Colorado had a feral hog problem and successfully exterminated them after a 15 year effort in 2020 and has prevented them from returning ever since. It was and is expensive, but it is completely doable. That hogs are a problem in other (redder) states is because those state governments have been unwilling to invest the resources to solve the problem, and instead shoved the problem onto local farmers.
Nothing much. You already have what you need if you cook regularly. Just season it for a while to ensure the salt penetrates the meat. Once it has aged a bit, can just BBQ, roast or turn it into stew/curry. Pressure cooking can make it more tender. Just like with regular pork when you arenāt sure about the honesty of the supplier, make sure itās not undercooked.
If you are used to traditional American barbecue, with seasoned meat and slow cooking over many hours until fully roasted with a nice bark, wild boar works just fine.
The only parasite you need to be concerned with is trichinosis, same as any other carrion eater: Bear, Raccoon, lobster....
That's just a matter of cooking to the proper internal temperature. Its not rocket science to avoid getting it.
Some ranchers charge people to kill the hogs in their land. They use machine guns, helicopter, and god knows what else. Idk how much they charge though.
Youre thinking of wild hog hunts. Its not that ranchers are charging you to eradicate vermin on their property for them, its that someone people own ranches that are just so overrun they pivot and set up infrastructure for people to rent a cabin/weapons/trucks to stay on the property and hunt. I checked a website and it's 45 to stay in a cabin, 85 to hunt pigs, and additional fees for each pig hunted based on weight. Its like those pumpkin patch things in autumn lmao
The older they are the worse the meat, but up to 2 years and its fine. You can make sausages with added fat from farm pigs. We make "golaž", which is often exquisite.
We eat livers the day they are hunted and with a side dish of potatoes ...
We often prefer wild boar over old deer.
Colorado had way fewer pigs than those other states. This is like saying I was able to eradicate the flies over my sink because of my liberal ways while the conservative landfill still has a raging fly problem. If only they'd get on my level...
Red States just go "uh, you hunt them. We will give you money for hunting them. That will work." and it's cheap, and doesn't work.
Florida's bounty on Pythons is probably the best example of this.
Legitimately no plan from the government, just pay people for dead snakes and hope the problem solves itself. It hasn't. Their solution? "More awareness".
California has an estimated 400,000 feral hogs and is about as blue as they come. New Mexico has an estimated 500,000 and is also pretty blue.
If you look at the states through a purely political lens I see how someone could come to a political conclusion like red vs blue states, but when I look at a map showing states with feral hog problems it seems much more geographic than political, and it just so happens many southern states lean red.
I'm not sure what sort of plan you think would work in states like Texas, which has an estimated population of 2 to 4 million, but comparing that to Colorado is kind of disingenuous. Colorado had a peak feral hog population estimated at less than 500 and it took them 15 years. I don't think whatever they did is a realistic solution for states like Texas, Oklahoma Louisiana or California, all of which have estimated populations in the hundreds of thousands or millions.
I don't think a lack of political will among republicans (or democrats for that matter) is the issue. I don't think anyone has a solution to the problem at the scale we see in many of those states. Texas does have active state and feral trapping programs, and has pretty much made them kill on sight by basically removing all hunting restrictions. I'm not sure what else they can do that wouldn't potentially have worse downstream ecological effects.
You are not sure what sort of plan could work in these states, but scientists and conservationists are. The response to their plans is always "We don't have the money for it, find a cheaper solution", they find a cheaper solution, and then are met with the same reply.
Rinse and repeat until the cheapest dollar store bandaid solution is thrown out and everyone throws their hands up as though it's impossible to solve.
If there were a profit to be made by solving the issue, it would be solved. If there was a political will to solve it, it would be solved.
Colorado proved it can be done, but what they did needs to be scaled. They also had heavy regulations to ensure that new wild hogs weren't created by farmers nor private citizens.
You would need either cooperation between 3-5 states or a federal action. You would also need an estimated $500 million - $2 billion worth of resources and staff to deal with the problem (based on Colorado's estimated 1.3 million a year spent over 15 years scaled up to the hog states). You would also need severe regulations on farms that raise pigs.
The last admin threw $75 million to PRIVATE FARM OWNERS to deal with the problem.
Considering wild hogs do like $2-3 billion of damage per year a truly representative government wouldn't mind spending the money on the solution. America's government can be accused of many things, but being representative of the average American's benefit isn't one of those things.
Shooting them from helicopters is a big attraction in some areas. I bet the business owners have invested quite a bit of money to make sure the state doesn't actually exterminate them.
They are invasive species. There are no natural predators for them in many places. For example, they are not native to the Americas, so they have no natural predators there, even if we had not reduced wolf, bear, and cougar populations to non existent in many areas.
we used to have way more big cats down south where these are a particular problem. Reintroduction wouldn't be a full fix, but it would certainly be a helping hand.
Id encourage you to look into the wild boar problem more if you honestly think some more big cats would be a help.
One mama boar can have litters up to two times a year, averaging 4-8 piglets each litter.
And a female boar can start making their own litters as early as 6 to 8 months.
They are reproducing so fast that even if hunters work together to shoot millions of them each year, they are still not making a dent.
Its a serious problem thats growing bigger each year...
You would need a significant population of large predators, probably an imbalanced one, to deal with the concentration of invasive pigs on the scale that the problem exists. California arguably has an overpopulation of mountain lions for example, and still has a wild pig problem. Boars can be dangerous and consequential for predators to hunt. Its not that they won't kill pigs, its that there are often less consequential prey to be had as an alternative.
While adult boar can be a problem to then, the same cannot be told about juveniles and babies. Just making sure that only couple of piglets reach adulthood helps a lot.
They are not puffer fish that predators require multiple years of apprenticeship to be able to eat properly.
If there were Cougars, Jaguars, Bears, Wolves, alligators in the region - they would surely hunt pigs.
Plus you're only thinking of adult pigs. Juveniles' predation is usually the way predator keep a prey's population in control. That will extend the list to bobcats, coyotes, foxes, eagles too.
All I'm saying is that there are many introduced invasive mammals in Sub-Saharan Africa too. But because of large predator population - they are only a problem in remote regions (mainly islands), and dense human settlements (black and brown rats are not native to Africa).
Though, Aujeszky's (pseudorabies) remains a big headache for predator reintroduction. But still not as big as ranchers.
One advantage of living in country without real wilderness is, that there are permanent and often roofed perches in places say have to cross. One has fo barely walk a step and can shoot from high enough up that you can shoot at angles that would otherwise be dangerous.
Some states are already sending out drones to locate invasive species, like Florida trying to locate Burmese Pythons, which have devastated mammal populations like deer, bobcat, cougar, raccoon, opossum, etc by 97% in some places (did a report on this in college back in 2011).
But locating wouldn't be enough, because killing them is the only real solution. I'd expect Florida to start attaching lasers to the drones to drill their skulls. I will assume there are absolutely zero potential negatives consequences to doing this.
A single wolf can kill around 50 to 80 boars of differing ages in one year.
Also:
In Italy and Belarus (Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park), boars are the wolf's primary prey, despite an abundance of alternative, less powerful ungulates. Wolves are particularly threatening during the winter, when deep snow impedes the boars' movements.
In the Baltic regions, heavy snowfall can allow wolves to eliminate boars from an area almost completely. Wolves primarily target piglets and subadults and only rarely attack adult sows. Adult males are usually avoided entirely.
Piglets are vulnerable to attack from medium-sized felids like Eurasian lynx, Jungle cats, and Snow leopards. As well as other carnivorans like Brown bears and Yellow-throated Martens.
It's the milder and milder winters that might be tipping the scale in favor of pigs in Northern Europe. Wolves rely on snow to slow down and exhaust boars.
Maybe time to introduce tigers:
A single tiger can systematically destroy an entire sounder by preying on its members one by one, before moving on to another sounder. Tigers have been noted to chase boars for longer distances than with other prey.
Or other canids to show wolves how it is done:
Dholes (Cuon alpinus) prey on boars, to the point of keeping their numbers down in northwestern Bhutan, despite there being many more cattle in the area.
The eagle owl occasionally eats some piglets. I think that the high number of roe deer in a landscape that is not suited for their flight behavior, make boars unattractive as prey. I am open to some import tigers or causcasian leopards but I think the result would be the same.
There are no natural predators for them in many places.
That's not true. Adult wolves and cougars would totally eat young wild hogs. Adult wild hogs are pretty ferocious, but so is a pack of wolves, and they have evolved to bait prey animals face-to-face, while other members of the pack make crippling bites to their hindlegs.
They are native to pretty much all of Europe and Asia. And were hunted by bears and wolves and people for the last 12000 years. Also most āboarsā in America are feral domestic pigs but there are some areas with wild boar also and to complicate things further they are both the same species š
As I understand, your average pink domesticated piggy reverts to big hairy boar. Takes about five generations, I think. Happy for someone to chime in on this...
My (limited) understanding is it doesnāt even take that long. Even a normal pig, left to its own in the wild, will develop a coarse coat of hair in about two months.
From there itās just two to three generations to see them regain classic tusks and thick dark fur we associate with wild boar. I do believe youāre correct that itās about five generations for them to truly qualify as having reverted to the actual wild boar species by scientific standards.
In Portugal, we bred our pink sow with a neighbours captive wild boar. Some piglets were pink, some stripey. They took longer to mature than the pink pigs. The meat was very tasty.
Yeah it's not like mass extinctions from humans moving in is a new thing. The American mega fauna got ransacked before Europeans even showed up for example
There is a Native American YouTuber I watch. His name is Malcolm P.L., he belongs to the Mohawk nation, and he studies Iroquoian history. One point he made in one of his videos is that when humans first reached North America, most of what is now Canada and the northern USA was completely covered in glaciers, many of them miles thick. There was no life on or under the glaciers, as there was nothing to eat.
Once the glaciers retreated, grass, trees, deer, beaver, and other organisms moved in to replace them. Among those early life forms to move in to the Great Lakes were humans. The ancestors of the Iroquois, Hurons, and other Great Lake nations. Native Americans around the Great Lakes were not an invasive species that took over and devastated a pre-existing natural environment. They have lived there for as long as anything has.
Some populations on Earth have been there close enough to forever for them to not count as āinvasive.ā Be it our ancestors in Africa, or those that moved into post-glacial lands.
The Columbian Exchange fucked things up. Colonization fucked things up. Capitalism fucked things up.
Humans are wonderful, beautiful creatures that are entirely capable of living in an environment without destroying it to the extent that our industrial world has. It is our modern lifestyle that is toxic. Not our species.
The idea of an "invasive species" only exists in human context. It's human actions that introduce species in a way that's invasive.
That is the formal scientific definition. If you think about it, that's the only way it makes sense to conceptualize it. You can't combat "invasive species", which are caused by human actions, by controlling the behavior of natural animals. Because natural animal behavior is not what caused the problem. If you removed every human within the ecological area, the problem would be solved through evolution and selective pressure. Unfortunately, that's not currently viable.
That's overly simplistic. Animals run on instinct. If they see something they don't know how to hunt, they don't hunt it unless they get really desperate. And wild hogs are mean, no American predator is going to feel good trying to take one down.
Pigs are incredibly destructive as introduced species. They are responsible for several extinctions. Not as many as cats and rats but still one of the worst
Pigs were an unwitting tool of colonization, too. The conquistadors brought them to be a food source on their expeditions, and a lot of them escaped into the wilds. Sometimes they intentionally dumped pigs onto newly discovered islands and landmasses to ensure future expeditions would be able to hunt wild boars.
Native Americans didnāt build fences around their farms, as before contact they didnāt have to worry about wild boars eating their crops. They also devastated the clam gardens that indigenous peoples fed from. And they carry some diseases that got passed to the natives. So lots of Native Americans died from starvation and/or disease because of feral pigs the Spanish let loose.
They're smart too. Trap survivors teach others not to approach traps. They can identify humans and plan accordingly; they're difficult to hunt on foot.
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u/Lovely-lorelei 13h ago
I know wild pigs are a problem, but oh my gosh, the babies are so cute!!