This summer, a south Arkansas man was responsible for one of the more surreal viral memes of the year when he asked on Twitter how to deal with “30-50 feral hogs.”
Legit question for rural Americans – How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?
— Willie McNabb (@WillieMcNabb) August 4, 2019
Whatever the entertainment value of the meme launched by the question, William McNabb’s post highlighted a genuine problem for Arkansas landowners and farmers. Just how big a problem, though, is almost impossible to tell.
Anecdotally, people in agriculture will say that feral hogs are a nuisance, ruining crops and pastureland, damaging equipment either directly or indirectly and decimating wildlife in the areas where the herds, called “sounders,” roam for forage. The University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service released a report on feral hogs in January that tried to provide a starting point for feral hog research in the state.
Becky McPeake, a professor of wildlife extension at the UA, said the research team contacted 467 landowners in the state, 70% of whom said feral hogs were active on their property. Researchers concluded that damage to those landowners amounted to $12 million.
McPeake cautioned that the report is just a snapshot because of limited resources to do a full survey of the state’s feral hog population, so an extrapolation of how much damage hogs can do wouldn’t be responsible. And, McPeake asked, how do you value fence or ground repair that a farmer spends a half-day doing but that doesn’t require any expenditure on material?
“It’s a large and difficult issue,” McPeake said. “It is really difficult to put a value on it. It gets more and more difficult the farther we go out on that limb to figure out what that damage is.”
The Arkansas Game & Fish Commission insists there is no accurate estimate of the number of feral hogs loose in Arkansas.
“We don’t have a population estimate,” said J.P. Fairhead, the AGFC’s feral hog program coordinator. “There are too many, obviously.”
Sounders are led by female hogs. Adult males are solitary and reunite with sounders when it’s time to breed.
Females average about 160 pounds and males approximately 200, although males can get much bigger than that. Female wild hogs can have as many as two litters a year of up to eight piglets. The AGFC said 65% of an area’s hogs have to be eliminated to keep the population from growing.
The Extension Service’s report said the hog population in Arkansas has grown significantly during the past 30 years, but without concrete numbers, the exact percentage would be a guess.
Feral hogs used to be a welcome sight for hunters, who were allowed to kill hogs whenever possible during hunting season on public land. In 2014, the Game & Fish Commission changed those rules to prohibit taking of hogs unless hunters were hunting deer, elk or bear on certain public lands, excluding such areas as national forests, state parks or other public trust lands.
The taking of feral hogs on private land is always allowed, Fairhead said. Fairhead said the change had to be made because feral hogs began to show up in areas they had not historically. The assumption is hunters enjoyed shooting hogs so a few of them began to catch and release wild hogs in virgin areas to have a new hunting pleasure.
“Whether it was intentional or unintentional, we started seeing hogs pop up in places we had never seen them before,” Fairhead said. “We took a lot of heat over that because everyone thought we were trying to restrict hunting opportunities. We didn’t want to promote them as a huntable species because they are not wildlife. It wasn’t real effective at controlling the population.”
Hog Hunt
Former state Rep. Nate Bell lives on 20 acres just outside of Mena and deals with feral hogs every year.
Bell said he kills or traps as many as 80 feral hogs a year on his land or, most commonly, on the land of his neighbors. The most effective way to control the feral hog population is through traps, Bell said.
“If they have a fault it is that they tend to be creatures of habit,” Bell said.
Bell puts out bait of sour corn and strawberry Jell-O, lets it ferment a while and waits for the sounders to follow their noses. As the sounder gets more accustomed to the bait pile, Bell can reduce the size of it until the sounder is concentrated, either for trapping or shooting with his AR-10.
“On a good big sounder of 12-18 pigs, I can kill about half of them,” Bell said. “I wait until I have them bunched up pretty tightly and then dump as many rounds as I can as rapidly as I can. Typically I can take out eight to 10 of them. It is actually a very ineffective way to control the hog.”
Hogs are intelligent, too, which makes efficient trapping important. If a trap is sprung to capture half of a sounder, the surviving members will be that much harder to trap in the future, as will their offspring.
If bait is used to lure hogs in for shooting one or two of them, then the survivors will view bait more suspiciously in the future.
“If you’re trying to trap, you need to leave the pigs alone and try to trap the whole family unit,” Fairhead said. “Trapping and shooting don’t work in conjunction.”
Grapes of Wrath
Audrey House, who owns Chateau Aux Arc in Altus, said she has been dealing with feral hogs since she started her vineyard 23 years ago.
Feral hogs don’t normally do much damage to her vineyards directly but damage the ground and can cause sinkholes from their wallowing. Because Altus has a number of vineyards in the area, feral hogs are a common nuisance with such a plentiful food source.
“I go out to harvest my vineyard and there are huge divots and holes,” House said. “They have been rooting around. You get a rain and all of a sudden you have a massive sinkhole where they have been rooting. They can ruin pasture land. That’s not that big of a deal, but it can be if you have to fix a field. They can mess up anything.”
House has a pack of well-trained dogs on her 36 acres that alert her to any encroaching critters. House’s dogs can take care of pests like possums and racoons, but a large sounder of 20, as House has seen on her land, isn’t going to be intimidated by a few dogs.
“Feral hogs are a serious burden,” House said. “If you have kids on a farm, you have to be concerned about feral hogs. When they have a pack, it is a pack mentality. It is like a pack of rabid dogs. That is the only way I can explain it to someone who doesn’t live on a farm.”
House said that because of her vineyards, traps don’t work effectively. She hopes that her dogs and her occasional shooting of a feral hog train sounders to avoid the “crazy woman.”
House said hogs aren’t all bad because they can turn over a plot of land or eat competing vegetation in forests to spur tree growth. Their problems are rapid reproduction and gluttonous appetites.
“They are opportunistic omnivores, which mean they will eat anything they can catch and they think smells good — anything and everything,” Fairhead said.
McPeake said she hopes future studies of feral hogs can be done at regular intervals in Arkansas. As the problem becomes better defined, farmers and landowners will be motivated to keep better track of feral hog damage and interactions, which will create a more detailed database.
“They are a real hazard to the environment and wildlife,” Bell said. “The environmental destruction they do is incredible. Until people have seen it, they can’t fathom it. They can literally destroy 20 acres of a hay field a night, to say nothing of what their feces does to the ponds and the wallowing that they do.”
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