Yep, will the USDA not longer accept feral hogs at buying stations? What testing will be in place to assure hogs being bought at those stations are not laced with warfarin? Ideally, since they are supposed to be using the blue dye, the fat will turn blue, so that the normal hunter should not be ingesting feral hog meat with any significant amount of warfarin in it. Blued means Screwed.

Texas Hog Hunters Association started a petition to get it stopped...

https://www.change.org/p/texas-hog-hunte..._src-custom_msg

I guess free trapping will come to a halt since hogs cannot be sold.
Professional hog doggin may be impacted as well.

Signed. I will also be contacting my representatives tomorrow to voice my displeasure.

Fact is, i'd be more than happy to shoot more hogs to help control the population. The problem is finding the landowners that will let me do so without charging a fortune for a day hunt.

I have a freezer full of wild hog and will be sad when I can no longer eat them without fear of accidentally consuming one that has been poisoned.

I understand y'all's concerns, and they are valid. If I had been asked to sign that petition a short time ago, I would have signed it.

My problem is, I have seen in the course of about 2 years, my favorite hunting areas down here on the coast, absolutely devastated. I promise you I am not exaggerating. Deer and squirrel were once plentiful, are now on a rapid decline. Snakes, lizards, frogs, ect are all taking a hit. Even the oak trees are unable to reproduce because the hogs are eating every acorn that hits the ground.

I'm writing this while digesting some excellent jagershnitzel from a young sow I shot the day before yesterday.

Hunting, even with dogs, is not working. Trapping year round is not working. Even helicopter hunting doesn't work very well here because the woods are too thick.

Hopefully the state will implement this in a responsible manner, perhaps requiring licenced pros to apply or oversee the application of this to minimize collateral damage to native wildlife.

Palehorse you must be very naive to believe that implementation would be in "a responsible manner". There are more fools and morons than responsible people.

I didn't say I believe, I said I hope. Can't say you're wrong about fools and morons though.

They can mess it all up for the rest of us every time.

So they put out the poison, the hogs eat it, the hog don't feel so good and go into a thicket and die.
Who is going to drag out all the rotting carcasses and dispose of them.
If your neighbor is poisoning, and the dead ones are on your property, who is responsible for clean up? Are you going to let someone who makes bad decisions, such as indiscriminate poisoning, onto your property?

M

Agreed. I also believe this a private property issue. If a landowner has a feral hog problem, it is incumbent on him to solve the problem. Sitting around waiting for the government to fix a problem is one reason our nation is in the shape it's in.

The money trail on this definitely needs to be followed & may explain allot. When the government gets involved unintended consequences are often overlooked. This seems to be a little knee jerk reaction & agree this is a private property issue.

I like it. And would use it if is more effective then trapping. Amount that is absorded into muscle seems minute, especially when compared to what it would take to OD a human.

Only objection I see to it is if you have to use a special application to feed it you might as well use large drop trap.

Anyone want to talk to a reporter from KXAN in Austin on this topic? I emailed them and they are looking for someone with some expertise in this field.

Update, they want to do a story on this tonight and want to speak with a concerned hunter. Anyone want to do this?

Not me. Not only am I not an expert, I have a face for radio.

PM Dragunov. He fits both.

Sent him a PM.

Bobo, you don't just have to use a special application trap, but you have to train the hogs on how to use the trap. This takes 2-3 weeks and you bait it with unpoisoned bait from the company that makes the poison. Then you have to bait the special trap with the poison and the hogs need to return for several consecutive days in order to get a lethal dose. Of course, once you kill those hogs, you have to start the training process again with the next hogs because you already killed the ones that knew how to operate the trap.

So basically, you are looking at 1 month time, using unpoisoned bait to train the hogs and then poisoned bait to kill the hogs and if the hogs run off in the middle of the process, then you have to start over with the next set of new hogs. No doubt the traps will have to be maintained properly so that they do not stick or jam open whereby you end up poisoning whatever other animals show up.

Danger to humans may not be so minimal, particularly if you are already on blood thinners like Warfarin.

Sounds really effective, not to mention uncomplicated and inexpensive. You just need to buy special traps, special bait, special poison free bait, run game cameras to monitor the process of education for timing the bait change, and you are good to go. Oh, and if you have a big property, you will need multiples of traps.

You will also have to be licensed to use it. You will not be able to just run to tractor supply and buy it. Also considering what a bucket of rat blox cost at tractor supply, a 50lb bag of kaput hog poison is going to be expensive even for someone with a state applicator's license. Many of us on here know too a 50lb bag of poison is not going to go very far. Then there is the cost of the feeders and the kaput branded non poisoned bait that is likely going to be required to be used by the person applying the poison.

I looked up the Kaput Hog poison usda application and the same company's Rat Poison MSDS. They are pretty much the same poison in different strengths. Hog Poison has .005% warfarin and the Rat Poison has .025% warfarin.

This stuff will be deadly for anything that eats what the hogs and raccoons spill out of those feeders and anything that eats those smaller poisoned animals. Provided the poison is even applied as directed.

This is just a very bad idea. No poison.

There are many problems with putting reproductive hormones in bait that would potentially inhibit reporoduxtion. First off, the hogs would have to stay home and eat the material all the time, otherwise, as in humans, once you stop eating the pill you become fertile again. How many of us know that experience first hand?

Second, such bait would invariably end up in the water supply and humans and other animals could become involved. Would really stink to find that a. Much of doe in the homeland got temporarily sterilized and a whole crop of fawns was missing due to this type of poison.

In my mind, any type of poison or other hormonal control is going to be fraught with many unpredictable results, probably none of which would limit or decrease hog population. Very rarely do any of these govt interventions work out for the better...

KXAN in Austin is doing a segment on this in 5 mins for anyone in the Austin area.

This won't be a government program, but rather is a tool for landowners who have a bad enough hog problem that they will be willing to pay for a licensed professional to thin down the hog population on their land.

For those who think hogs can be eliminated by shooting them...

Feral hogs can be shot out of a small area where they can't come back in to repopulate the area.....for example an island in the Pacific Ocean like Santa Cruz.

The National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, which co-own the island, contracted with Prohunt, Inc. out of New Zealand to remove feral hogs from the 96 square mile island. The state of Texas is 2,798 times that size.

Prohunt cross fenced the island to restrict the hogs' movement, used extensive trapping, baiting, ground hunting with teams of dogs, infrared sensing devices and radio trackers, and their most effective method, shooting them from helicopters.

It took over two years to remove the 5,036 hogs at a cost of $5 million, or $988 per pig.

Palehorse, I can understand the problem with feral hogs but do you allow people to come hunt them with you? I have no idea, maybe you do.

I just don't see how a landowner can complain about their hog problem and then say they either won't allow hunting or especially want to charge for it. Seems to me Mr. Landowner, your hog problem isn't as big as you make it to be.

Again, I am not insinuating this about you Palehorse as I don't know you so please don't take offense.