5000 Pigs Killed to Save Park

That's a lot of bacon.

There are hog culling videos on YouTube. The number of feral hogs in places like Texas is amazing. The farmers use infrared scopes and hunt the armies of them at night. I hate to say it but I root for the farmers.

Rabbits in Australia are another bad one. It was really bad but they ended up using biological warfare on them. It greatly reduced their numbers but you can't eat their rabbits because they are infected. They do still do night culls because some are resistant. Tasmania using a number of methods actually became rabbit free.

Australia also has a feral cat problem. Being a cat lover cat culling video are pretty upsetting although being a cat lover I know too well what efficient hunters they are. Cats put a pretty big dent in the bird population here in the US.

The pigs were invasive so they had to go. Sorta wish a bunch had been sent to pork farms, probably for different feeding before the inevitable conversion to pork chops, bacon, etc.. but likely no way to make that economically even with marketing.

I have very mixed feelings about this. After all, the pigs didn't ask to be brought here. And from a purely practical standpoint, I do not believe any efforts to eradicate wild hog populations are going to be successful. Pigs are extremely intelligent and adaptable, and they breed year-round. We have been overrun in many areas here in Texas, so I have seen firsthand the damage they can inflict on the landscape. There are intensive hunting and trapping efforts, which are barely making a dent. We humans eradicated most of the apex predators in North America, then introduced pigs into the wild and are now treating wild pigs as enemies. But, as usual, "the enemy is us".

When I was very young and not quite legal to work on a farm I wanted to work and earn enough money to travel America. One of the farmers I worked for had several locations of pig operations, one for fattening up the ones headed for market, another for getting the sows pregnant and the new state of the art barn for the birthing and weaning. At the fattening area there was one day that I had to castrate 80 pigs. First I had to catch them, them do the cutting and squirt a solution to guard against infection. They were smaller at that point. The sows getting pregnant were big. There was one boar and he was huge and mean. The birthing place they had large litters and the little pigs were fun to pet. The pigs were super smart. That farmer had a friend who was also a farmer and he was always drunk. One day both of them disappeared for a few days on some kind of bender and I grew bored so I tossed a pack of firecrackers into the pen with the fattening pigs. They were curious and all gathered around the firecrackers pushing each other to get close and see if it was good to eat. Then the firecrackers started popping and the pigs stampeded into the pole barn and hit the side so hard they pealed off the bottom two 2x12s and just kept going until they disappeared over the horizon. I was stunned but hey I was also 15 years old and just nailed the 2x12s back on and covered the firecracker material. He returned the next day and I told him that they had disappeared so we went and rounded them all up. That was actually kind of fun. Then since they had tasted freedom they found ways to escape every single day which left me off the hook. Yes they are super smart.

I also know a fellow in Mississippi who is dealing with very destructive feral hog populations and he uses an AR-15 every time he drives anywhere. I’m very glad I don’t have to deal with that. The feral hogs can destroy the environment for all the native species like the rabbits in Australia do.

After working on the farms for two summers I put it all down to experience, did travel America, never went back home and decided I’d never do manual labor for a career ever again. It was a self fulfilling prophecy.