Sports Illustrated - USA (2020-02)

FEBRUARY 2020 71

nearly impossible to control. They can scale five-

feet-high fences or burrow through almost anything

they can get their noses under. They wreck barri-

ers, freeing livestock and other animals, to whom

they may pass on any of dozens of diseases and

parasites, or whose young they may settle on as

meals. Feral hogs can disrupt entire ecosystems by

competing with local wildlife for vegetation or by

rooting out seedlings. Although they typically flee

from and rarely bother humans (the 2019 death of

a Texas woman in a hog attack was an outlier; Mets

outfielder Yoenis Céspedes’s recent hog-related

injury was tied to his trapping a pig), they still

wreak havoc on any number of man’s pursuits,

destroying historical sites, ripping up golf courses,

contaminating water supplies. They decimate crops,

devouring fields of corn, sugarcane, wheat, oats,

melons, pumpkins and whatever else they find

appetizing, typically leaving farmland too ravaged

to reharvest. It’s not unheard of for a farmer to

take a $70,000 hit overnight. In fact, the federal

estimate of the total annual damage done by wild

pigs is $1.5billion. One USDA researcher has called

them “the worst invasive species we’ll ever see.”

All of which is to say: When one Arkansan last

summer went viral by jumping into a Twitter debate

about assault rifles and asking, essentially, But what

This is not quite hunting. At least not so far as the

sport is generally conceived. It’s more like hunting’s

souped-up, ecologically inspired cousin—an inten-

sification many see as necessary in taming a chaos

for which more traditional hunting is to blame.

Wild pigs—a catchall term, synonymous with

“feral hogs” or “razorbacks,” that includes escaped

domesticated swine and their descendants; wild

boars; and crossbreeds between the two—are not

typical pigs, or even typical wild animals. Compared

with the pigs found on farms and in children’s

books, they have thicker hides, leaner builds, longer

and darker hair, and sometimes tusks. An average

wild pig weighs around 150 pounds, but it’s not

unusual to see triple that. As species go, they’re

aggressively invasive and, crucially, prodigious,

able to breed at less than 12 months old, produc-

ing an average of two five-to-six-pig litters every

two years. World over, the wild pig population

is estimated between seven and eight million, of

which some 2.6million could reasonably consider

themselves Texans.

Which wouldn’t be such a problem except that

wild pigs don’t become a part of their environment

so much as they rampage through it. They have

incredible senses of smell, aggressively omnivorous

appetites and athletic capabilities that leave them

FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, as pigs snorted and snuffed

their way across the planet, evolving and learning to dodge

gray wolves and tigers and coyotes and alligators, they were

almost assuredly safe from any potential threats from the sky.

¶ Then they arrived in Texas, where in addition to the rare

predatory large mammal, a wild pig today might be forced to

evade, for example, a cascade of 5.56-caliber bullets fired from

a hundred-odd feet above by an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle in

the hands of some adventurous tourist from Pennsylvania or

Mexico or Australia. Unfortunately for said pig, evolution has

not yet blessed him with the neck flexibility needed to look up.

Thus, he hears only the thundering roar of a helicopter before

it all goes down. He’ll run around, searing bursts piercing

the ground around him, until inevitably he’s struck, usually

a number of times, left to die in a scrub of brush or a field of

cotton or a row of cornstalks. The chopper will fly away, only

to move on to some other unsuspecting, ground-focused pig.

A lot of people in Texas would say this does not happen enough.