My husband and I watched a video of hunters trying to take out huge herds of destructive wild pigs. Damn, those things run fast and it’s impossible to shoot more than a few at a time.
Given this, which is the better option to thin the population: shoot the big ones, especially the big sows, or shoot the little ones? My husband said it would be better to take out the little ones so that they don’t grow up to become big boars and sows. I thought it’d be best to take out the biggest ones so that they don’t breed.
I’m wondering what assumptions are accurate here. Looking here, I see that:
Litters are about 5 pigs each.
Sexual maturity is reached after six months.
They can breed twice yearly.
Killing 75% of the population leads to maintenance population.
Honestly, I’m not sure that it makes a difference which you shoot, given their incredibly quick and prolific breeding. Imagine a population of 10 breeding pairs and 50 babies. In six months they’ll breed again (35 breeding pairs), and in nine months you’ll have 175 babies. If you kill 20 babies now, in sixth months you’ll have 25 breeding pairs and in nine months you’ll have 125 babies. That’s exactly the same as if you killed all the adults right now.
I have an associate in Texas who hunts the darn things all the time. Which he hunts depends upon which rifle he has with him. If he has his AR-15 platform in 5.56 - it’s the little ones (5.56 is a more of a critter killer than a great hunting round), if he has his AR-10 (in 7.62), it’s the big ones.
His argument, and I’d probably agree with it, is that given the choice, he’d take out the adults, because the little ones have a decent chance of not surviving if the adult dies. But he isn’t going to attack and kill an adult easily with a smaller round, and leaving it injured but alive is both cruel, and likely to end up with hundreds of pounds of enraged pig hunting YOU.
And while I don’t want this to be a gun use/control thread, it’s one of the few hunting scenarios where I see a big advantage in the medium sized (10-20 round) magazine fed semi-auto rifles. They are fast, they are tough, and they are aggressive. I would NOT want to go after one with a bolt unless I was in a hide off the ground.
Can you imagine hunting them suckers on the ground with a boar spear and some dogs? Because that would take some serious gonads. Of course sometimes the boar runs right up the spear and seriously damages said gonads. People were metal back in the day.
Texas has long allowed pig hunting from helicopters. However, helicopters make a lot of noise, which scares the pigs into running, frequently splitting up & running, which means you might only get one. Someone had a 'brilliant’ idea - “Hmmmm, what’s airborne & quiet?” Yup, hunting pigs is legal from a hot air balloon in TX.
Just two important points:
They’re quiet until the pilot hits the burners; burners are loud & probably more startling going from quiet to loud than a helo approaching which gets steadily louder.
Hot-air balloons move with the wind. If the pig runs any direction other than downwind, you’re only getting a butt shot that gets further & further away each second. Same if the pig happens to run downwind but faster than the wind. (Hint: we don’t fly in higher winds)
There’s also the fact that many hot air balloon baskets aren’t very large. Standing directly behind someone firing a gun it’s quite possible the pilot might get an elbow to the throat or eye upon recoil of the shooter.
You may laugh, but I’ve heard of some insane rednecks who basically have the dogs corral the hogs, and they then run up and knife the boars. This was from some guys who do the same basic thing with pistols instead of knives- they were saying how crazy these other guys they knew were.
Personally, I kind of think it’s a lost cause- there are too many places where feral hogs can hide and reproduce, and too much food for them out there. Shy of paying some sort of absurdly high bounty like $250 per feral hog corpse, I don’t know that anything voluntary is going to put much of a dent in their numbers.
These stats make me wonder whether hunting boars is even an effective way of culling them in the first place. My guess is “no”, considering how long we’ve been trying to cull the damn things and how they’ve been spreading all over North America instead.
This NatGeo article backs me up, and in fact implies that the popularity of (and money that comes with) hog hunting is a major contributor to the problem:
I doubt even a bounty would help. Dogs are useful, as you say, but hogs are very smart and in areas where culling efforts make heavy use of dogs the hogs learn and adapt and dogs become much less effective after a few seasons.
Large scale traps that can hold a whole herd of hogs until someone comes by and shoots them seem like the best bet, honestly.
I was just thinking that if a bunch of broke-ass rednecks could make $1000 by bringing in 4 hogs, you’d see lots of areas scoured clean in short order.
Yeah given the fast growth rates and frequency of breeding, it doesn’t matter whether you cull the adults or the babies; you need to reduce overall numbers to have an impact.
Kill all the adults and their existing babies will just replace them as adults in 6 months. Kill all the babies and the adults will just have more in 6 months. I suppose if you could kill 100% of the babies before they became adults, the existing adults would eventually die of old age and stop producing babies. BUT, you’d need the ability to take out >70% of the population in 6 months to pull that off. If we had anywhere near that ability there would be no wild hog problem.
I’m no hunter, but I know a few, and hunting wild hogs are not easy and can be pretty dangerous. One of the guys I know actually lost 2 dogs (and he was heartbroken over it…big time) on a hunt, and I’ve heard many stories of injuries. Basically, even with a bounty, I doubt you’d tempt many who aren’t already hunting to go out and give it a try, even if they are broke redneck types. Hunting alligators is a LOT easier than going after wild hogs, who are both a lot smarter, a lot craftier and a lot more dangerous out in the woods than alligators are in a river.
Or you’d see a bunch of enterprising entrepreneurs establish a clandestine breeding program to enable them to collect ongoing bounties without the trouble and potential hazards of having to hunt the critters in the wild.
I think you’d see a bunch of people claiming bounties without making any real dent in the feral hog population. Unless they were using traps, not charging them with rifles.
Yes, I’m familiar with the function of a boar spear but that cross bar didn’t always do the job. Especially when the boar runs up the spear, hits the cross bar and yanks it out of the person’s hand and gores the holy fuck out of them. Few hundred pounds of enraged pork does not lie down and die easily.