■ TEXAS, SAN ANTONIO: Exotic animals from all over the world (including axis deer from India) was imported to Texas in the 1930s for hunting purposes. Around the same time some of these ranches also imported wild Russian boars for the same reason.

In the wild, these Russian boars interbreed with feral hogs, meaning pigs that were once domesticated but have now gone back to live in the wild. Said hogs have been roaming around here since the Spanish conquistadors brought them as a food supply while exploring what is today Southern United States under the leadership of people like Hernan De Soto.

Often, said Conquistadors would also leave hogs behind, knowing that are capable of surviving on anything and virtually anywhere, thus ensuring an easily accessible food supply for future expeditions.

In the years since, these pigs have been incredibly successful as a species and has established themselves across multiple State. In Texas alone their numbers stand at an estimated 2.6 million.

According to an article in National Geographic, many researchers consider these hogs the most destructive invasive species on the planet. Here are just some of the negatives associated with them that applies locally here in Texas.

For starters these pigs are omnivores meaning they can live on plants and meat. This means they kill the fawns, i.e. young axis and white tail deers, which is the animals these ranches are built to sustain. And when they go for plants or smell something exotic potentially buried under a field of grass they don’t behave any better..

Unlike cattle which graze a field until the grass is too short to chew up, hogs use their tusks to root up the grass all the way down to the soil. This destroys the fields ensuring grass and plants may not be able to grow back. Instead you’re left with mud and dirt.

Second, they also eat the food from deer feeders which is meant to sustain the deer population as well as cause immense property damage to fencing and other structures.

The owners of these farms really have no other way of managing the problem than to put these hogs down. But that is easier said than done. They mate year round and one sow, meaning a female pig, can give birth 3 times a year to a dozen piglets. These lands are also riddled with rattle snakes and as you can see here from the air are rather inaccessible by foot.

On top of that the hogs have responded to being hunted by becoming increasingly nocturnal, meaning they hide during the day and come active only at night when they’ve learnt there’s less danger in the form of human hunters about. They are also actually incredibly smart and can detect odors from up to 10 km or 7 miles away.

This explains why helicopter hog hunting was invented to try and keep the hog population in check. At first the farms used to pay teams of hunters to clean up their farms. That however costs a lot of money and wasn’t really a sustainable solution. And that’s how a group of guys which included Dustin, the pilot sitting next to me here came up with the idea of charging tourists to do this for them.

As a result the hog population goes down, deer population up, crops and fields stay productive and the owners of them get to keep more of their money whilst helicopter companies make money.

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■■■■■ FLY WITH DUSTY ■■■■■
http://www.holthelicopters.com/

■ More information about Texas' wild hog problem:

■ A PLAGUE OF PIGS IN TEXAS:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com..../science-nature/a-pl

■ THE BATTLE TO CONTROL AMERICA'S MOST DESTRUCTIVE SPECIES:
https://www.nationalgeographic.....com/animals/article