The Standard Journal

Poison baits to be used against feral hogs

- By Janet McConnaugh­ey

NEW ORLEANS — Feral swine do more than $1.5 billion a year in damage around the country, and scientists are taking what could be a big step toward controllin­g them.

They are field-testing poison baits made from a preservati­ve that’s used to cure bacon and sausage.

The tests will cover two major habitats where feral hogs are common during seasons when they’re most likely to go for bait, said Kurt VerCautere­n, feral swine project leader for the U.S. Department of Agricultur­e Wildlife Services. Tests will start early in 2018 in dry west Texas and continue in humid central Alabama around midsummer.

The bait Vercautere­n is working on uses the meat preservati­ve sodium nitrite. It can keep an animal’s red blood cells from pulling in oxygen. Pigs make very low levels of an enzyme that counteract­s it, so it’s more deadly to them than to humans or most domestic animals. Swine that gobble up enough sodium nitrite show symptoms similar to carbon dioxide poisoning: They become uncoordina­ted, lose consciousn­ess and die within 90 minutes after eating it.

The prospect of a new way to fight the beasts is good news to Samuel “Sammy” Williams, who farms about 2,000 acres of cotton, corn and peanuts in Alabama near Georgia and Florida.

Williams said he’s killed nearly 200 feral hogs a year for the past four years, but those that survived still damaged his crops. Swine love corn and peanuts and will root up cotton fields for weed tubers, he said. They also make “wallow holes” 4 to 6 feet across — though communal wallows can be much bigger.

“I saw one 20 to 25 feet (6 to 8 meters) across, and the hogs had knocked down a couple acres of corn right around that hole,” he said.

Hogs did so much damage to a neighbor’s 30-acre hay field that the neighbor offered it free for Williams’ use. He took the offer and installed an electric fence — but fencing all his fields isn’t practical.

Hogs also can spread dozens of diseases. Their rooting and wallowing can destroy pretty much any terrain, fouling waterways and exposing banks to erosion. Invasive plants often take over uncultivat­ed areas rooted up by hogs, VerCautere­n noted.

And hogs will eat just about anything. They compete with deer and turkey for acorns and also eat fawns and eggs, not to mention quail and sea turtle eggs.

Forty-one states joined USDA’s feral swine control program in 2014, after Congress appropriat­ed $20 million a year. New York and Idaho since left it after going two years without any confirmed sightings of feral hogs, program manager Dale Nolte said. He said five other states — Washington, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey and Wisconsin — are believed free of feral swine, and are in a two-year evaluation period to be sure.

The program included $1.5 million a year for toxic-bait research.

The federal government has previously approved a feral hog bait that uses the blood-thinner warfarin, but to date no states have approved it for use in the field, VerCautere­n said.

VerCautere­n, who works out of Fort Collins, Colorado, worked on the sodium nitrite bait with scientists at Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Auburn University and in Australia and New Zealand.

If the field trials work well, the new bait might get federal approval in 2020, opening the way for states to approve it. But at least for the first several years, landowners will have to get the USDA to set up the bait and feeders.

“It’s not going to be on the shelves of Home Depot,” VerCautere­n said.

It won’t replace trapping, helicopter hunts and other methods, but should be a powerful addition to the anti-hog arsenal, VerCautere­n said.

Much of the work so far has involved finding a way to get pigs to eat sodium nitrite, which tastes nasty and breaks down quickly in the presence of air or water. Researcher­s had to micro encapsulat­e the powder to hide the taste, and find a coating that would both stand up to chewing and keep the chemical stable from the time the bait is made until it hits a pig’s gut. They worked up a hog-tasty formula for bait in which to mix it.

Researcher­s also had to make sure other animals couldn’t get into the bait feeders, and that hogs killed by sodium nitrite were safe for scavengers.

They’re working on making bearproof boxes, using cameras and sound recognitio­n so only pigs can get in, but that’s probably a couple of years away, Vercautere­n said.

“Right now we just won’t use the bait where there are bears,” he said.

 ?? File, Mike Groll / AP ?? Wild hogs, like these in a holding pen at Easton View Outfitters in Valley Falls, N.Y., cause millions of dollars of damage to crops and farm property annually, resulting in intensive efforts to develop new tools to control and reduce feral hog...
File, Mike Groll / AP Wild hogs, like these in a holding pen at Easton View Outfitters in Valley Falls, N.Y., cause millions of dollars of damage to crops and farm property annually, resulting in intensive efforts to develop new tools to control and reduce feral hog...

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