Pigs on the rampage

Friday, April 3, 2009

What is hairy, tusked, weighs up to 300 pounds, and can wreck a pasture, a fence, a golf course or a car?

A wild pig, and Texas claims to be home to two million of the critters.

According to Associated Press reports, wild pigs caused $52 million in crop damage last year in Texas alone. Ranchers hired 1,100 licensed hunters shooting them from helicopters, but pig numbers keep growing so state representative Sid Miller proposed issuing licenses to weekend sportsmen to increase the kill. Other methods, such as traps, have failed and birth control is still being developed.

Not everyone is a fan. Some fear a hunter may shoot a calf or a dog by mistake.

Spanish explorers introduced the wild pigs' ancestors more than 300 years ago. Numbers have exploded since the 1980s. Texas is about four-fifths the size of the province of Ontario and vast rural areas area thinly populated at best. BF