Hogs gone wild
by Courier staff
11:00 AM, Sunday, March 17 2013 | 7442 views | 0 0 comments | 135 135 recommendations | email to a friend | print
(THE COURIER / Submitted, Arkansas Game &amp; Fish Commission)
(THE COURIER / Submitted, Arkansas Game & Fish Commission)
The proliferation of feral hogs in Northern Arkansas has been the subject of conversation at the recent few meetings I’ve attended with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC). The St. Francis Sunken lands has a healthy population of hogs and growing.

The question is simple: How do we stop the feral hog? The answer, unfortunately isn’t so simple.

Just ask any deer hunter in South Arkansas, and they’ll be quick to tell you about their frustrations with the growing purveyor of pork. Hunting hogs sounds like a lot of fun, and it is, but we’re not really talking about the hunting of hogs — it’s about the eradication of hogs.

Hogs and deer don’t mix. As a matter of fact, hogs and just about every other kind of plant or animal don’t mix. If a hog had a thumb, he might just take over the world. They are an invasive species, a term typically used for plants and fishes.

Of course, I’m talking about the wild or feral hog. They pose a threat to man, wildlife and to agriculture. They procreate like there’s no tomorrow, having two litters of piglets each year with an up to 100 percent survival rate. You have to kill at least 70 percent of them each year in order to maintain them at their current level. Think about that for a minute, and you’ll soon realize why this animal is a looming threat to areas that currently don’t have a hog population.

The most effective way to control feral hogs is to bait and trap them. That requires a great deal of effort, especially once you have hogs in your trap. The cruel reality is that the only “good hog” is a “dead hog,” as harsh as that may sound.

Wild hog is decent table fare, but skinning and cleaning 15 hogs becomes a task not many folks are willing to do. The AGFC is supporting a bill that requires no hogs can be transported from a trap, which basically means they have to be killed on site. There is certainly merit to that bill because once a feral hog is loaded into a truck, it’s anyone’s guess where it might end up.

Of course, there are always other viewpoints and there’s certainly one here, as another bill would allow trapped hogs to be transported if done properly. There are commercial “hog trappers” that make money from trapping hogs, and there are a few commercial hog-hunting operations in our state where you can pay money to hunt a wild hog. These are fenced operations where the hogs are confined to a particular area, typically several hundred acres. The operations will pay for hogs that trapped in other areas around the state.

It’s currently illegal to transport a wild hog and release it somewhere else, and HB-1478 would make transporting a wild hog illegal. It would also make it illegal to test the hog for disease and introduce it into a domestic hog farm operation. That might have an impact on the few commercial hunting operations within our state if they rely on importing hogs to sustain their huntable hog population, or the guy who wanted to take a feral hog and domesticate it for pork chops later in the year.

If you have private land accessible for hunting you can hunt hogs day or night, 365 days a year. If you’re hunting on state-owned land, you must hunt within the guidelines of that area’s open regulations in order to kill a hog. There is no limit, and hunters are encouraged to shoot early and shoot often.

I’ve suggested that if the AGFC really wants to get rid of hogs in our state, they’d put a bounty on them and pay for every dead feral hog brought in. No, I don’t know where that money would come from and I don’t know if hog farmers would be claiming their domestic hogs as feral hogs, just so they could collect the bounty. But, it just sounds like a good idea to put a financial incentive because the lemon has to be worth the squeeze.

Maybe we could get some of the $900 million that we spend to give away free cellphones in our country or the money wasted to research robotic squirrels and divert some of that money to feral hog eradication. It would certainly make more sense to me.

One thing is for certain. Hunters in North Arkansas need to support the efforts of those battling the eradication of our hunters to the south, because we are destined to wake up one day and smell the bacon. And it won’t be a very pleasant smell.

David Mosesso is publisher of The Jonesboro Sun. Email comments to dmosesso@jonesborosun.com.
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