By Rod Walton
As printed in the Tulsa World, June 11, 2008.
It's bad enough that feral hogs already root up so much farmland throughout Oklahoma, but it's another thing altogether when it's your property.
The wild pig problem got personal for Locust Grove blueberry farmer Jim Baker here in the last year or two. Baker and many of his neighbors are up in arms over the uncontrolled swine herds rushing in at night, tearing up rows at his Berry Creek Blueberry Farm and, maybe worst of all, hurting his dog.
"You got to start carrying a gun," Baker said, adding that he's killed more than a hundred feral hogs in the past two years. "They've dug up over a thousand of my plants. It took seven years to get those to the point of production."
Because of prolific breeding and an apparent will to survive, it's taken feral hogs less than two decades to go from regional nuisance to establishing themselves in every Oklahoma county, according to reports. They are now causing untold thousands, maybe millions of dollars' worth of damage to pastures, orchards and even backyards.
Salina rancher DeAndra Butcher and her husband Bill are even afraid to let family members loose on the outer reaches of their Foothills Farm for fear of encounters with the unkept swine.
"We got a big family, with eight children and their grandchildren," Butcher said. "They used to be able to go and camp on the hill, but I'd never let them go up anymore."
Some experts say that feral hogs are a boar-ish pain in the behind and pocketbook, but they are hardly a threat to human life unless trapped and cornered. Noble Foundation researcher Russell Stevens has studied the loose pigs for decades and compiled his observations in a 1992 book, "The Feral Hog in Oklahoma," which is being revised this year because of the animal's population explosion.
A 1999 national report indicated that feral hogs were confirmed in 55 of Oklahoma's 77 counties. A Noble Foundation survey last year determined that only three counties – Tulsa, Woods and Grant – did not have populations of wild pigs, but likely played host to incidents involving the animals.
"They're probably there," Stevens said. "We just haven't found them."
Farmers and ranchers elsewhere across Oklahoma have been finding them way too easily. The feral pigs are known to root out and damage pasture lands in western rangeland as well as planted fields or pecan orchards in eastern parts of the state.
"It's just awful the destruction they can deal out," said Jack Carson, spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry. "We've seen them in areas where farmers plant peanuts; the hogs go out and root it up and it literally looks like a plowed field."
The feral pigs' invasion is partially due to its baby boom, as a wild sow typically gives birth to more litters and can wean 10 to 12 piglets annually, according to reports.
In addition, the hogs will eat meat, vegetation, worms or whatever they need to survive.
And they're not all that pigheaded after all, which is why Baker would rather shoot than trap them.
"They get trap-wise really quickly," the blueberry farmer said. "They are way more intelligent than I am, and I've never seen anything with so much will to survive."
Feral pigs originally became a problem in southeastern Oklahoma as domesticated pigs escaped and banded together for survival. Another source came earlier in the 20th century as imported Russian boars were brought in for hunting expeditions but, obviously, got away.
Some blame other landowners for the current infestation because they bring in animals for modern-day hunts.
Residents troubled by wild hogs are allowed to shoot them, although they need state permission to fire away at night. However, Stevens took issue with the contention that feral hogs are so dangerous that children cannot camp in the woods anymore.
"I've heard reports of feral hogs attacking people," he said. "In my experience, feral hogs want to get away from you just as fast. They'll stay away unless they're provoked."
Some of the hysteria iswarranted if the hogs' victim is a farmer's crop, Stevens pointed out. The feral herds do real damage to farms and may be best controlled with a combination of shooting, trapping and fencing, although that last option is expensive.
Getting completely rid of them is unlikely.
"It gets worse and worse," Carson said. "They are not going to eradicate them; there's too many of them, the way they breed."
Farmers and ranchers like Baker and Butcher are ready to try cutting the feral hog numbers down the best they know how. Yet the pigs are smart, too.
"I got a tree stand, I put cameras out to see what their habits are," Baker said. "Then I go sit in a tree and they don't show. How do they do that?"
This article appeared in the Tulsa World,
www.tulsaworld.com, on June 11, 2008.
1997-2008 by The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Inc.
Subject: here is a article about hawgs 
July 11th 2009, 1:32 pm
