FEBRUARY 2020 73
like that old saying: Don’t mess with Mother Na-
ture,” says Jack Mayer, a biologist at Savannah River
National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C. “It’s something
we did to ourselves.”
Nowhere did nature retaliate worse, though, than
in Texas. Some farmers in the state have taken so
many hits to high-value harvests, such as peanuts
and corn, that they’ve shifted to lower-valued crops,
like cotton, which pigs find less attractive. There are
endangered toads whose breeding grounds are regu-
larly ruined and sea turtles on the GulfCoast whose
eggs are gobbled up like popcorn. Cars routinely
collide with massive hogs on Highway130, outside
Austin. More than 100 springs in the state are con-
taminated with swine-related E.coli. In 2014, onechurch outside Houston was so worried about its
annual pumpkin sale that it enlisted armed guards
to stand watch over the patch at night.
“In 1982 the USDA killed 86 feral hogs” in Texas,
says Mike Bodenchuk, a San Antonio–based wildlife
biologist. “Thirty years later we’re killing 30,000.
We look at other states—Kansas, Missouri—and
say, ‘You guys are where we were 30 years ago. You
don’t wanna be where we are today.’”
How to prevent that future? Hog traps with
built-in cameras controlled by smartphone can
cost more than $6,000. In Texas the agricultural
department tried to fast-track a warfarin-based
poison, but there were too many concerns about
killing other animals who might eat the bait—or
the deceased hog.
Support for any large-scale effort is hard to
garner. Pigs present an off-beat problem that manysaw pigs raid his camp nightly, he wrote that he
was “annoyed by hogs beyond all description.”
In a way, the story of wild pigs paralleled that
of their newfound home: a product of European
colonialism come to pillage the continent, expand-
ing ad infinitum.
These two stories began to intersect in a con-
cerning way in the late 1980s, when the wild pig
population started to soar, from some twomillion
across the U.S. to nearly four times that now. It was
an explosion long coming. Across the Southeast, as
well as in California, game departments had been
stocking pigs, promoting them as a huntable big-
game resource. Elsewhere, residents had started
to leave feed for wildlife, like white-tailed deer andquail, in order to foster populations for hunting—
which meant unwittingly supporting local pigs, too.
The biggest contributors to the problem, though,
says Higginbotham, were scofflaw hunters. The
more they enjoyed hunting wild pigs, the more
places they sought to do so. That meant trapping
loose swine where they already lived and releasing
them where they did not, to seed new populations.
Suddenly, the people most interested in killing wild
pigs were expanding the animals’ territory even
faster than the pigs could themselves. Which is why
modern distribution maps show isolated clusters
in places like Illinois, Michigan, NorthDakota
and Washington.Enthusiastic as those hunters
may have been, the relocated pigs bred faster than
they could be killed off. Soon, the very things that
humans had for so long liked about the animals
BILLY H rendered them an ungovernable nightmare. “It’s