La. Dept. of Wildlife and Fisheries conducted a USDA-WS aerial feral hog removal program on two La. wildlife management areas,Pearl River WMA,east of New Orleans and Sherburne WMA west of Baton Rouge,during the week of March 10,2014 to March 14,2014. LDWF contracted with USDA-WS for two days of aerial shooting for $550 an hour plus the salaries of the pilot and the shooter,figuring on two eight-hour work days,the total came to $8,800 plus the salaries of the crew. The one day at Pearl River WMA,March 10,produced a total of 21 hogs,while the one day,March 14,at Sherburne WMA produced a total of 33 feral hogs. This was after LDWF and USDA-WS had said that the aerial operation was capable of removing 300 feral hogs in a day. USDA-WS has conducted similar aerial feral hog removal programs along the La. Gulf coastal marshes on state and federal wildlife management areas and refuges,in similar contracts,but those results were not released to the press. Doing the math,that amounts to $170 per reported feral hog kill,not counting the salaries of the pilot and shooter. This was an experimental program to judge the effectiveness of the aerial shooting program,in an area that is not open marshland,as the other coastal hunts were. LDWF and USDA-WS have had a very cozy working relationship for many years here,in Louisiana, with USDA-WS doing many closed contract nuisance wildlife jobs for LDWF. But now,USDA-WS is starting to charge LDWF for the real,true costs of these nuisance jobs and LDWF is being forced to start developing new,creative schemes to get fur and feral hog trappers to do the nuisance work for free. They are offering certain exclusive privileges on La. WMA and refuges to trappers who will play ball with LDWF,along with certain restrictions that USDA-WS never had,when they did the same work. Money or the lack of it is starting to drive a wedge between these two old allies and LDWF is now doing what should have been done in the first place,managing wildlife using sound scientific facts and doing it with the resources,at hand,namely La. trappers and hunters,sadly,with the exclusion of costly USDA-WS closed contracts. Good Luck

I bet they could get a lot of shooters for free if they would only ask people if they want to shoot hogs from a helicopter. Heck, I'd pay them $50, bring a few boxes of 00, and my shotgun for an hour of fun.

Matt

There spending about a million in ny to do the same.
They are smart enough to call it surveying for them. To account for the fact that they weren't able to shoot any in two weeks

Clint and his crews will do it for a lot less $$ and bag 500% more

They need some "experienced" and equipped full time feral wild hog trappers. A good trapper does not work for free.

Hunters/shooters alone will never significantly reduce the numbers of hogs in those areas. Aerial gunning works well in fairly open areas, but not in thick or heavily wooded terrain.

Dave

Here are some folks that do it. I would think La. may be different than west Texas.

http://helihunter.com/

That looks like fun for sure but check out the cost on their website. $2500 per hour! I had to go back and read it twice to be sure I read that correctly.

Dave

This was going on before it was made publicly legal in TX, now it is rampant, many western states I've lived in there are folks flying and gunning their own lands or those of folks they get cash for. Typically this is like many things, rich folks with money to burn who can afford to pay that without thinking twice.

In relation to the original thread it always interests me what the states goals are for working on feral hogs. Do they want...

1) Hunting and trapping of hogs for public recreation

or

2) Eradication of feral hogs wherever possible

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The answer generally correlates to who they hire and how they go about it. In this state we always shared information with anyone calling about hunting as to what public land areas had feral hogs. This was done through information sharing among public land agencies and our agency (WS).

Many eradication efforts can fall short due to funding, they can fall short due to land access and politics (ie. a block of landowners who won't allow feral hog removal, which serves as refugia).

Ultimately, in this day and age nobody wants to have their statistics outed for having a bad cost/benefit ratio, however things beyond anyones control do happen, just like anything we do in this private industry, there are factors on a landscape scale when talking large invasives like feral hogs that will hinder or stop your take very quickly.

I personally have witnessed in OR, TX and NM on operations how you can have every hog in the area coming to your pre-baited corral traps and just when you are ready to hit the switch and remove entire sounders, you end up with 1 or 2 hogs because a truckload of folks just came through and shot up the place (and typically removed 1-2 hogs out of 30-40 you had coming).

This isn't just an idea, this happens all the time. We always had trail cams helping monitor traps and they always were setup to catch passing vehicles as well as the hogs on camera.

Ultimately this leads to discussions with landowners to allow them to allow hunters whenever they'd like, but to not waste money and time by having traps set by agency staff and fouling it by overlapping with random hunting.

***

There are outfits who do feral hog trapping obviously and the number should be growing just based on the growth of feral hog numbers and the folks willing to pay to get rid of them.

Just thought it was worth stating that if the state agency hiring wants eradication, that takes a different amount of work than if they just want to remove X amount of hogs each year.

If you want to see a well coordinated outfit that is a private outfit that does major contracts around the world, check these folks out. They have the only proven 100% eradication of feral hogs documented thus far.... Here is the pub. The cost was extremely high, fences were built ahead of time to split the island that wasn't part of the cost they charged but paid for by TNC and they used all tactics and coordination they can among their people from flying to dogs and telemetry. They are the gold standard, but most states can't afford to hire them.

http://nativerange.com/

(formerly "pro hunt")

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320709004935

As a govt. employee I always used these folks and what they did as an educational tool to explain how you utilize all methods available and coordinate them to remove hogs as efficiently and as quickly as possible.

***

A side note, these folks bid the contract ahead of time, so the amount they bid was the amount they received whether it took 5 years or whether it took 3, if they finished in 3 obviously they made more money and if it took 5 not so much.....

***

There will be plenty of opportunity for folks to go after feral hogs in the private industry, my only suggestion is that those who are going to attempt large landscape scale reduction realize that politics and landownership is usually 75% of the nightmare, the hogs themselves which can be plenty tricky and of course reproduce like mice are only about 25% of the actual problem.

There are some great papers published from eradications that have been attempted and the one I linked is just one of them, worth looking at all the massive amounts of literature especially what is published out of Australia and New Zealand, they've had feral hogs longer than we have and are an authority on much of the technique used to remove them.

We may be continents away from them geographically, but Sus scrofa is still the feral hog or feral pig underneath it all and the problems are the same in all places.

Folks keep moving hogs because they like to hunt them, widespread eradication takes massive effort and funding and coordination and the hogs keep reproducing while we all argue about who is better at getting it done...

Good luck!

Make LA an earn a buck state before you shoot a deer you gotta take a hog

Justin, you missed Wisconsin's state goal which is enough spanferkel for everyone!

Spanferkel is the German word for pig roast, I'm guessing, and we take our pig roasts very seriously.

The town P.J. lives in has an entire weekend devoted to pig roasts. ( And perhaps some German beer to wash it down )

I've mentioned this before but I don't believe either wild or domestic pigs last very long in Wisconsin.

When asked about the number of wild pigs in Wisconsin, the DNR game manager said that we have three. I am not making this up.

That is a new word for me Paul! I like it!

**

I have heard the statement before and I hold it in high regard, that you can't barbecue your way out of a feral hog problem!

Now, I think you'd have to admit being I'm sure well traveled to the southern half of the U.S.A. that the folks in the states with the most
feral hogs probably find a new way to cook pork on a daily if not hourly basis!

I've been fortunate to consume pork both wild and farm raised in TX, GA, FL, AL, NM and a number of others in my travels. One thing remains
constant, feral hogs keep proliferating.

As an advocate of feral hog eradication who truly believes we've yet to understand their true impacts and damage to many other species and to the ecology of our country as a whole, I would love to believe any state or country for that matter is immune to their potential spread and devastation.

However, factually, that place hasn't been created yet within any climate outside of Antarctica or the Arctic. Whether true eurasian / Russian stock or simple farm hogs left out too long a pig/hog is an animal with coyote like intelligence and wariness and the ability to reproduce like a norway rat!

There isn't a place in the lower 48 we won't see them exist in numbers in the next decade. If you look at the spread thus far, they far outreach what folks once thought they were capable of. In Europe where eurasian boar exist natively, even they have started to exceed their northern push utilizing farm fields and croplands to sustain them through long winters.

**

Now I love pork so I'm all for folks getting after it in the belief they will hunt their way and eat their way out of it, but it ain't gonna happen.



However, I will say that the more the public understands the problem they bring the more your average hunter who likes hunting native species will start to push against his buddy or her buddy moving a bunch into a field and dropping them off after a short trailer ride from a nearby state or game farm.

Only through folks stemming the tide of illegal and legal movement of hogs will there be even a remote chance of keeping them down or eradicating them.

***

On a side note, I've heard all manner of things folks have believed would stem the tide. I can't tell you how many folks have the delusion that native predators will clean them up! Feral hogs/pigs tend to carry a fair amount of things like pseudorabies which can drop a native predator within 24 hours of consumption, along with being a killer of livestock when they contract it!

Many states have very high native predator numbers (mtn. lion, bear, coyote, bobcat, wolf) and still these don't check feral hogs. As I'm sure you know and we've discussed before, the tenacity of a sow with piglets is second only to a few critters I can think of! Much easier meal to kill a fawn or other unarmed species, versus face old ma sow with her cutters!

Love the feral hog topic, it will be here longer than I will be and many generations thereafter.

Now, gonna go make a pork sandwich!

Lol!

Justin

As someone who actually prefers lamb and veal to your normal pork offerings, I must say that whenever I get anywhere within smelling distance of a pig roast, I become somewhat of drooler. Get outta my way!

I learned about those big old lactating sows very quickly. My dad had a small shed for whelping sows and I jumped over a pretty good sized fence because I wanted to look at the piglets. ( And of course, play with one of them ) When the piglet squealed and that 1 ton sow came after me, I probably set a new world record clearing that fence from the inside.

It is truly amazing the stuff you forget when you get older, but even more amazing is the stuff that you remember!

We have hogs!

I know from first hand experience that those Florida hogs taste mighty good also. What kind of bait did you use to get that one to jump up and grab the scale hook?

Worms. :-)

Some nice shots Dave!!

Closed contracts and political problems with wildlife services right in the middle, doing a poor job with our tax dollars. Why is this allowed to happen? Is it because ws comes with a big federal rubber stamp? Or is it that they use dirty politics and a proclaimed reduced cost for the supposed service? I find it interesting that ws is having to charge more for their services... Fortunately, this means they are competing with me and other private WCOs, on prices anyway. Now if we could just make the legislation fair, ws would perish!

From the pictures in this post it appears to me that there are people able and willing to remove the hogs using a variety of methods and technology, while providing a decent food source to themselves. This is the method I prefer and it could allow my tax dollars to be used elsewhere, like perhaps paying off the national dept. (not to mention the larger tax base with the employment opportunities hiring private WCOs would create)

So much for saving our country's ecosystems from this invasive specie when we can't even stop wasteful government actions. Our money (or social and economic value system) is wasted by our own government proclaiming (and failing) to protect our environment. Results; economic collapse and ecological degradation.

If you abolish WS, won't you unleash several hundred former WS specialists that will no longer have to abide by no-compete rules and go into business and compete with you for ALL of your work?

Yes, but Justin excepted, most guvment employees make terrible business folk. I got a brother that couldn't hold down a job for more than six months at a time, took him four and half years to get his two years on the job to sit for his PE exam. He's happy as a clam as a GS12 and has held that job for six years now.

Warrior, while you make a great point about most folks are not business minded, it only take one to start the company and hire employees! When WS folds why wouldn't the right person hand pick his or her new employees, especially if they had a prior working relationship, that's just good business.

And just think, most of those employees are already strategically place in any state to allow for service areas with a ready made customer base!

See you in the private sector some day!