Officials used corral-like traps to round up as many individuals of a sounder (a group of hogs) as they could and then euthanized the animals. In a previous effort, they helped fund control efforts in less-densely populated states. That’s why the USDA has poured money into fending off the swine. They’ve even been found to eat dusky gopher toads, an endangered species, according to a USDA spokesperson. On Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy moved quickly to wipe the island of pigs after they discovered that the animals had been rooting through archeological sites belonging to the Chumash, a Native American group whose presence in the state dates back as much as 11,000 years. Feral pigs have damaged cultural and archeological resources. If it hopped the pond, wild pigs could quickly spread the deadly disease, bringing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to the pork industry here, says Mayer. African swine fever is currently devastating the Asian and European pork industry. That’s not only a public health concern-it could destroy the nation’s livestock. Importantly, feral swine are a vector for diseases that spread to both domestic pigs and humans. Swine waste also introduces pathogens and nutrients into water, posing a health risk and contributing to algal blooms and fish kills downstream. These activities lead to loss of plants, soil erosion, and increased sediment in streams. They also need to wallow in water to cool off. Perhaps the worst impacts are to watersheds-pigs love living around and rooting through these areas. About half of that $2 billion in damage is agricultural impacts. It’s not just that they voraciously eat anything edible, but they also vigorously root around in the soil as they search for food, leading to their nickname “the rototillers of nature.” They also wreck areas through repeated trampling. The hogs literally tear up fields, especially in the Southeast. This is bad news for farmers, conservationists, and even archaeologists. They are “opportunistic omnivores,” which is a fancy way of saying “if it’s got a calorie in it and they can get their mouth around it, they’ll try to eat it,” says Mayer. Meanwhile, they thrive almost anywhere between the Arctic and the tropics and females can birth two litters every year. And while plenty of non-human predators would enjoy some pork-including mountain lions, alligators, coyotes, and hawks-there are just too many pigs to make a dent. To wipe out a population, you need to shoot 60 to 80 percent a year, says Mayer, but recreational hunting can only cut their numbers by about a quarter. Once they’re out in the open, feral hogs simply breed too fast for hunters to keep up. Even when the new hunting spots are fenced properties, the swine are notoriously good at digging their way out and escaping. Hunters love to shoot them so they transport the animals to new areas. But even when state officials encouraged sport hunting for the explicit purpose of curbing the tidal wave of pigs, it’s backfired. Now, they’re the second most popular game animal after white-tailed deer. In the 1950s and 60s, says Mayer, wildlife departments promoted pig hunting and sometimes even stocked the animals. Today, America’s feral swine include wild boar, escaped domestic pigs, and hybrids of the two. Then, in the 1900s, sport hunters imported wild boars. The pigs’ rooting and wallowing all began in the 1500s, when European settlers brought them to the states for food. “This situation has been described as the greatest emerging wildlife challenge that the United States faces in the 21st century,” says John “Jack” Mayer, a biologist Savannah River National Laboratory who’s been studying wild pigs for over 40 years. According to the USDA, they cause $2 billion in damage every year. Today, they number an estimated nearly seven million and have established themselves in 35 states (and have been spotted in 48!). But officials in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas face significant challenges, not just due to the pigs’ rapid feeding and breeding, but also because of their value as game. The effort is focused on areas where the hogs are causing the most damage, primarily in the Southeast. Department of Agriculture recently announced $75 million in funding toward a pilot program to control feral pigs. They’re smart, secretive, adaptable-and have an appetite for everything in sight.

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