72 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED
do I do about feral hogs in my yard? he was posing
a somewhat valid question, however ridiculous it
may have seemed to the countless appalled com-
menters who jumped into the fray. Someday, though,
they’ll understand, as this invasion is spreading.
Wild pigs can live just about anywhere—in swamps
and forests and brush, in climes warm and cold.
Three decades ago they inhabited 20 U.S. states;
that number has since doubled. And where they
already were, now there are even more. Since the
1960s, California’s wild pig population, for example,
has swelled from roughly 100 to some 300,000.
Texas, though, is something else: Feral hogs can
be found in 253 of 254 counties. And given their
prolific breeding, at least two-thirds of that popula-
tion—upward of 1.7million pigs—must
be killed each year simply to keep the
count level. Current efforts, however,
are estimated to accomplish less than
half of that culling.
“There are probably a dozen states,
including Texas,” says Billy Higgin-
botham, professor emeritus of Wild-
life and Fisheries at TexasA&M, where
“eradication is not even on the table.”
The more realistic goal is merely a
greater measure of control.
But control doesn’t spark the motiva-
tional appeal of eradication, and eradica-
tion doesn’t hold the gravitational allure
of hunting. So ingenuity equal parts en-
trepreneurial and Texan has birthed an
industry to limit this porcine destruc-
tion. For as little as $1,000 (and as much
as $12,000, with add-ons like lodging
and unlimited ammo) a hunter or wan-
nabe hunter can book a helicopter ride
for the purpose of gunning down wild
pigs, typically with an assault rifle. “The customer
wants to go hunting; we want to go eradicating,”
says Barrett Blume, the owner of one such outfit.
“We make this blend of compromise and we do
both.” The name of his operation: Last Shadow,
referring to the silhouette cast by a chopper—the
final thing a pig in the crosshairs will see.
Wild pigs, by all accounts, make entertaining
quarry for these sportsmen. They’re smart, elu-
sive and faster than you think—up to 30 mph at
a sprint. And that very appeal is, essentially, the
root of the whole problem. America’s love of pigs
as sport-hunting fodder has sowed a situation it
can’t shoot its way out of. And might not want to.
“If they were not fun to hunt, we would not
be in the shape we’re in,” says Higginbotham, a
beard’s worth of mustache framing his mouth on
three sides. “And I term it to be: We’re in a war.”
GO BACK A FEW
decades, as recently as the early 1980s, and you’re
unlikely to see any signs of this man-versus-pig
conflict in the U.S. In fact, until Europeans began
showing up a few centuries earlier, there were no
pigs anywhere on the continent. Christopher Co-
lumbus brought eight of them to what is now Cuba
on his second trans-Atlantic voyage, in 1493. Al-
most 45years later the Spanish explorer Hernando
deSoto scooped up a dozen members of that Cuban
lineage for his trip into NorthAmerica, beginning
near modern-day TampaBay. In both cases the
idea was the same: Pigs made a perfect mobile
food source, and they could repopulate their stock
while foraging for themselves. By the time deSoto
died, three years into his journey, even after scores
of pigs had escaped or were butchered or traded
with locals, the pig population in his exploration
party had ballooned beyond 700.
With more Europeans came more pigs, some-
times by the hundreds. It wasn’t until the late
19thcentury, though, that the real trouble started.
That’s when America’s burgeoning ultrawealthy
began importing wild boars from Europe to stock
hunting preserves as far north as NewHampshire
and NewYork’s AdirondackMountains. Many of the
animals in the hunting grounds escaped and seeded
wild populations around the region, often cross-
breeding with feral domesticated pigs, spreading
farther and farther out. At the same time, existing
populations to the south were wreaking increasing
havoc. After famed landscape architect Frederick
Law Olmsted visited Texas in the mid-1800s and
RO
LF N
USSBAU
MER PH
OTO
GRAPH
Y/ALAM
Y STO
CK PH
OTO
S WI N E
COUNTRY
From front lawns
to fields of corn
(and sugarcane
and wheat and
oats and peanuts),
pigs pose serious
problems to
Texans of
every ilk.
FERAL
HOGS
