Hogs starting to move in

[Double Naught Spy]

Does the lion/coyote population increase with feral hogs present? I realize hogs can out-breed predators but seem like their only natural predators would feed on these pigs.

Coyotes will feed on the younger hogs. Mountain lions, wolves, bears and alligators will feed on any size of hog.

^^^This.^^^ And also, I have never known or herd of someone to completely eradicate wild hogs. If anyone else knows better speak up, and I will stand corrected.

Eradication is a fantasy or a misnomer, depending on how you look at it. I have been part of a group that removed all the hogs from an 800 acre high fence ranch and they were gone for about 1.5 years until something dug a big enough hole under the fence that they got in again.

You can kill off all the hogs on a given property and call it eradication, but it is temporary eradication with repopulation because you failed to kill all the hogs on all the surrounding properties and the properties surrounding those. If you consider removing all the hogs from a property to be eradication, I have eradicated hogs from my little 45 acre property dozens of times...only they came back, sometimes the next day.

With that said, of the various properties I hunt, most do not have anything approaching a significant hog problem. I engage in maintenance hunting of the hogs. Aside from multiple visits to properties each week to shoot interlopers that might happen to be present, whenever a landowner reports new damage, that property gets extra attention to quickly let the new invaders know that they are not welcome. So this maintenance hunting is just a form of mitigating the damage through regular and consistent pressure on the hogs that try to come back.

Somebody pointed out to me that I am simply driving the survivors onto other people's properties. That is true. In some cases, I hunt adjoining properties. In some cases I have tried to access the adjoining properties and have been turned down for various reasons.

Traps are great. I don't trap but have told several landowners that their properties are not conducive to dealing with hogs due to limited visibility, usually by vegetation, and sometimes due to neighboring houses or ranching concerns.

I have not been impressed by the amount of hogs taken by hog doggers in terms of quantity of hogs, but they can certainly sleuth out individual hogs in thick brush.

After attending a seminar and slide show presentation by a government hunter years ago, I'd never eat wild hog meat again. They can carry lots of foul diseases and they eat dead stuff. Sure, cooking can kill most or all that's dangerous to humans, but the thought of eating the meat of such a nasty critter doesn't sound very appetizing.

Hogs carry about 85% of the same things deer, elk, pronghorn, and (unvaccinated) cattle carry. Take deer for example, they carry some things hogs don't carry and vice versa, despite having so much in common. So which species is really worse? They all carry lots of diseases. All animals do. As for being nasty because they eat dead stuff, so do chickens, turkey, catfish, halibut, shark, lobster, crab, and shrimp.

 

[Hatrick]

All animals do. As for being nasty because they eat dead stuff, so do chickens, turkey, catfish, halibut, shark, lobster, crab, and shrimp.

So do we.