They've been in the U. S. for hundreds of years, so why did it take so long for them to be considered such a nuisance? At the rate they multiply, you would think they would have become 'a problem' long ago.

Can't answer that one-but I was hearing about them in the early '80s here in Tx and wondering what I had to do to be a part of the control solution. Turns out it takes either good friends who will share their land with you or money to buy a lease/trespass rights to shoot them.

I think the problem has just become so much better publicized through sites like this one that more are aware of it also.

quote:

Originally posted by dustoffer:
Can't answer that one-but I was hearing about them in the early '80s here in Tx and wondering what I had to do to be a part of the control solution. Turns out it takes either good friends who will share their land with you or money to buy a lease/trespass rights to shoot them.

I think the problem has just become so much better publicized through sites like this one that more are aware of it also.

I agree that it is just being communicated better in this day and age, and let's face it, there are even more today because the populations just keep growing, and growing, and growing, and growing........

quote:

Originally posted by SIR MAUSER:
They've been in the U. S. for hundreds of years, so why did it take so long for them to be considered such a nuisance? At the rate they multiply, you would think they would have become 'a problem' long ago.

I think you asked this question well. Also, I think it has little to do with better communication today compared to the past. I remember when I was a teenager in Georgia, and seeing for the first time, evidence in the creek bottoms of hog rooting. Back then a boy could roam the creek bottoms at will without having to worry about trespassing or hunting leases. Heck, there were few deer where I grew up until several years later. I remember hunting hogs in South Georgia when I was in college, but I found only plenty of evidence of them, but didn't see any.

That was a long time ago, and they were there then. Given all this talk about how one sow can produce umpteen piglets, and they can breed again at six months, three litters a year, etc., there has been more than enough time for the country to be overrun with hogs, doing the math. There has to be other factors playing into this.

It has been only in the last five years or so that the hogs have been on or near the family farm. At the predicted rate of multiplication, they should have been there long ago. I don't understand it all.

KB

I think that part of the problem is because there were hunters transporting hogs illegally to establish huntable populations near their homes. Mostly in the last 15 or so years. Man has spread them out much more than they would have done on their own.
Jeff

A comparison would be how coyotes have migrated west to east over the last 20 years. They've been around no telling how long, yet we had none in Alabama until the 1980's.Now they are everywhere. What took them so long?

I doubt this is the whole answer but for most of the 20th century (until the late 60s), land was owned primarily by individuals who worked it and probably lived off hogs to a greater degree than current times. Hogs were turned out to forage and collected in the fall for slaughter. Just like they milked their own cow instead of buying a gallon at the store. They also had locals hunting their properties as well. The lifestyle wouldn't be newsworthy then. Today, no one lives off their land anymore. Convenience has replaced neccesity and that ain't a bad thing. One day they just quit calling hogs into the farm.

A modern example in Texas would be the resurgence of coyotes in parts of the Hill Country that were the heart of our wool industry. The wool producers spent 100 yrs smacking coyotes until they were virtually eliminated in that area. Then ranches broke up as children chose city living and were sold to weekend families who had no interest in agriculture or animal husbandry; they just wanted their little piece of heaven for a retreat. They also wanted animal diversity and refused to continue the land management practices of before. It caused quite a bit of friction between neighbors when a tree-hugger protected coyotes adjacent to a working sheep ranch. Needless to say, from the early 80s to now the coyote population has rebounded dramatically in that part of Texas.

So I think the answer lies in some combination of land use changes, population shifts and cultural changes.

Since my youth in Georgia, there has been great increases in the populations of coyotes, deer, hogs, fire ants, armodillos, and people. There has been a great decrease in cottontails, and bob whites for example. I suppose one could call that populations shifts, but I think cultural shift maybe not.

KB

I was refering to shift in hunting culture over the last century from subsistence/market/sporting/fur hunting to a predominantly (but shrinking) sporting-only culture.

The armadillos have spread faster and farther than the feral hogs from my observations. I am a Missouri boy and never saw an armadillo until the Army brought me to Texas in 1969. This past month, while on vacation in Missouri, I think I saw as many road-kill armadillos on Missouri roads and highways as I see in Texas.

I'd agree that changes in land management probably has much to do with booming hog populations. Todays small private parcels of land managed for deer and turkey are also ideal for hogs. Same goes for large leases where professional managers are employed to develop everything from direct feeding of game to broken patches of fallow crops, and cover thickets. Much of what is meant to benefit deer, turkey, and even exotics, is a factory for feral hogs. I would venture that most feed and plantings meant to increase big game numbers are consumed by hogs.

Ratltrap, you are most correct. And another poster said He (like I did) just roamed the woods and hunted lots of small game when we were growing up. Most of those woods we roamed in are now croplands and pine plantations.

You have to have a lease to hunt this crap in the daylight now, but many folks are releasing hogs and hunting them with dogs at night for sport not food. And without permission.

In many instances the hogs are not killed but caught and released elsewhere so these folks can poach on someone else. Hogs do have a very high reproductive rate and high survival rates of piglets. A sow can easily raise 15 in one year and a doe deer averages about 1.3. Who wins competition for natural or supplemental deer food here? Not too hard to figure out.

In the 1950's and prior to that there were still vast bottomlands in the Southeast and much more room for hunters and wildlife. At that time, hogs were managed as free ranging animals for a food source and not hunted and released. There were hog traps all over the woods. They were not nearly so abundant as now, especially on a per acre basis.

Deer and other wildlife don't like to co-mingle with hogs. The aggresive hogs are consuming all of the acorns that deer, squirrels, and turkey and over 150 other species of wildlife depend on in the late winter to survive until spring green-up.

Hogs are not wildlife. They are the only domestic animals that can adapt to floods, heat, cold, and other extremes of nature including highly modified landscapes and still find something to eat and continue to reproduce well.

Where feral hogs are abundant, we should make efforts to eradicate every one of them. If you don't they will soon be rooting up the grass in your front yard if you live in the South. They already have mine. Merg

I think all of the "causes" mentioned so far may be factors, but are relatively very small ones.

The largest factor is public health and animal health practices. This is why the last two decades have seen such an explosion compared to the last four centuries.

Hogs are subject to a number of animal and human diseases. Hog colera is one that everyone is familiar with, but there are dozens, if not hundreds, more. Improved animal health practices (including the elimination of the screw worm which also contributed to a population explosion of deer in the southwest) have greatly diminished the transmission of swine diseases from domestic herds to feral populations. Likewise improved public health practices, particularly much tighter regulation of sewerage, has kept many human diseases from being transmitted to the feral hog population.

You know all of the "creeks and streams" you used to wander when you were a boy? Well, back then they were full of pathogens that chronically infected feral hogs and put a damper on their population. Nowadays, with all the tree-huggers in charge , those creeks and streams are mostly pathogen-free (not full of human shit), therefore hogs are being infected with disease at a much lower rate than a couple of dozen years ago.

Cultural practices, economics, hunting regulation, predation -- all are insignificant compared to disease. If you want to get hog populations back down, just flush your toilet directly into the surface streams without treating the effluent.

Probably a combination of shrinking habitat, reduction of hunters, and restrictions on trapping. At one time there was a considerable number of hogs trapped and shipped overseas, particularly to France. The new rules in Texas makes that option not really economically feasible.

That is a very good question. I've wondered that myself. While I've read scientific studies from throughout the world, my direct observations are from the Central Coast of CA.

In this area my father quit hunting around 1960 and had never seen a wild pig while hunting. But by 1980, on the exact same ranches, there were tons of them (many more than now). Barley production in this area started around the 1930's so I really can't fully explain the lag time in the population rise.

In this area the population size is almost directly proportional to the amount of barley that is planted. For the populations to grow the sows need protein while they are nursing. In our region that comes from the barley. Without the barley, huge portions of the litters don't make it to the age of recruitment (get old enough to breed).

Over the last 20 years it hasn't been economically feasible to plant barley in this area so as the barley production falls... so goes our pig population. This Central Coast region has around 5 to 10% of the barley production that we had 30 years ago.

I think the pig numbers are changing drastically with the years of drought and changes in farming practices. Those of you who follow pig hunting in CA may have noticed that DFG quit publishing the raw numbers of pigs taken in each county. Rather now they just give percentages of take in the various counties. I think the take has dropped dramatically.

One of my main competitors normally took about 40 clients per month this time if year and I recently heard they took 4 in the last month. Some of that could be related to the economy but the number of pigs I'm seeing is way down as well. This year my take was up from last year but that is a bit of statistical artifact as our operation is scaled back tremendously from what it was at our peak in the 1990's.

Another enormous ranch (toward 100,000 acres), that was recently taken over by a new outfitter, is said not to have produced a pig over 80 pounds since their lease. If that's an accurate assessment, then their average pig is under breeding age. Not a good sign for pig hunting fans.

BTW - one of my HUGE pet peeves in the popular media is how many litters sows in the wild have. It is ONE, NOT two and definitely NOT three per year! If someone is feeding them all bets are off but if they're earning a fair living in the wild they have one litter per year on average. That's not to say two doesn't happen in the wild, but it's pretty rare unless feed is supplied.

Further details according to the scientific studies: The average litter size is 7.6 piglets, they start breeding at about 1 year, but up to 80+% of those litters die in the first year from malnutrition and predation.

This may be a bizarre statement if you haven't thought about it, but: The feral pigs only friends are hunters. For the most part ranchers would be happier if they were all gone, ecologists think they're disruptive to the environment and farmers want them all dead. But that doesn't mean landowners are willing to let people on to hunt... the lawyers have made those days go away. Really its only the hunters that want to see lots of pigs roaming the hills.

Kyler

Kyler, I'm pretty sure DFG is still publishing the hog take per county. I think the last one I saw was 2007 or 2006. Monterey County was still leading the herd.

Check the 2009 Big Game Booklet, I think that's where I saw the more recent hog kill numbers.

Many of the hogs I've seen in CA have access to corn feeders used for cattle on private and public land. On Tejon their bellies are full of acorns and wild oats most of the time. Barley when it's in seson.

Hi Jesse,

You're right they do publish statistics (%) but not the raw numbers like they used to. What I'm referring to is page 43 on the 2009 Big Game booklet. They used to publish the raw numbers on how many pigs were taken per county.

Years ago they used to compare the raw numbers taken by county over several years so you compare the trends in various counties. Now they publish the percentages taken per county in the state. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing it's because there has been a large decrease in the overall number taken. Maybe the raw numbers are published elsewhere and I just haven't found them.

Monterey county will probably always be on top because its a large county and has the best in the basics of the habitat needs for feral pigs.

Great hunting,
Kyler

I've been in this location for 15 years now and have been hunting all of this time on our family's 200plus acres. We are on the Brazos River and when I first moved here it was nothing to see 30 to 40 deer in the wheat field that is about 400 yds from the river. We never saw any hogs or even tracks. Just about 8 yrs ago a ranch foreman up river 20 miles decided it would be fun to have some to shoot, so he turned out a dozen or so along the river. Now the deer herd is near nothing and hogs are everywhere. They have dug holes deep enough to lose a truck in that same field where we used to have deer. JC

This is very interesting and something I have pondered for years. I really started deer hunting at age7/1972. I was a fortunate kid and got to hunt alot. At our lease in 1976, somebody killed and brought a hog into camp--EVERYBODY--went to look at it b/c it was a big deal and the only one we had seen on the lease after several years. Now, every time I go to the ranch I either see them, smell them or find fresh wallows/tracks. If it gets cold & wet, you can kill them at multiple stands on the same day!
Something has changed/happened. Could it be all the supplemental feeding/better nutrition that takes place these days? It has not seemed to have had the same effect on the deer population that I am aware of.