ROOTING OUT HOGS
Oklahoma, partners make strides in feral hog eliminations
Efforts to control Oklahoma’s feral swine population aren’t yet being categorized as hog wild.
But those efforts have really picked up during the past six years.
In 2011, just 2,426 feral swine were eliminated from inside the state’s borders. In 2017, officials said Oklahoma’s Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry, other partnering agencies and organizations and other private harvesting efforts eliminated 32,237.
Feral swine create issues in Oklahoma and across the nation, said Jim Reese, Oklahoma’s agriculture secretary, during a news conference held Tuesday updating the harvesting efforts.
Reese said there is an estimated 6 million feral swine in the U.S. that create $1.5 billion in annual damages for property owners.
The swine also pose risks to commercial swine populations and other animal species and humans, as they are known to carry more than 30 different diseases.
The animals, which eat grasses, plants, roots and tubers, acorns, fruits, bulbs and mushrooms, root through soils at depths of 6 inches or more, damaging crops and the habitat for both humans and wildlife.
Reese said Tuesday the Noble Research Institute estimates the population of feral swine in Oklahoma is between about 430,000 and 1.6 million.
So getting on top of the situation remains a priority, he said.
“We have had a lot of successes,” he said, referring to harvesting efforts the past year. “We are still way behind, clearly. They have a big head start.”
Reese said his agency’s Wildlife Services division eliminated more than half of the 2017 total. Others were eliminated by private aerial hunts, sporting facility activities and through captures of swine that are slaughtered outside of Oklahoma for overseas meat sales.
Officials said the involved strategies are biologically sound, socially acceptable and are supported by organizations such as the Oklahoma Pork Council, which views feral swines as a significant threat.
Risk to commercial pork
Roy Lee Lindsey, the Pork Council’s executive director,
said his organization’s concern is that a minimum of 70 percent of existing feral swine must be eliminated annually to control its population because it reproduces so rapidly.
“For us on the commercial pork production side, they represent a real risk to our operations,” he said. “We ship pigs in and out of Oklahoma every day to be finished (fed out to market weight) to Texas and Iowa. If we were to get a pseudo rabies outbreak in our commercial herds, we would have to stop the movement of our animals.
“And we move more than 5 million a year out of Oklahoma to other states. So it is a tremendous risk to us, and that’s why we are so supportive of these collaborative efforts to remove as many of these feral swine as we can because of the risks they pose to all of us.”
Reese said his agency plans to continue to increase its efforts to control feral swine through initiatives it has developed with its current and future partners.
He said the Agriculture Department also likes a trapping system developed by the Noble Research Institute that uses remote sensing and control capabilities to trap groups of the swine.
Trapping with BoarBuster
The system, called a BoarBuster, is built by W-W Livestock Systems in Thomas and is marketed to consumers across the U.S.
BoarBuster uses a rigid trap enclosure about 18 feet in diameter that is deployed by its user above a trap site. This arrangement allows feral hogs to freely enter and exit the trapping area. A critical part of its system involves camera software created by Tactical Electronics in Broken Arrow.
When the BoarBuster camera detects movement, it sends the user an activity alert via a smartphone using a web-based app allowing the user to access real-time day or night video of the trap site.
Most importantly, the user can remotely activate the trap while watching the video whenever a desired number of hogs are in range.
Joshua Gaskamp, technical consultation manager and wildlife and range consultant for the Noble Research Institute, said that while the trap works well, it’s not a cure for the problem.
“The best way to control the feral swine population is to do that through partnerships,” he said. “If I own 80 acres and control all the feral swine on my property, but owners of the 1,000 acres around me don’t, then we collectively are doing nothing.
“So working together with landowner alliances and different entities and associations working together, that is the way we are going to gain ground.”