Miller on tape: Safeguard for feral hog bait ‘not doable,’
Continuing its fight with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller over his promotion of a bait that he has said would hasten the “feral hog apocalypse,” a coalition of hog hunters and environmentalists has released a months-old audio clip in which the commissioner seems to suggest that a safeguard involving the product is “not doable.”
The release of the recording, made by a concerned rancher from Northeast Texas, appears to be part of an effort to pressure Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, to allow a vote on House Bill 3451, which would require further study of the warfarin-laced bait.
Warfarin is used as a rat poison and as a blood thinner for humans.
The bill, which was passed by the Texas House in April, has not yet received a vote in Perry’s Agriculture, Water and Rural Affairs Committee, preventing it from making it to the Senate floor.
Miller has heavily promoted Kaput Feral Hog Bait as an antidote to a Texas scourge — the fast-growing hog population is responsible for millions of dollars in damage to Texas farms and golf courses annually.
Rancher Bruce Hunnicutt runs cattle and farms hay on about 3,000 acres spanning Franklin and Titus counties — and said in an interview with the American-Statesman that hunters kill 200 to 300 hogs on his property annually.
He said news of the bait plan worried him, and eventually, after Miller personally returned a call from Hunnicutt, Rep. Gary Van-Deaver, R-New Boston, arranged for them to have a face-to-face chat in early March. The meeting came as Miller was trying to respond to spreading alarm about the plan.
With Miller’s permission, Hunnicutt made the recording, he said.
“I got people coming all the way from Canada to kill hogs and take them home to eat, OK? Now when I asked you about that on the phone, you said, ‘Oh, it won’t hurt them to eat that meat.’ You still standing behind that?”
“I wouldn’t eat it,” Miller says in the recording.
In another portion of the recording, Hunnicutt observes that according to a warning label on the product, animals exposed to the product have “to be recovered and put 18 inches under the ground. How are you going to do that?”
Miller responds: “I guess we should take that off the label, because it’s not doable. We’ll take it off.”
“Everybody hates the hogs,” Hunnicutt told the American-Statesman, “but you can’t hate them so bad that you put the public at risk.”
Hunnicutt said of Miller: “He was doing what he thought was right, but he was misinformed. He didn’t get the facts that I know. He wanted to control hogs so bad, he didn’t think of other things that could possibly happen.”
Last month, facing pushback from hog hunters, meat processing plants and environmentalists, the company producing the bait asked the Texas Department of Agriculture to withdraw its approval of the product.
Perry’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.
Miller spokesman Mark Loeffler told the American-Statesman that the issue “is moot” because “there is no feral hog bait registered in Texas.”
Loeffler said Miller “was agreeing with his constituent that some of the label requirements might be onerous, and he would be open to contacting the EPA and (suggesting) possible changes to the label.”
Will Herring, owner of Wild Boar Meats, a Hubbard company that processes feral hogs for pet food and has sued the Texas Department of Agriculture over the issue, said the recordings show that the study bill is needed.
“The only person currently holding up this whole process is Sen. Perry,” said Herring, who said the coalition Don’t Poison Texas posted the recording on YouTube. The recording was first reported by the Texas Tribune.
Hunnicutt said he had sent copies of the recording to Perry’s office and to the office of Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, who authored a companion version of the house bill.
In March, Perry chastised Miller at the end of a meeting of the Agriculture, Water and Rural Affairs Committee for the way Miller had rolled out the feral hog bait in February.
“I’m disappointed in that something this big and of this magnitude of the state ... that you avoided any public commentary to implement that policy,” Perry told Miller.
After Miller chuckled, Perry said, “I don’t think it’s funny.”
“There’s a lot of confusion, Mr. Chairman,” Miller said.
“You’ve got to communicate better, and you need to be a little bit more communicative on front end rather than the back end,” Perry responded. “So that when the calls start coming I have a way to have a conversation rather than (saying), ‘It’s another Sid thing.’ ”
He told Miller: “That is not how we govern in the state.”