prove how good they were. When you have to put a piece of metal on the spear to keep the thing from coming up the spear and killing you too, it marks a tough animal.
If I remember right, part of the problem is that they are not great eating. Although, a animal overrunning Texas boggles my mind.
That's generally done with thing like feral cat populations where there is some positive effect of the feral cats existing like rodent control. Also, just killing cats is way less socially acceptable than killing pigs.
Eventually they will figure a way to make them sterile. It's a huge problem so there's money in figuring it out. Drop some "food" and they win the Darwin Award once they eat it.
Jeez, reading this list it seems the biggest hope is to have something that predates on the piglets or young. There is almost no way to stop them once they reach full size.
Specifically the section about how these things at full grown size can even kill a black bear!!!
> There is almost no way to stop them once they reach full size.
There is only one known way to stop a full-grown feral hog, and that's with a (big) gun. Unfortunately. So until we have a better answer, our best bet is to kill them as rapidly as possible. Even with all the lore and furor around it in Texas, hog breeding is outgrowing active efforts to exterminate them and the population increases every year and is trending upwards.
They're also very aggressive, so enjoy that if you encounter feral hogs. I carry a large bore revolver with me when I go hiking and everyone assumes it's for bears... it's actually for feral hogs.
Pigs are smart. Traps and poison don't work as well as you might imagine. I'm sure you've heard the saying "Build a better mousetrap and the world will provide you a better mouse." or something to that effect. Pigs are smarter than mice.
Ontario is lauded for essentially doing nothing other than studying the situation and haplessly following up reports weeks and months later. Also, not actually getting rid of any hogs.
But, the real problem is allowing hunters to shoot them when they see them. Got it.
Are there any audio deterrents for pigs like there are for birds?
I think I've read about playing hawk screams or bird distress calls to scare away birds from airports. Would something similar like playing a cougar scream be enough to keep pigs out of an area?
Hogs and boar are not afraid of much once they're fully grown. They have few natural predators, and animals known to prey pigs them typically only prey on piglets, as a boar can turn the tables on even the deadliest predators if they get a little lucky (black bear and cougars for example).
Your best bet for audio deterrence would be firing blank shells, and that's most effective on a sounder (herd) that's already been hunted.
I hate to say it, but in NZ we've found our usage of sodium fluoroacetate (highly toxic to mammals) to control brushtail possums to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis, has had the side-effect of reducing what were once very high wild pig numbers - they scavenge the possum corpse, and in turn are poisoned.
Which is very unpopular with pig hunters and people who don't like 'chemicals'. And not very feasible for countries with native/endemic mammals that may scavenge a hog corpse.
But, poison works, albeit accidentally. We use a variety of other techniques to control introduced mammals - intensive trapping and poisoning in ecologically sensitive areas, judas goats[1], helicopter culling, and sometimes, just letting the free market handle it[2] - wild animal recovery is very good at keeping red deer populations at low - medium numbers... ...when the price of wild venison in Germany makes it economical. Although it has changed their behaviour - they become more daylight-averse, and quickly learn to hide from helicopters.
I live in a rural area and have many friends who hunt deer and other game.
I expect if the need arose, many of these would help thin the feral hog population with little incentive. (Maybe free access to land, or even a discounted hunting license for next year.) It wouldn't take much.
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[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 3106 ms ] threadJust tell the hunters you have a problem and invite them in to eradicate them. I feel like government bodies whose job is to deal with such things never want to "solve" a problem completely, but would rather "manage" it so they can keep their job.
Some day these few hundred pigs will be 10's of thousands or more and they'll look back and wonder why they didn't put more effort in sooner.
This is only a problem if there are not hunters there. If there enough hunters, the pig problem will disappear.
Feral hogs are still a scourge in Texas, I doubt that’s because Texas doesn’t have enough hunters.
As other comments have mentioned, most of Texas' population lives in large urban areas. Even though hogs are starting to show up in and around cities (I have personally seen them right next to I-45 in The Woodlands/Conroe area immediately north of Houston), it's illegal to shoot them there. And there are only so many people willing to spend their own time and money to leave the city and go kill them.
If we're talking straight theory (and this is HN so why wouldn't we), all it should take is enough predators to reduce/eliminate any given prey population to the desired number. The predator count that is needed could itself be reduced if more effective predation methods are available, but it's still a numbers game.
Have permits and bounties been discussed? It has backfired with cases like cobras in India, but I don't see such a risk here. I'm not always one to go for a market based solution but it looks like it could help here.
I would also be concerned about unintended consequences, like you mentioned. I know for a fact that there are people today who, if they manage to trap the right pigs, would try to sell them. Their market would be landowners that offer canned hunts on a high-fenced property (say, $300 for a guaranteed large hog kill). Sure, the hog is still dead - but what if it breeds first? What if the piglets then escaped? Personally I'd feel dirty if I didn't cull the animals I trapped immediately, but if I were less financially secure, maybe not.
I'm guessing a real blocker is tax funding as you say. It is a little odd since solving this seems like it should be appealing to a wide range of people on the political spectrum for various reasons.
Why track them and remove?
https://www.rgsl.ca/wild-boar-in-saskatchewan/
Of course, even the extreme measures taken against hogs (explosives, machine guns, etc) seem to be doing little good.
The US is a heavily militarized state, spending a lot of money on it's use of weapons. However, these weapons tend to be very expensive and hyper targetable.
But just killing literal pigs, in the wild, with really no restrictions at all, and practically no need to track the kills or process them for food, is a nearly impossible task. Just pure, cheap, blunt weapons will do the job more than fine. But there just isn't enough, even with the massive spendings.
So it still seems like an improvement, unless there are frequent night attacks on humans or something that don't happen in the day (if being driven nocturnal to avoid humans I wouldn't think so).
Running 100 miles away, if there is food heir they would eventually breed themselves over to their anyway without hunting anyway wouldn't they?
The State of Texas--which is absolutely full of hunters and gun owners and such--has "shoot on sight" rules for hunting feral hogs. There are no limits and the season is always open.
The problem is only getting worse.
Because people get their panties in a knot over the idea of loosening other hunting laws enough to let an open season make a difference. As long as it's not ok to just shoot a hog on the side of the road a baseline population is going to exist in perpetuity in rural/suburban areas where property owners don't generally tolerate people shooting hogs off their front lawn from the road.
> The latter method [encouraging recreational hunting] has sometimes backfired dramatically when surviving animals spread across the state. In some places, for-profit hunting outfits have worsened the problem by importing feral pigs
Basically, it doesn’t seem to work for pigs (thus why Montana banned hunting them).
According to the article, this is because Montana doesn't have any pigs. You can't hunt pigs without bringing them in if there are no local pigs. But that's not an issue that applies to places that have too many local pigs.
Right now, those huge killer wasps from Asia are nesting in Washington State. There is a silly ineffective effort to track down the nest, as if there would be only one nest. That won't work, and the pests will eventually spread all across the Americas. We could solve it, at the cost of a short-term ecological mess. Simply dump pesticide from aircraft, covering a 100-mile diameter region, in quantity sufficient to kill every member of the order Hymenoptera. We won't do it, and so both North America and South America will eternally be infested.
“Legit question for rural Americans - how do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 min while my small kids play.”
And yet, it sounds like this is literally what the guy did.
PJ: Willie told me the reason his wife was scared is these weren’t like, barnyard pigs, they were feral hogs. They’re more like wild boars – some have big sharp tusks, they’re much bigger, with longer legs. They move really fast. And that moment, there was a bunch of them swarming around his 4 and 5 year old. It was scary.
WILLIE: I went to my safe. I got my gun. I got my shells. Went right out on the back porch.
PJ: And how were the hogs acting? Were they like moving quickly? Were they–
WILLIE: Well, yeah. You know, they’re running all through the yard from the back of my yard all the way to the front. And then I pick out, of course, the ones that look the meanest. The one with the tusk. These are two or three hundred pound hogs. I’m not letting them near my family.
PJ: Yeah–
WILLIE: So, just for lack of a better term, I just start laying them down.
I may be misunderstanding your comment, but that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Retrieving a gun doesn't take 5 minutes.
Let t be the time at which the hogs arrive.
I can sprint from my basement to the top floor in a bit over 5 seconds. I can find something in a closet in about 5 more seconds. That's about 12-13 seconds to having a gun in my hands, but let's account for opening the gun safe and fumbling around for magazines. The clock is now showing t+30.
Let's now assume the gun isn't loaded. I'm probably a bit stressed by all of this, but almost anyone can load a magazine-fed rifle in 5 seconds. t+35s.
Now I have two choices:
1. Open the bedroom window (~3s), take aim (~2s) and fire. => t+40s
2. Sprint down to the ground floor (~3s), run out the back door (~2s), get into a shooting position (~3s), aim (~2s) and fire. => t+45s
A conservative estimate has me shooting hogs in 45 seconds. If I live in a place where this is a problem, I'm also likely to take steps to prepare. I might keep the gun safe in a more accessible place (e.g. the garage). I might store the firearm in the gun safe with a magazine already seated in the well. I might keep my eyes open and notice the hogs at a distance, giving me the time to fetch a gun sans the frenzy. In some parts of the world, it's common to keep a rifle at hand when outside.
I don't live in a part of the world where I have to deal with feral hogs, but this doesn't strike me as a "gratuitous excuse to shoot 30-50 feral hogs". Nor does it strike me as diagnostic of unsafe firearm handling, as others have suggested.
-- EDIT --
The most worrying thing here is the idea of shooting in a place where little kids were running around/playing just moments ago. While this kind of situation can be handled safely, it's also where dramatic accidents tend to happen. A big problem with firearms handling is that it's a perishable skill. You forget. You get rusty.
The tale looks much more like an excuse to explain having a lot of furtive hunting in the fridge IMO.
I haven’t been confronted with feral pigs, so I’ll take you at your word. What I can say with great confidence is that it doesn’t take 5 minutes to get a gun, so the fact that someone manages to shoot pigs in their back yard doesn’t in itself point to furtive hunting.
I guess that leaves us with two possibilities:
- poaching
- a bad response to a legitimate threat
You can rest assured that we agree both are bad.
It is strictly legal to hunt feral pigs any time of the day or night (!!), any time of the year, without permit in Arkansas, so long as it's on private property. You can even do it on public property if you have a generic hunting license, though there's time-of-year and time-of-day restrictions in that case.
There is no bag limit. You can even do it with night vision.
But yes, shooting pigs with small children playing nearby isn't good. I don't know the context, maybe it was very obvious that the kids all got safely inside and accounted for.
... but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.
If this is a concern in some areas, just a small stone wall around the kids's playing area would deter the pigs to enter. They do not jump very well.
I think this relates to the specifics of the situation.
If you're on farmland, and you've ensured your family is in a safe place, it's pretty safe. The danger -- as I mentioned in a previous comment -- is that this kind of situational awareness is a perishable skill. If it's not being practiced (ideally by all parties involved), it's easy to make mistakes. It's definitely not like riding a bike.
It is only legal in a handful of states, usually those with insane quantities of feral pigs.
In a lot of the US, it would be illegal. However in Arkansas where the person in question was, it was legal on private property.
In nearby Alabama or Louisiana you need a permit, likewise in California. So in those states it would have been illegal. In Arkansas, Texas, or Oklahoma, there's no permit.
In Texas, it's legal on public property even. Texas has a feral pig population nearing 2m, which causes almost (supposedly) half a billion dollars in damage annually. Or $50m. Or a billion. It depends on the study.
Are you perhaps projecting onto me some ideas you have about the kinds of people who discuss guns?
I am definitely interpreting your lack of concern for small humans as someone who does not have kids nor understand their lack of ability to do whatever it is you think they should do when being shot at.
In many U.S. states a gun safe or other secure storage isn't required. (And even when required people don't necessarily obey it.) Getting your gun might be as simple as grabbing it off the living room wall. It might even already be loaded. Even in households with children--that's why accidents happen.
All the while seeming to ignore the fact they have a rather large hole in their fence if multiple colonies of feral hogs worth of feral hogs can enter the garden in a very short space of time.
All of the natural predators coming up from googling seem to be fairly "weak" at population control -- alligators, cats, large birds (preying on the young) -- so it seems to be the wild hog has both the traits of an apex omnivore, but also comical rates of breeding; combined with their ability to eat just about anything (including each other), it almost as if the inevitable outcome should have been complete and total domination of the world centuries ago
I am having trouble linking it but Wikipedia says that wolves are indeed the primary natural predator of wold board
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21967020
Senestech's system for controlling rodents [1] is an ovary poison that stops female rodents from reproducing. The system is deployed continuously to keep rodent populations down in cities. But trying to kill all the rats in a city is probably not a good idea either: "A Vancouver rat study is showing us how pest control can backfire... " [2]:
>> [Rats] may be just as much a part of our city as sidewalks and lampposts. We would all be better off if, under most circumstances, we simply left them alone. [2]
Invasive ferrel/hybrid pigs are not comparable to rats, and I don't think a case can be made to let them alone. Maybe something like contrapest [3] could be developed for these invasive hybrid/ferrel pigs.
[1] https://senestech.com
[2] http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/the-case-for-leaving-city-ra...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ContraPest
Solution: eat animals
Problem: people like eating animals and want more
Solution: selectively breed animals in a way that makes them reproduce rapidly
Problem: poor containment has caused selectively bred animals to breed with wild animals and created explosive population growth
Solution: kill all the animals?
"[Scientists] are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something." - Jurassic Park
Perhaps we should stop trying to screw with nature. We end up with things like explosive population growth and I don't know... SARS, COVID, etc.
Relying on what can be foraged/hunted would keep the human population in check instead of being propped up by agriculture -- and all the problems that brings.
Also there are more slaves in absolute terms today than at any other time. Not sure what agriculture and messing with ecosystems has to do with the human urge to enslave and kill each other.
https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/assemblag...
Nah. Cannibalism is basal human behavior. Strong taboos against it are a good idea, but also a relatively recent one, viewed across all of human history.
Historians say the number is skewed due to the higher infant mortality rate. And I would need to do more research on the prevalence of starvation.
Seems like there was plenty of that after agriculture was discovered and we had high populations during a season of crop failure.
None of this addresses the reality that humans' playing with the larger ecosystems is incredibly destructive.
In a hundred years, people may have a very different view of "progress".
The reality is that humans playing with larger ecosystems is only as destructive as humans make it - it's not inherently destructive, it just needs to be done with appreciation of long-term effects, and it's something that we're still learning to do as a species.
The reality, also, is that any group of humans that goes there, is going to stomp any other group that doesn't, because things like agriculture are necessary to produce a surplus that's needed for the society to maintain specialists - who become specialists because they don't have to spend most of their life foraging for food, because other people can produce more food than they need just for themselves. This category includes professional soldiers.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...
More info from Texas gov https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/nuisance/feral_hogs/
There's no nice, fully socially acceptable answer, because even in Texas the majority of city folks are not comfortable with the reality of killing another living creature, and they certainly aren't comfortable with people using firearms inside the city. Unlike deer issues, you can't do crossbow hunts for feral hogs because they're dangerous and travel in packs. You need firearms with high magazine capacities to safely do feral hog abatement hunts.
In addition to all of the above, Texas is uniquely difficult to resolve this situation for because of the size of the state. Texas is big, and feral hogs range across the entire state. In many ways, there's simply not enough people who are interested and able to spend their free time during the week shooting hogs. Because of population centralization in cities, people do it as a weekend trip and usually with a company that charges them to handle the logistics, because it's also not okay to just walk on random land here as every part of the state is private property unless otherwise designated. Managing the feral hog problem here costs the state billions of dollars and is like trying to hold back the floodwaters by putting your finger in a collapsing dam.
I found it interesting how hunting backfires (scatters them and increases their range) as it seems to be always pounded into me "hunted out of existence" was a common thing that hunters would do if left to their own devices (I know, there is a LOT of propaganda in this space!) That said, I'm surprised there are not more trapping & slaughtering programs in place.
The engineer in me wants to slaughter the pigs, use the cesium capsules at Hanford to irradiate/sterilize the meat of all bacteria and parasites, and then turn it into free bacon and/or jerky for whomever needs it. Impractical for sure but free bacon right?
Food irradiation is relevant for other types of food too, including the ones we don't normally cook, such as fruits.
Technically yes, but how many households typically have a (meat) thermometer? A lot of people go by the "not pink" or "clear juices" rules of thumb, which work well enough for typical grocery store 'industrial' packaged meat, but may not be good enough for more 'uncontrolled' meat.
A 6.5- to 7.0-log_10 reduction in pathogens (salmonella) is generally hit at 158F/70C (with beef) where there is 'instantaneous' destruction of the pathogen(s), but lower temperatures can also be reached as long as they are held for longer periods of time, e.g., 140F/60C for 12 minutes. Poultry has slightly different numbers, also dependent on the fat content, but a similar principal of a time/temperature 'curve'. Ditto for fish†, pork, etc.
If you mess up the temperature you can have a really bad day.
† And the type of fish can mean different temperatures. The fat content of wild versus farmed salmon means few degrees' difference could result in a dry versus juicy result:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WSGjYMHF60
Frankly, if labeling was available I would actively seek out irradiated food (specifically bread and fruits). This would be great to reduce food waste due to spoilage and pathogen risks (either from spoilage or otherwise present in the food).
I suspect most(if not all) of the "unprocessed" food I eat has not been irradiated.
Edit: A woman was killed this year by feral hogs: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/us/texas-woman-killed-fer... . Attacks that result in death are unusual but you don't want to be in that position.
Welllllll those odds aren't terrible
It's disgusting to everyone, but women are particularly sensitive to the male sex hormone and tend to find it highly unpalatable.
There's a reason why boars are used historically to represent especially unpleasant or revolting men.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boar_taint
Thanks for that link tho, learn something new every day.
I for one don’t have a problem but my wife is repulsed by it. Also it’s not “gamey” it’s a different flavor profile.
While a real and recognized phenomenon, it isn't common or universal. I haven't ever noticed it in wild boar and have not heard of it from any other hunters. Internet forums of full of hunters arguing over if it exists at all.
I don't hunt boar because I don't like eating it, at least.
In several of the stories there are recipes and methods of cooking the meat that make it palatable.
You missed one of the bigger reason it backfire... people enjoy hunting them, which has made it a fairly lucrative industry in some areas.
Therefore it's actually become against some people's interests to fully eradicate them.
Haha yeah, people say that, but recreational hunters typically have a vested interest in maintaining something to hunt...
I say that as a recreational hunter - I started hunting after encountering starving deer in very poor condition in eaten out forest, they had even eaten all the mountain beech seedlings[1] which is a sure sign of desperation. And an obvious part of population control is shooting the hinds...
...which makes me somewhat unpopular with other recreational hunters. Although trophy hunters, at least, realise that lower populations lead to better antlers due to better nutrition for an individual animal.
[1]: Not a real beech - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothofagus_solandri_var._cliff...
If I remember right, part of the problem is that they are not great eating. Although, a animal overrunning Texas boggles my mind.
Most of the predators are listed as hunting the young, but based on how frequently these breed, it seems like those wouldn't work well enough
Might it have been a major vector of smallpox?
Start counting money and proclaimed a national hero and the icon of mutual dependency between us and China...
Sounds like a good idea. And this is free for copying.
And "endangered bird control" :/
Specifically the section about how these things at full grown size can even kill a black bear!!!
There is only one known way to stop a full-grown feral hog, and that's with a (big) gun. Unfortunately. So until we have a better answer, our best bet is to kill them as rapidly as possible. Even with all the lore and furor around it in Texas, hog breeding is outgrowing active efforts to exterminate them and the population increases every year and is trending upwards.
They're also very aggressive, so enjoy that if you encounter feral hogs. I carry a large bore revolver with me when I go hiking and everyone assumes it's for bears... it's actually for feral hogs.
But, the real problem is allowing hunters to shoot them when they see them. Got it.
I think I've read about playing hawk screams or bird distress calls to scare away birds from airports. Would something similar like playing a cougar scream be enough to keep pigs out of an area?
Your best bet for audio deterrence would be firing blank shells, and that's most effective on a sounder (herd) that's already been hunted.
Which is very unpopular with pig hunters and people who don't like 'chemicals'. And not very feasible for countries with native/endemic mammals that may scavenge a hog corpse.
But, poison works, albeit accidentally. We use a variety of other techniques to control introduced mammals - intensive trapping and poisoning in ecologically sensitive areas, judas goats[1], helicopter culling, and sometimes, just letting the free market handle it[2] - wild animal recovery is very good at keeping red deer populations at low - medium numbers... ...when the price of wild venison in Germany makes it economical. Although it has changed their behaviour - they become more daylight-averse, and quickly learn to hide from helicopters.
[1]: https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/10136/judas-goat [2]: https://www.doc.govt.nz/get-involved/apply-for-permits/busin...
I expect if the need arose, many of these would help thin the feral hog population with little incentive. (Maybe free access to land, or even a discounted hunting license for next year.) It wouldn't take much.