FEBRUARY 2020 75
So, end pig hunting? Blume would sooner double
down. He wants greater coordination between the
helicopter companies, maybe even state subsidiza-
tion to fill the periods when customers dry up. He
wants to combat the perception that he and his
ilk are a bunch of yahoos. He wants the general
public to understand the environmental and eco-
nomic impact of wild pigs, to grasp the science of
eradication. And he wants to rent a satellite—to
see even better, from even higher, where the pigs
are and where they’re headed.UNDER A VIVID
July sun, Potts fires up the Last Shadow chopper,
christened Clarice (as in “Silence of the Hams,”
Potts jokes), for a demo run over central Texas.
The vehicle glides over above-ground pools and
unbothered steer and backyards the size of par-4s,
eventually arriving at acres and acres of open field.
Last Shadow’s safety officer, an amiable skydiving
devotee named Ashley Lewis, is strapped in the
back with a (safetied) assault rifle across her lap.
In her four months on the job, this will be her first
time actually shooting at pigs from the air—if they
find any. Of that there’s no guarantee. Earlier, she
rode for an hour with a quartet of Long Island
teens and didn’t see a single hog.
Potts cruises at 400 feet for a fruitless 15 minutes,
the possibility of another shutout looming. “There
are pigs out here, I know it,” he says into a helmet
headset. “They probably see us.” He’s fond of saying
that the minute you claim to know what a pig will
do is the minute said pig has made a liar of you.
Clarice is sailing over fields of cotton and corn,
most of the rows marred by empty patches where
pigs rooted out seeds, when Potts slows the chopper
and announces, “Here we go.” A dozen or so swine
scurry out from the brush and Potts descends below
30 feet. “Go ahead, Ashley—bang-bang-bang,” he
says. And she does. Bang-bang-bang. A large gray
hog in the back of the group, maybe 150 pounds,
drops. More bursts of fire, and a few more pigs fall.
The rest get away.
“They’re laughing at me,” Lewis says.
“They’re running from you,” Potts tells her.
“Yeah. Running and laughing.”
Eventually a straggler darts out from a bush, into
some tall grass, knocking the haulms about as it
sprints, and Lewis fires until it stops. Potts lowers
the helicopter, and the air parts the grass where
the pig is lying. It raises its head, then collapses
into stillness.
In the end, after half an hour or so, Lewis’s tally
will have reached six for the day. The same number
born in one litter, to one pig, somewhere among
the millions not seen. ±all the time,” says one area crop insurer. “‘What’s
the helicopter guy’s number?’”)
The blowback, though, is real. Animal-rights
groups take issue with how many wild pigs are
maimed in such hunts, not killed. (“This seems
like it’s potentially not a part of a controlled, pre-
cise management network,” says the Humane
Society’s John Griffin.) Some experts also contend
that the chasing and hunting of pigs, on land or
by air, will only drive populations back and forth
between properties—or, worse, split sounders (as
a group of pigs is called) into smaller units that
may settle in new areas.
Mayer, the SouthCarolina biologist, believes
that real eradication would require eliminating all
financial incentive for wild pigs to persist, and as
things stand, there’s a mini-economy built around
their existence: the chopper companies and night-
hunting outfits, the suppliers of specialized hog-
hunting equipment, the meat purveyors who buy
and sell trapped pigs, the restaurants that serve
wildpig dishes, the land owners who lease their
land for hunts.... “That’s a lot of revenue that’s
gonna disappear,” Mayer says. “You get money
involved, it just complicates everything.”
At the core of all this is the question of how
impactful hunting (even the relatively efficient
aerial variety) can be. Blume says that Last Shadow
kills as many as 1,200 pigs in a quarter. But even
if you extrapolate that number across the entire
industry, in all of Texas—say, 50 companies over
four quarters, killing 240,000 pigs a year—it’s
nothing compared with the 1.8million that would
need to be removed annually just to cap the state’s
population growth. “Hunting alone won’t get this
done,” says Bodenchuk, the Texas-based USDA
biologist. “They want to turn a literal sow’s ear
into an actual purse, and it’s not working.”
Not that Texas would benefit from putting an end
to pig hunting altogether, as Missouri and Tennes-
see have done. “We’ve got such a large population
now,” says Higginbotham, “that it wouldn’t do any
good to say we’re gonna stop.”
In the meantime, some suggest that the hunt
itself is getting harder. When bookings are slow
at Last Shadow, Blume and Potts will often fly
maintenance trips, as a service to landowners.
And they’ve noticed that the pigs—who over re-
cent decades have become increasingly nocturnal,
to avoid human hunters—are adapting to their
pursuit, sometimes sending one pig into the open
as a diversion while others head elsewhere. “No
matter what,” Blume says, “there’s always gonna
be something they’re scheming.” (Potts likes to joke
that the pigs are collecting brass out in the field,
planning to someday retaliate.)