The perfect invasive species does not exi—
pinpoint a single moment when wild hog populations started to explode. Will Harris grew up in southwest Georgia, where he is the fourth generation in his family to operate White Oak Pastures, a regenerative livestock farm. “Nobody here ever saw wild hogs when I was kid,” says Harris, who is 68. “Today, it’s an incredible problem. Especially for row crop farmers, the losses can be devastating, because they root and root and destroy many acres.
On maps kept by the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program, created by the US Department of Agriculture in 2014, the pigs’ expansion from the 1980s looks like a tide flowing inland, from the Atlantic Coast into Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and from the Gulf Coast up through Texas and Louisiana into Missouri and Illinois.
He explains it this way: In the pre-cable years, there was occasionally a hunting show on TV. In the multi-channel era, those morphed into entire hunting channels that needed enough content to fill 24 hours every day. “And they started to show pig hunting,” Ditchkoff says. “And people said, ‘Boy, I’d like to try that.’ And pretty quickly they realized they didn’t have to go where the pigs were—they could track them, transport them, and release them close to where they lived.
The idea that people were trundling pigs all over the country might sound far-fetched, and it would have been illegal. But several lines of evidence make it plausible. Genetic studies by multiple research teams show that characteristics possessed by wild pigs in one place abruptly appear in pigs hundreds or thousands of miles away; in one, a group of feral hogs in California possessed mitochondrial DNA sequences that otherwise had been found only in Kentucky.
And finally, there’s the paradoxical fact that when states with a new influx of hogs declared special hunting seasons or bounties to get rid of them, their pig populations actuallyBetween people seizing hunting incentives and hogs learning hunters’ habits, sport hunting has not made a long-term difference in how many feral pigs there are.
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