Pigs Gone Wild

This is what happens when farm animals go wild:

... An estimated 2 million wild hogs are causing $52 million a year in crop damage in Texas, according to agricultural experts. Pigs that they are, they eat just about anything, including the carcasses of their own brethren. They trample crops, dig up plants with their snouts and steal animal feed. Entire peanut farms have been stripped.

And the pasture-wrecking porkers are causing trouble well beyond farms. Authorities in Texas are reporting an increase in collisions between hogs and cars, while golf courses and suburbs are increasingly finding turf uprooted by hogs. ...

As the article notes, the state of Texas is now going to step up the approval of aerial hunting permits for these now-wild animals, descendants of a 300 year old population of hogs that probably escaped from the livestock stores of Spanish explorers.

The book 1491 by Charles C. Mann reports research estimates that the ancestors of these pigs, part of Hernando de Soto's traveling food supply, transmitted an unknown disease that wiped out 96 percent of the Southwest's Native American population. (And we may get a repeat, what with the methicillin resistant staph infections we're cultivating on our factory farms.) Since then, they've become a dominant species in the region, striking fear into the local coyotes.

They are large animals that have become highly aggressive and are non-native to the region. They're a feral safety hazard. They're a threat to human property and the food supply. They've caused millions of dollars in damage to the local economy. What should be done with them?

The state's solution seems harsh, but these animals aren't even considered good eating anymore and they sure can't be adopted as pets.

(Photo credit: m.prinke on Flickr.)