(Copied From NOLA.COM Web Site)

BATON ROUGE -- Feral hogs, beware. Legislators have you in their sights.

The Louisiana House voted 87-0 Tuesday to allow the trapping of feral hogs -- which the law calls "non-game quadrupeds" -- year round and without requiring a permit. House Bill 294 by Rep. Major Thibaut, D-New Roads, now heads to the Senate for debate.

Thibaut said the wild hogs reproduce several times a year and have dozens of offspring at a time, creating a growing problem for farmers and some suburban landowners. Thibaut said his bill would not require a special permit to trap or bag the wild hogs, but it does give the Department of Wild Life and Fisheries the power to issue guidelines on taking the critters.

Thibaut said if the feral hogs are hunted at night, his bill allows hunters to use any type of firearm, but the hunter must notify the parish sheriff's office 24 hours before blasting away.

If his bill passes, Thibaut said, the only place the feral hogs "will be going is to the skinning shed and the barbecue pit."

Earlier, the House voted 90-4 for House Bill 169 by Cameron Henry, R-Jefferson, to allow silencers on weapons used to hunt nuisance animals, such as feral hogs and nutria.

Henry said the silencers are available now, but any individual who gets one has to obtain a special permit from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "This would allow limited use of them" for hunting, Henry said.

Henry's bill also goes to the Senate along with House Bill 64 by Rep. Bobby Badon, D-Carencro, that would allow crawfish farmers or landowners to shoot not only possum, raccoons and nutria, but also otters, mink and muskrat -- all creatures that poach on crawfish farms, eat unharvested crawfish and ruin equipment.

Badon's bill allows the farmer to blast away at the nuisance animals with either a rimfire rifle no larger than .22-caliber or a shotgun no larger than 12 gage that uses nontoxic shot no larger than BB-size pellets. The hunting can be conducted year round during daylight or night hours "with no bag limit," according to the bill.