Feral hogs have been a part of the Ozarks for hundreds of years, but they have become a menace in the Ozarks in the last 30-40 years. There have been a number of publicly visible incidences of property damages in recent days, not least of which was a large amount of damage they caused to a golf course in Viburnum.
Hogs are a real threat to the ecosystem, the property and the people of the Ozarks, and feral hog populations are growing. According to the Missouri Department of Conservation website, feral hogs caused more than $1.5 billion 10 years ago in the United States, and that number is growing each year.
One example of this persistent problem is Jerry Clement's farm east of Boss.
"I'll tell you what, they'll ruin a farm in no time flat," said Clement, a landowner and life-long Dent County resident. "You can't control 'em. They've got me whipped. There's a lot of history here in this old farm.”
The farm has been in Clement's family since his great-grandfather homesteaded it well over a hundred years ago."But he didn't have to deal with these hogs," Clement said.
Along with the feral hog problem, Clement has battled two separate bouts of cancer. When asked how old he was, he said, "I don't much keep track of that anymore. I was born in 1937, you do the math."
Clement loves his farm and has always taken pride in keeping up his property, and he hates to see the farm he built damaged by the feral hog infestation.
The problem is on the radar of the governing bodies in Dent County and throughout South Central Missouri. Dent County Presiding Commissioner Darrell Skiles and District 143 State Representative Elect Ron Copeland both have expressed their concern with the problem in our area and went to Clement’s farm Friday.
When talking with Clement, Skiles expressed that it was important to him to figure out a solution to the feral hog problem in Dent County, but there is still a lot of kinks to work out with the way the government should work with the people.
"I wanted to come out here and see first-hand what problems the people of Southeast Missouri are facing," Copeland said.
MDC has a plan in motion to combat the spread of the hogs. Hunting and trapping feral hogs is prohibited on conservation areas and other lands owned, leased or managed by the MDC. The department would also prefer that people not shoot the pigs themselves, but report them to MDC officials.
MDC Private Land and Service Chief Jason Jensen in a phone call Monday with The Salem News explained how the Missouri is dealing with the infestation.
“In 2007 Governor Blunt by an Executive Order penned the Feral Hog Taskforce into existence. Now those involved are reorganized into the Missouri Feral Hog Elimination Partnership (MFHEP),” Jensen said.
The partnership includes the U.S. Forest Service, MDC, USDA APHIS Wildlife Services and the private L-A-D Foundation, as well as several other private and public entities. The strategy is to implement a statewide operation that methodically clears each watershed of the state. The partnership eliminated more than 10,000 feral hogs last year and had already killed almost as many by the end of September this year. Numbers from October have not been tabulated yet. Jensen explained the goals and strategies of the partnership.
“Our goal is to remove a whole sounder (group of pigs) at one time,” Jensen said before explaining the process. First, trappers will scout out an area to identify signs of pigs, for example turned over earth and large holes called wallows; second, they will bait an area until the pigs have become accustomed to being fed; then they build a trap and use game cameras to track the movements of the pigs; once the whole sounder has become accustomed to going in and out of the trap they will set the trap and wait.
Tyler Washausen, Jerry Clement’s grandson has begun implementing some of these trapping stratagies on his grandfather’s farm, although he is not affiliated with the above mentioned government agencies. He maintains two traps that he built.
"I killed 16 in a week-and-a-half last month," he said. "I'm pretty new at it, and I can't really take credit for all this so far, there was a lot I had to learn and I'm still constantly figuring out better ways to outsmart the hogs."
Washhausen went on to explain that his cousins have been hog hunting with dogs and trapping for years, and he credits them for giving him a lot of advice in the enterprise.
"Before it was made illegal, they used to hunt with dogs all the time on conservation land," Washausen said. "It was nothing for them to kill 20 or 30 hogs in a single night."
It is hard to estimate how swiftly the species is propagating when each sow can expect to whelp two litters of six piglets each year, so, no specific number has been placed on the feral hog population, but that’s because the way the MFHEP tracks them is not by estimating a specific number, but rather to keep track of how many individual watersheds are occupied by feral hogs. Currently, there are 210 watersheds (more than 5-million acres) of occupied land in Missouri. That’s compared to the previous 383 watersheds and more than 9-million acres.
Washausen suspects that part of the reason that the population seems to be growing more swiftly now is the rules and regulations that prevent hog hunters from using public land. "These hillbillies down in Bunker have been hunting and trapping these pigs for generations," Washausen said. "That's a large part of how they've been feeding their families for a long time now."
Washausen thinks that's why the hog population isn't a lot bigger than it already is, and he thinks that it is a huge oversight to leave out the experts who have been hunting pigs all of their lives.
"You gotta be smarter than the pigs. I think they're the smartest animal in the woods," Washausen said. Jensen shared the same sentiment, “Hogs are hands-down the smartest animal in the forest
The MDC views hunters as being partially responsible for the feral hog infestation. According to the MDC website, "Feral hogs have been roaming some Missouri counties since the days of open range. The situation took a wrong turn in the 1990s when hog hunting for recreation began to gain popularity. Groups began raising and promoting European wild boar as a form of alternative agriculture and for hunting on captive facilities. It wasn't long before many of these hogs escaped or were released intentionally on public land."
The eradication of feral hogs is a difficult and nuanced topic, one that has sparked a lot of controversy between hunters and conservation agencies. One thing that those involved can agree on is that the feral hogs must be dealt with and prevented from spreading. Hunters, farmers and government agencies stand against a common enemy, feral hogs. Going forward the real question is, will the Department of Conservation and private citizens work with or against one another?
Washausen thinks that more should be done to include the hunters in the Department of Conservation planning stage of how to deal with the hogs.
"You'd have three or four hundred people all killing hogs just in this area, compared to the small number of conservation agents," Washhausen said. Washausen knows that he is not an expert, but he does have first-hand experience of kinds of damage and problems the feral hog's cause.
One thing is for certain; feral hogs are a dangerous menace that cannot be ignored. If efforts are not continued and constantly improved upon this problem will continue to spread.
Jensen expressed some of his concerns regarding what he said was the spread of misinformation to farmers and landowners. One example according to Jensen: “There are people who think that hogs are not still being released,” Jensen said. “That’s absolutely incorrect.”
Jensen wants people to know that there quite a few ways for people to be involved. One is to contact the MFHEP about feral pig activities in your area as Clement has now done. Another minor way is the granting of the incidental hunting made legal on government land through the use of unused deer and turkey tags.
