Eight years into a U.S. program to control damage from feral pigs, the invasive animals are still a multibillion-dollar plague on farmers, wildlife and the environment.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Feral Swine Damage Management Program has received $31.5 million since it began in 2014.
But despite the federal money, an estimated 6 to 9 million feral swine still ravage the landscape nationwide. They tear up and trample crops, out-eat deer and turkeys, can carry parasites and pollute streams and rivers.
Total U.S. damages are estimated at a minimum $2.5 billion a year.
The worst-hit states — California, Oklahoma, Texas and Florida. They are still at the program’s highest level, with more than 750,000 hogs. Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina put their populations at 100,000 to 750,000.
The National Feral Swine Damage Management Program isn’t the first to try to address the problem. In 2018, Congress passed what is commonly called the Farm Bill. Under that bill, thousands of dollars were doled out to farmers to try to help them recover from damages.
Research also continues on ways to poison feral hogs without killing other animals, said Michael Marlow, assistant manager of the USDA program. Trials this winter and spring will test whether birds can be kept away from dropped bait by using a less crumbly formulation, Marlow adds.
But for now, two major control methods are aerial shooting and remote-controlled traps that send cell pictures when a hog sounder is inside.
Some states, like Oklahoma, have legalized night hunting for feral swine. Derek Chisum, who grows peanuts, cotton and wheat in Hydro, Okla., figures he has killed 120 to 150 a year since hunting was legalized three years ago.
Kim Pepin, a research biologist at USDA’s National Wildlife Research Center, says hogs are so prolific that 70% of those in a given area must be killed each year to keep numbers stable.
In Texas, USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS. is targeting areas with the worst damage, teaching landowners how to continue the work after Farm Bill projects end in 2023, and leaving resources such as loaner traps, each $7,000 or more, to help.
“Even using this approach, we won’t have the resources to eradicate pigs in Texas in my lifetime,” Mike Bodenchuk, state director of APHIS says.
Researchers are still trying to get good numbers for populations and damages. The current estimate of at least $2.5 billion in annual national damages is up $1 billion from the 2014 estimate, and the number of pigs is now estimated at 6 to 9 million rather than 5 million.
The agency has been making surveys to improve damage estimates, but they’re still limited. Research economists say when a small group of farmers and ranchers were asked to consider the damages costs, estimates nearly tripled.
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