You wouldn't think that California would be a likely state for declaring jihad on any sort of wild animal, but the state isn't dealing with just any wild animal—it's suffering from a glut of destructive feral hogs:
[Rampaging feral hogs] are tearing up lawns, ripping through golf course fairways, threatening the drinking water and disturbing the harvests at Napa vineyards. Many Californians want them dead.
Rich residents of San Francisco be like:
Seriously, if it's driving Palo Alto's legions of vegan homeowners to the point that they want to straight-up shoot a bunch of wild animals, it must be bad.
And believe me, it is:
In California, 56 of the state's 58 counties have wild pigs. The swine are inflicting a mounting economic toll in Lafayette, a suburb in the East Bay, where the pig invasion seems most acute. Before the pandemic the city shelled out $110,000 when pigs, rooting for grubs, churned soccer and baseball fields like a rototiller. The Park and Recreation Department installed fences around the fields and keeps a trapper on contract to capture and kill the pigs. Recently neighbors have been waking up to find their lawns churned into clumpy heaps of sod and dirt...
Nearby, and more potentially serious, are the hundreds of pigs that have invaded the creek beds that feed into the San Leandro reservoir, which at certain times provides drinking water for Oakland, Piedmont, Alameda, Hayward and other East Bay cities.
The pigs are figuring it out: If you control the water, you control everything.
Legislation proposed by the California state legislature would "remove a requirement that hunters buy a $25 'tag,' the legal right to hunt one pig." The end result would be "all year long you will be able to hunt as many pigs as you want."
In the meantime, residents often have to rely on professional trappers to nab the destructive beasts in the dead of night, like so:
If nothing else, you get some good wild boar sausage out of the deal!
Best of luck to you, California, hope you bag a lot of em!
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