Originally Posted by
falcon
All the above plus bureaucratic incompetence.
Since 1999 I’ve spent thousands of hours hunting, trapping and observing wild hogs. Most of the wild hogs around Cache, OK have Eurasian boar blood from imported hogs released all over the area. Wild hogs in the other areas I hunt don’t appear to have these genes. Until recently many of the hogs i killed in one area resembled dirty show pigs. They were purchased and turned loose.
The fish and game biologists take information from commercial hog raising operations and apply it to wild hogs: That is a big mistake. Wild sows don’t have three litters per year, that’s impossible. In a year when mast is plentiful or where feeders are running 27/7 some wild sows may have two litters per year. Many of the wild sows we hunt and trap have never borne a litter.
Wild hogs live a hard scrabble life compared with domestic hogs. Any sow that raises four pigs to six months of age is a great mother. Any lactating sow will nurse any pig from the sounder. They will even nurse stray pigs.
For many years some friends and I have used portable hog traps. But portable traps don’t work well. You catch a hog or a few, the rest escape and are trap shy. Corral traps are the way to go. One young guy made enough money in high school trapping wild hogs to pay for four years of college. He caught up to 38 hogs in corral traps.
The fish and game “experts” in states with budding wild hog problems never apply methods that have worked in other states. They hire folks to study the problem.
Good info.
I might add that released domestic Hogs are breeds. line breeding or inbreeds. A study here says random breeding and they eventually revert back to the original animal or something else very near the original wild animal (kind of like a Dingo). Basically all of the big hairy Wild Boar looking hogs can be the great great grandpigs
from released domestic hogs, after generations of running wild and random breeding. Having true Wild Boar in the gene pool just quickens the process.
I've often wondered if you could train a Sow to lead a sounder back to a corral?