Solving a Pig Problem

Yeah, absolutely.

Lots to talk about.

[laughs]

Could you define what a feral hog is versus a wild pig, and then kind of tell us how they got here to North America?

Well, they got here, we know for sure, as, as far back as the 1500s.

We know de Soto brought hogs with him on his explorations to feed his, his group, and, uh, they reproduced so fast that they couldn't eat 'em as fast as they were reproducin', so some of them were left.

We've had 'em here in Missouri for probably, you know, a long time, since the days of open range, but they really didn't start becoming a problem here in Missouri till maybe the mid-1990s, and that's when we really started gettin' a lot of damage.

The feral hogs that we have here are kind of, uh, I guess you'd call mutts.

They, some of them have some y- you know, Russian boar in 'em, European wild hog, some that were just, you know, farmers just kicked out 'cause they didn't want 'em anymore.

You know, uh, there's times where pork prices get low enough that they, it doesn't pay to raise 'em and they just release 'em, or they get out.

I don't know if you've ever had hogs, but they're pretty hard to keep in.

You gotta have a pretty good fence.

So all these things just go out and mix together, and they're runnin' wild and, and they eat anything.

They can pretty much adapt to any climate.

They're found in Canada, they're found in Hawaii, they're found in Texas, they're found in Michigan, California, New York, and they have tremendous reproductive rates.

So, um, yeah, they're, they're kinda like the perfect invasive species.

But we also have pure, kinda pure genetic strains of the Russian or European wild boar-

Yeah

... that have been introduced as well, right?

Yeah.

We have that in some of our strains as well, where they've been introduced over time by people that wanted to hunt them before some of these laws were changed-

Right

... and we were able to really get on top of this population here in Missouri.

That was kind of part of how they got going in the mid-'90s here in Missouri, is that people started bringing 'em in to hunt, put 'em in, you know, they were bringing 'em in, putting 'em in high fence facilities.

And again, they're really hard to keep behind a fence.