It’s all fun and games 'til someone gets a bullet upside the head.
Twice, I think.
I am curious about the why of that. Usually, unless the kill had to lay around too long like from a helicopter hunt, all the meat gets used or at least donated. Is there some bug roaming you hogs like CWD is roaming the deer populations some places?
If you’ve never seen a feral hog up close (i have both living and when recovering a 5-ton truck that had hit one) consider yourself lucky. They are, or at least can be, disgusting wormy parsite ridden creatures
Beck, the name Kevin is for the more sensitive types.
I’ll consider myself lucky then; most of mine have been places where the population wasn’t quite that bad/dense for that to be an issue. Or its just gotten that much worse in the last 6 years.
The pigs have every sort of worm, disease and parasitic pestilence known, in them. There is a pseudorabies that runs rampant in them. Pseudo- or not, I don’t want that! The ones I saw up close appeared to have some sorta skin disease as well. Scabies or ringworm. The guys handling the dead ones were given gloves and face masks. It was truly the most disgusting thing I have ever witnessed, in my life. I cannot describe the smell. It was horrible.
I slept fitfully last night. Pigs were everywhere.
When I walked my pups this morning we stayed off of the grass. I walked down the drive. Coming back the bad smell hit me. Nasty.
Rain, rain come today…
I apologize for the double post. HughesNet was in a snit last night.
Beck, I can visualize you in one of those heavy, cumbersome radioactive-protective suits, spraying down the deck and yard with commercial-strength bleach.
With much giggling, I related the “Pig Shoot” saga to Mr VOW. He could actually see the reasoning behind the pink hats and three-bullet rule. But he definitely got a laugh out of the whole story!
I would love to have a garden here in AZ, but without fortified barricades, we’d only be providing a salad bar for the various animals. Our BIGGEST nuisance is the cow population. AZ is a free-range state. Cattle owners pay a fee to the state, and then they turn the beasts loose on any open land. Unless your property is surrounded by a minimum 3-wire fence of barbed wire, the cows are permitted to wander at will. Before we built our deck, we practically had them peeking in our windows. And there is nothing quite like opening windows to catch an evening breeze and getting a whiff of a nearby cow using the the area as a toilet facility!
Whatever leftovers the cows would leave of a garden would then be a dining venue for jackrabbits, deer, antelope, and anything else that walks, hops, crawls or slithers.
Honestly, it’s easier to shop at Safeway.
~VOW
You so funny ~VOW:)
ETA- I thought double post was on purpose. It fit my mood during the whole ordeal. I don’t talk alot. But I said everything twice yesterday.
[:eek:]
Shudder, feral pigs are just nasty, filthy animals and unsafe to eat.
I don’t even like country ham at Waffle House. Tastes gamey to me. I love city ham. Give me a Armour or Hormel canned ham and I’m in hog heaven. 
Waitwaitwait…
“Pig traps?”
Are they like the Havahart traps that gentle souls use on mice and other vermin?
Or maybe of a bear trap design?
I can’t help but imagine a gigantic mousetrap where a gigantic arm snaps down on the hog’s neck.
~VOW
Beck described a pig trap on her land.
The design changes over time because the pigs learn to recognize and avoid them.
Here’s a large one.
There is no reason to be humane to this invasive feral population. They add exactly ‘nothing’ to the land they populate. In fact they ruin whole fields of crops. They can devastate a small farm. We have electric fencing because of deer (and now pigs). Mr.Wrekker grows corn and hay. We’ve grown peas. We get less from the pea patch every year. It’s far away from the house so the wildlife get in it more.
We couldn’t make living on these crops. He mostly does because corn and hay are crops he can use. The peas are for me.
People don’t feel sorry for the pigs.
They’re bad, bad, bad.
Farmers hate 'em. Hunters hate 'em.
They gotta go.
(~VOW- pig traps are not a viable solution. What are you gonna do with a LIVE, angry diseased pig? In a cage. Ethically you can’t catch and release. Where would you release?)
Texas?
I’m not a fan of Havahart traps of ANY kind. Wild critters violate my sense of home. Critters are welcome to use the parts of Earth that are not of my realm. Once they cross into my territory, death is the only solution.
Where to release feral hogs which are trapped. Hell works for me.
~VOW
I’m pretty sure most landowners use a bullet to finish off trapped feral hogs.
Catch & release isn’t an option for invasive species that carry disease.
Yeah. Then Mr.Wrekker can go hunt Arkansas pigs in Texas. Win-win!
I honestly didn’t know it had gotten that bad in the last 10 years or so; I Googled and was much surprised. And that seems the case most places where pigs have reached the stage of problem. To the point where folks are paying big bucks to hunt farm-raised boars on preserves rather than the naturally occurring ones. Who’da thunk? But its one of the reasons I say stopping here is always a chance at an education.
There’s always been wild hogs in Arkansas. See @Razorbacks. My Mother tamed a wild hog piglet once, when she was a child.
Feral hogs are a different thing, altogether. When we built out here we never saw hogs. 20years in and I see them everyday. I saw one this afternoon. After the big cull and there’s still hogs creeping around:smack:
No thankee! Way back when, sometime when the first two digits in the year are what the current last two digits are I went to Vicksburg, MS for a work trip. We went over the river to LA for some drinks; met a young lass heading into the USCG. We enjoyed our time together (in a platonic, clothes-on sorta way). A weekish after I get home there is a perfumed letter in the mailbox; she’s changed her duty station to one (relatively) close to me. :eek:
Hell, I’ve been known to take my own TP to the start of a large race.
If you wanna go to Texas, you can legally hunt them from a hot air balloon. Seriously!
It seems some ‘brilliant’ legislator didn’t like the fact that the hogs get scared of the chopper noise so they run away. I guess he didn’t think of the fact that they’d probably get scared of the burner noise…& unless they happen to run downwind they are running away from an aircraft that can’t chase them. :smack: