Wildlife and the Outdoors
Controlling your wild hog infestation By David Rainer
Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources
Playing catch-up is a difficult task in almost every endeavor. That’s especially true when the issue at hand is the explosion in the feral hog population. I heard a story last week from a hog hunter who had trapped and relocated a group of hogs to the Tombigbee River swamp in the 1980s before everyone
managers and landowners knew something had to be done about the burgeoning wild hog population. Since 2003, Steve Ditchkoff, the William R. & Fay Ireland Distinguished Professor at Auburn University’s School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, has been involved in wild pig research. In 2004,
Wild hogs cause between $50 million and $100 million in damages in Alabama every year
realized what a destructive force an unchecked wild hog could become. The complicit owner of the swamp told the hog hunter, “If I knew then what I know now, I’d have killed you and the hogs.” While that statement might be a bit over the top, landowners with feral hog infestations know the damage these eating machines can wreak. Early in the previous decade, wildlife
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Ditchkoff and noted wild pig expert Jack Mayer of the Savannah River National Laboratory in Georgia introduced the International Wild Pig Conference; it has been held every two years since. This year’s conference, held recently at the Embassy Suites in Montgomery, hosted 250 attendees from all over the world. “We know the wild pig problem is growing,” Ditchkoff said during a break at the conference. “We have pigs popping up
in areas where they were not before. Damage has to be increasing. We were talking about how poor our damage estimates are. $1.5 billion in agriculture damage is the estimate we always use nationally – that’s based on $300 per pig – but that’s a guess. Some people project the damage is in the multiples of billions. In Alabama, the estimate is between $50 and $100 million. We think that’s a conservative estimate.” Ditchkoff said the greatest concentration of pigs in Alabama is in the lower coastal plains below I-85 with significant densities north of Mobile Bay in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. “We’re starting to get a measles sort of distribution across the state with little spots here and little spots there,” he said. Ditchkoff said the distribution problem has been exacerbated by people with trucks and trailers. “People ask how fast pigs spread,” he said. “One of our presenters said, ‘They move at 70 miles per hour – in the back of a pickup truck.’ Pigs move extremely slowly on their own. This is a human problem. The vast majority of these pockets popping up are due to hunters releasing them. “Even then, can you really stop them? We’ve got people who say, ‘We want pigs and we don’t care how it’s going to affect anybody else.’” When feral pigs show up in an area, Ditchkoff said the only viable option to deal with the infestation is trapping with a plan. “Strategic trapping is the only way to do it,” he said. “I don’t care about how many pigs you kill. I only care about how many you left behind that can reproduce. “We developed a trapping strategy at Auburn and cleared 20,000 acres at Fort Benning (Ga.). You can do it if you do it
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