The bad news: You're gonna have 600-pound wild hogs running through your yard.
The good news: You're gonna have 600-pound wild hogs running through your yard.
Some of y'all know what I'm talking about: Hunting feral hogs is a great excuse to buy another liberty stick!
Here's the low-down on these feral beasts:
For decades, wild pigs have been antagonizing flora and fauna in the US: gobbling up crops, spreading disease and even killing deer and elk.
Now, as fears over the potential of the pig impact in the US grow, North America is also facing a new swine-related threat, as a Canadian "super pig", a giant, "incredibly intelligent, highly elusive" beast capable of surviving cold climates by tunneling under snow, is poised to infiltrate the north of the country.
There are 6 million feral hogs running across the US. While they've been around since the Spanish introduced pigs to North America 400 years ago, they've only surged in recent decades as dummies have purposely released them to create hunting populations (which soon got out of control).
Pigs are insanely good at surviving. They can eat practically anything and they easily grow to 250 pounds.
But these new hybrids are a whole new level.
Brook and others are particularly troubled by the emergence of a "super pig", created by farmers cross-breeding wild boar and domestic pigs in the 1980s. The result was a larger swine, which produced more meat, and was easier for people to shoot in Canadian hunting reserves.
These pigs escaped captivity and swiftly spread across Canada, with the super pig proving to be an incredibly proficient breeder, Brook said, while its giant size – one pig has been clocked at more than 300kg (661lbs) – makes it able to survive the frigid western Canada winters, where the wind chill can be -50C.
You are gonna need something bigger than 5.56 to take down a boar that size, my fellow Americans.
This insane size is what gives them the ability to survive in the harshest conditions across a variety of terrain.
"All the experts said at that time: ‘Well, no worries. If a wild pig or a wild boar ever escaped from a farm, there's no way it would survive a western Canadian winter. It would just freeze to death.'
"Well, it turns out that being big is a huge advantage to surviving in the cold."
The super pigs can burrow six feet into the snow, creating a snow cave to survive the winter.
Heaven help you if you fall into that demon lair without a weapon!
"They'll use their razor-sharp tusks to cut down cattails [a native plant], and line the bottom of the cave with cattails as a nice warm insulating layer.
"And in fact, they're so warm inside that one of the ways we use to find these pigs is to fly first thing in the morning when it's really cold, colder than -30, and you will actually see steam just pouring out the top of the snow."
Feral hogs currently do more than $1.5 BILLION in damage every year. They eat crops, fauns, turkey eggs – you name it, absolutely destroying ecosystems (and killing a few unlucky souls here and there).
One method that has worked in the US, Brook said, is the use of a "Judas pig". A lone pig is captured and fitted with a GPS collar, then released into the wild, where hopefully it will join a group of unsuspecting swine.
"The idea is that you go and find that collared animal, remove any pigs that are with it, and in ideal world then let it go again and it will just continue to find more and more pigs," Brook said.
If you're wondering what hog-hunting with boomsticks looks like, the boys in Texas know how to do it:
[Warning: Hunting Violence, Language]
