Person vs. Porcine: Hogs Gone Hogwild--Taylor Bendele, Kate Gruben, Sirisha Poudel

Invasive species, like the infamous Burmese Pythons in the Florida Everglades, wreak havoc on local ecosystems. Without natural predators, they are able to take over and grow explosively. In Texas, feral hogs have taken over. This podcast includes interviews with residents from a small Western Texas city named Rotan, where they talk about the effects of the feral hogs on them and their livelihood. The hogs were originally brought by colonizers for livestock and hunting. However, some escaped from pens and others were released into the wild after their owners grew tired of caring for them. Because their gestation period is so short (3-4 months), their litters so large (4-8 piglets), and females able to have offspring at nine months, the population grew dramatically. There are now over six million feral hogs in Texas alone, and it’s estimated that two million of them need to be killed every year to keep their population from growing. Because so many need to be killed, Texas passed a law so you don’t need a hunting license to shoot them. Farmers have come up with creative ways to do it more efficiently. The most ridiculous one is shooting them from airplanes. It has even become a business venture, where farmers will give hunters a chance to hunt the hogs from helicopters. They have found numerous ways to cause damage. They run out into the street, causing crashes. The hogs are so large that they pose a serious risk to people and their cars. They destroy agriculture. Freshly planted seeds and grown cropped are derooted, and their process of removing the plants creates large one to two foot wide holes that can be more than a foot deep. The environment isn’t unscathed either. When hogs forage, they uproot tree saplings and wild vegetation, feeding into erosion and soil degradation. They also pass diseases like rabies onto domesticated livestock, and on many occasions, get into pens with show pigs. Efforts to erect more fencing, traps and hunting are extensive, however the sheer number of feral hogs remains an obstacle.

Further Reading

● https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/docview/230217339?accountid=7118 &rfr_id=info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo

● https://undark.org/2020/09/14/feral-pig-swine-bomb-ontario-montana/

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhLJ1qWlNp4&t=24s

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DadiycrLNP4

● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW3k80Vuq34

● https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma9910179090297060 11