Trying to outsmart a feral pig

Let me introduce you to that fearsome member of the swine set, the wild hog.

They start having sex when they’re still half-grown. They breed year round and can produce as many as 30 piglets in a single year. And they travel in big family clans.

They will eat you out of house and home, and, by rooting with their large, tough, armor-like snouts, they leave a helluva mess behind. They are known as “opportunistic omnivores,” which is just a way to use eight syllables to say “pigs.”

Feral hogs are rooting around more than two-thirds of New Mexico counties, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has given New Mexico $1 million to figure out how to outsmart the hogs so that successful tracking and trapping techniques can be used in the dozens of other states where the wild pigs have set up shop.

If you think feral pigs sound more like rednecks than Rhodes scholars and that it shouldn’t take a million bucks to outsmart them, apparently you have never tried to trap one.

I consulted Ken Gioeli, a wild pig expert at the University of Florida, about the wily ways of feral pigs. I was especially interested in their intelligence quotient, after state Land Commissioner Ray Powell, a veterinarian, recently told The Associated Press that wild pigs “are really smart.”

Providing campaign mailer fodder for political opponents for years to come, Powell said, “They’re much brighter than I am.” He added that if the pigs “had the dexterity,” they’d be driving cars.

Yes, but are they smart enough to figure out how to navigate a roundabout?

Are they smart enough to pass a third-grade reading test?

Could they find the bathroom at the Roundhouse on a single pass?

Gioeli, unfamiliar with the New Mexico version of the IQ test, told me the pigs are not so much book smart as canny.

“I don’t think they’re going to be doing any math anytime soon,” he said.

The pigs are garden-variety barnyard pigs that have gotten loose and over generations developed thicker hides, bigger tusks, Olympic speed and different social mores. What can wild pigs do? Run up to 30 mph, jump a 3-foot fence, swim across two miles of open water.

“They can outrun a person,” Gioeli said. And although they generally are vegetarians, they can and will eat just about anything their size or smaller. It’s the pigs’ vegetarian diet that causes great damage to the land -ranches, parks, dirt roads, golf courses.

“They have these really nasty tusks,” Gioeli said. They use their snout and tusks to root for tubers and other plant matter, and they do enormous damage. “They do it not to be antagonistic to people,” he said, “but because it’s their nature” to dig for tubers and roots.

They’re also quick learners. Gioeli said a study of land managers in Florida found that their efforts to reduce the ranks of bad hogs were only marginally effective in half the cases and completely ineffective in another 25 percent. When hunters went after the pigs during the day, the pigs started napping during the daylight and carousing at night. When hunters tried baiting them with corn and traps, they quickly learned to avoid the temptation.

“The hogs wise up to that pretty fast,” Gioeli said. “Somehow, it’s communicated to the population, this is a trap.”

The most effective method to emerge from the Florida research was large steel corral traps, 20 feet by 20 feet, with a spring-loaded entrance gate and a bucket of fermented corn alcohol buried in the middle. The goal is to lure a pack of pigs (known as a “sounder”) through the propped-open door and into the corral with a trail of corn leading to the hooch.

To a pig, Gioeli said, “That alcohol slurry is the best thing since spring break.”

After three or four nights of corn chomping and slurry slurping, you spring-load the gate. The pigs – sometimes 10 to 20 in a line – run into the corral, and this time the gate slams shut behind them.

They’re shot to death, turned into roasts and chops and eaten.

Problem solved – for now.

“The way to get them is to outsmart them,” Gioeli said. But to outsmart a feral hog, he said, you have to think like a feral hog, which means trying to figure out how the feral hog is going to outsmart you. Like manipulating a gate hinge or burrowing out under a buried steel fence, for example?

As to New Mexico’s quest, Gioeli said he hopes some great control methods emerge. But he said eradicating the pigs in New Mexico is wishful thinking.

“Once they get a toehold, it’s not about eradication,” he said. “It’s about management.”

Gioeli is also part of Florida’s “python patrol,” the effort to stem the tide of invasive Burmese pythons in the Sunshine State. He told me an interesting fact about his python research: Scientists have cut open dead pythons in Florida and found … feral pigs!

So you mean if we really want to get rid of feral pigs in New Mexico, we should import Burmese pythons?

“Oh, God, no!” Gioeli said. “Be careful what you wish for!”

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal