They had a segment on pigs at the Private Lands Summit at TWA.

Random notes I took:

1. Estimated annual damage from pigs is roughly estimated at $500 million in Texas, roughly the same amount as the annual Texas timber industry sales.
2. The pig hunting "industry" is estimated at around $300K annually.
3. Gestation is 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days.
4. USDA APHIS with helicopter shooting says they killed all the pigs in Dallum county. They got a lot in Hartley to stop the drift north. OK has worked at eliminating them in their panhandle.
5. They can carry anthrax (the ground, naturally-occurring kind), but not die from it.
6. Regarding the diseases they carry - cook any meat to internal temp of 160 degrees. Freeze raw meat at 0 degrees for 28 days.

They talked some about the poisons, but they're still years away from approval, so I don't get too excited about them.

This actually is a very effective way to deal with them. The property that I hunt in OK borders the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. It is around 40,000 acres. The pigs showed up a number of years ago, and at one point, got really thick. About as think as they are down here. We would shoot them on every trip and they were just getting thicker. The Preserve put in a campaign to helicopter hunt them. After that, we didn't see a pig for over two years, and even now, they are very scarce.

In that country, where you can see them running for two weeks.

3 weeks with a step stool.

Where I hunt near Reagan Wells it is usually "one and done" unless a hoglet gets greedy or come in a couple hours later.

Tha's why I always try to line em' up and go for a double. Do have one triple with a 375 H&H.


ya!

GWB

They are Prolific breeders. We can put a dent in them but they'll always come back.

Funny, but a large part of our property is thick.

Thermal sales alone are more than $300,000 annually for pig hunters. You just need to sell 60 $5K optics sales or 100 3K optics sales and you have zeroed out the $300K without firing a shot. No doubt sellers like Legacy Outdoors do more than that themselves. Then you have all the leases. Then you have all the guides. Then you have all the folks doing it who aren't on leases and don't use guides. Then there are the gun and ammo sales, lodging for hunting travelers, food, fuel, etc. Never mind all the gadgets, gizmos, and miracle attractants. Never mind the thousands of tons of corn sold to hog hunters.

if I were to tabulate all the money I spend in the process of perforating hoglets, I could just about do a trophy elk/mule deer hunt or a trip to Africa each year, But i get to hunt hogs 15 to 20 trips per year @ 2 to 5 days per trip.

ya!


GWB

The APHIS guy acknowledged how much hunters like to hunt them, but, his opinion now, is basically they ain't doing jack to actually reduce the population. Traps are second to aerial shooting, but a very distant second.

"We are from the government. We are here to help."

He does have a point. There is no official or coordinated effort by hunters and no real way to monitor their progress. For a lot of hunters, hog control is going out a few times a year, shooting the biggest boars they can find, going home and telling their friends they are involved in helping Texas control the feral hogs. They are "involved" but in reality, the individuals aren't doing jack squat. Many aren't even necessarily hitting the same lands to have a cumulative impact on a given location. With that said, we put 10s of thousands of said hunters into the field every weekend and a lot of them are successful as a cumulative group.

It is a lot easier to assess performance when you hit a location or area repeatedly until there are no more hogs. So traps and heli hunting (which is still hunting, LOL) certainly have their place. The problem with traps, however, is multifold. Aside from the loaner program, traps of sufficient size and technology are expensive. These guys aren't using little box traps to catch 1 or 2 hogs. They want to get whole sounders, which is outstanding. However, most landowners don't see shelling out 3-5K for such a trap, much less funding multiple traps for their property. Most won't move such large traps around their own property with any regularity as needed if they aren't willing to buy multiple traps. And based on my survey of landowners that have traps, most do not sell the hogs as there are no feral hog buying stations sufficiently close to them to make loading up, transporting and unloading hogs worthwhile. So some will shoot hogs in the trap. If you have done that, then you know what a mess that is. As one of my landowners told me, "I am in the cattle business, not the hog business. I found running traps that I was no longer in the cattle business and I don't want to be in the hog business." So I now hunt for a trapper. He still traps, but only on leased land where the landowner doesn't allow hunting. Pig Popper and I have even helped him empty a trap.

Helihunting is going to work great in areas like Dallam that are largely void of forests. It probably helps that a significant percentage of the county is the Rita Blanca National Grassland. Helihunting isn't doing so well in the wilds of the east Texas.

Jointly, the problems with heli-hunting and trapping are they are are expensive and/or time consuming approaches and not generally covered in any form or fashion by crop insurance or the like. So unless Uncle Sam is paying for the efforts, coordination, etc., it ain't going to happen. Dallam was probably an excellent place for their experiment. With a low human poplulation (<7200 people, <5 people per square mile), there are less people, houses, and equipment to worry about damaging. As of 2017, MOST of the ranches in Dallam County were over 1000 acres in size and there are only a few hundred ranches. 99% of Dallam is either crop or pastureland, so very open and great for helihunting. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publicati...ources/County_Profiles/Texas/cp48111.pdf 2017 is the most recent info I can find. Take the county I hunt for comparison, Montague. It is a physically smaller county, but has several times the number of ranches and they are considerably smaller in size. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publicati...ources/County_Profiles/Texas/cp48337.pdf

Just as an funny aside, I would be willing to bet that if the hog hunting industry is only worth $300K in Texas, then USDA APHIS paid for the vast majority of it in Dallam County, what with helicopters running about $1000 per hour and all. Of course, this was funded with $75,000,000 for a pilot program covering several states. I can't figure out how much they spent on Dallam alone, but they spend up to $1,500,000 per project and there are currently 3 "projects" running in Texas, so that is up to $4,500,000 alone that has been pumped into a 3 year program, a tad more than they $300,000 claimed for the "industry." https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/feral-swine-eradication-and-control-pilot-program