San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
HOG TRAPPER
hogs that get caught. Ortiz regularly posts videos of hogs being captured on his company Facebook page.
Video after video shows them thrashing wildly about the moment the doors come crashing down, throwing themselves against the steelmesh walls in a futile attempt to break free.
Feral hogs are the No. 1 nuisance animal in Texas, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, causing approximately $118.8 million in agricultural damage each year. And that doesn’t count the havoc they wreak on golf courses, airports, school yards, lawns and other nonagricultural property.
Ortiz is one of just a handful of full-time feral hog trappers trying to limit that damage.
Tom and Judy Myers, who own a 400-acre farm in Comal County, have been relying on Ortiz to remove feral hogs from their land for more than seven years. The first year, they say, he removed 140 pigs.
“They were knocking down our fences, and tearing our lawn and garden upside down,” Tom said. “Bubba’s done a good job keeping their numbers down, but there’s plenty still out there. I’m 80, and they’ll still be here when I’m gone.”
The Myers have gotten their fair share of revenge by butchering and barbecuing several of the pigs Ortiz has caught through the years.
“But only the small ones,” he said. “Once they get big and spiky, they’re not good eating any more.”
Ortiz got started in the business when he and his dad began trapping hogs on their ranch in Atascosa Country. As word spread, other ranchers began asking them for help.
He became a full-time trapper in the mid-1980s.
He insists he doesn’t have a vendetta against feral hogs. In fact, he kind of admires them.
“They’re doing the best with what they have,” he said. “Unfortunately, when they do that, they destroy crops, overturn fields, contaminate ponds and strip resources from the land. I don’t hate them, but they do need to be controlled.”
Ortiz is also the go-to guy for the city’s aviation department when hogs get a little too close to the runways at San Antonio International and
Stinson-Mission Municipal airports.
“It’s not so much them tearing up the airport grounds,” said Marcus Machemehl, the city’s airport wildlife biologist. “If an airplane were to hit a hog, it’d be catastrophic, even for a large commercial jet.”
Back in 2014 Ortiz removed between 100 and 200 hogs living along Salado Creek near the San Antonio airport, and he’s currently trapping several dozen in the park areas surrounding Stinson, Machemehl said.
“Bubba’s successful at what
he does,” he said. “And I know he works with other city departments, too, like the parks and rec department.”
According to Ortiz, feral hogs are as clever as a child of 5 or 6 — and even more destructive. So he has to employ hog psychology to trap them safely and efficiently.
“They learn, they teach, and they communicate,” he said of their smarts.
After setting up a trap, for example, he’ll leave the gates open for several days so the hogs grow comfortable coming and going while enjoying the deer corn he scatters on the ground.
“But I’ve seen a sow stop her (young) from going into the trap because she can tell when I’ve set the trip wire,” he said. “So now I have to camouflage the mechanism to fool them.”
Adult hogs will also send younger ones into a trap as scouts. If Ortiz gets impatient and drops the doors too soon, the adults left outside will scatter, never to return.
Ortiz charges clients a $150 setup fee plus a minimum rental of $35 per day, per trap. That includes scouting, placement, baiting, the technology needed to monitor the trap and hog removal. The price is higher for jobs farther away.
He butchers and sells some of the hogs that he captures, charging $100 to kill, skin, gut and split a carcass so it’s ready for the barbecue. He sells the rest of the hogs to fenced game ranches where they are hunted for sport.
Ortiz is often asked why he doesn’t just shoot the animals he captures, since a trapped and angry feral hog can be a dangerous creature. But killing them on-site isn’t that simple.
“Say you shoot 20 pigs,” he said. “What are you going to do with the carcasses? The landowner doesn’t want them because they’ll attract scavengers and predators, and if he
raises cattle or other livestock that can cause problems. So then you’ve got to remove and dispose of hundreds of pounds of meat.”
Killing hogs this way also causes them to release a stress pheromone, creating what he calls a “dead trap.”
“The rest of the hogs now know that something bad happened here, so they won’t go anywhere near that trap for a long time,” he said.
Ortiz is aware that in certain quarters, what he does might be controversial, so he tends to keep a low profile about certain clients, such as city governments.
“You’ve got mayors who hire me to clean up their city parks but don’t want to wake up to find people protesting in front of their house,” he said.
The hogs that are the bane of today’s landowners are descendants of domestic pigs first brought to Texas in the mid-1500s by Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto, who brought them for trade. Several escaped into the wilds of the New World.
Despite the best efforts of full-time trappers, weekend sportsmen and the occasional helicopter hunting tour, Ortiz said he isn’t optimistic that the feral hog population will ever be brought completely under control.
Instead, he said, the hogs should become a self-sustaining food source for hungry Texans. He proposes the state open its own processing facilities and pay trappers and hunters for bringing in hogs on the hoof.
“They could either sell the meat or use it in free lunch programs for kids,” he said. “They could even teach prisoners to do the butchering so they’d have a trade when they’re released.”