TKandMike,
Thanks!
The population is probably growing, but not at the pestilence rates claimed. All of the hunting, trapping, helihunting, and automotive impacts apparently are doing a very good job of making the population growth quite slowly.
I make fun of the projections of hog populations because I am not sure that they are real or based on any actual reality, but the claim is that we have a 20% growth of hogs every year despite the numbers of hogs hunted, trapped, killed in vehicular accidents, etc. Now, this article by my former colleagues at TAMU say 18-21% growth, so let's round it to 20%.
https://today.tamu.edu/2019/12/12/feral-hogs-increase-their-urban-and-suburban-sprawl/ This was back in 2012 when they were saying we had 2,600,000 hogs. Mind you, we had estimate of 2 million hogs going back a decade before that and a 20% annual growth compounded over 10 years does not equate to 2,600,000. And looking at 20% growth since 2012 with a growth of 20% compounded annually...
2012 2,600,000
2013 3,120,000
2014 3,744,000
2015 4,492,800
2016 5,391,360
2017 6,469,632
2018 7,763,558
2019 9,316,270
2020 11,179,524
Here we are in 2020 and nobody is saying we have over 11 million hogs in Texas. Nobody is saying we have over half that amount, though there are still claims of a 20% growth rate and the need to kill off 70-75% of the population just to keep it stable. Supposedly, we are now at about 3.0 million hogs in Texas.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/...are-now-encroaching-on-houstons-suburbs/ If that is the case, then the 18-21% growth per year is pure hogwash. Hunting is having a huge impact on hogs. It could be more. We are not ahead of the problem, but hunting is a significant factor.
When folks come up with a hog census, how do they count the hogs? From what I can find, they sample a number of habitats, figure out how many hogs are in their limited sample areas, and extrapolate that information to other habitats around the state based on factors such as carrying capacity, which is an estimation of its own. I think that in this case, the errors of calculation don't cancel out one another, but instead compound.