MU Extension Feral Hog Educator Kevin Crider visited the Phelps County Commission on March 3 advocating for continued interagency efforts to eradicate Missouri’s feral hog population, including the current policy of not allowing hog sport hunting on public lands.
“What's more important, is it sport hunting hogs or the livelihood of people running cattle operations,” Crider said to the commission. “That's really the nuts and bolts of what this is about. I think if we're really being realistic and logical about our approach to this, we have to say the ranchers making a living on raising cattle are more important than those sport hunting hogs.”
Crider began his presentation by sharing he is one of four Feral Hog Educators that have been hired to provide facts on the issue. Crider said he’s personally aware of how damaging feral hogs can be as a native of Shannon County and due to working as a state feral hog trapper until October last year. Before that, Crider was a highway patrol trooper and park ranger in Colorado.
Crider said feral hogs annual cause millions of dollars of property damage by wallowing in fields and destroying their ability to grow hay or other agricultural crops. He added feral hogs also harm native species and are known to kill turkeys, deer fawns and other game. They additional damage nonhunting outdoor recreation, with Crider citing previous significant damage to Viburnum’s golf course.
To solve the feral hog issue, a coalition of state and federal agencies along with private conservation groups have banded together as the Missouri Feral Hog Elimination Partnership to operate a trapping system in cooperation with landowners. Crider said by trapping, groups of hogs, or sounders, can be exterminated in large numbers. He cited in 2019 around 10,000 feral hogs were eradicated through the partnership, then 12,000 in 2020 and last year around 9,000. On the local front, Crider said as a trapper he saw progress has been made in Crawford and Dent counties. He said hog numbers are higher to the south but trapping at Peck Ranch in Shannon County has shown good results.
“It's gone up, we've hit a peak, and we're on the backside now hoping it's going to continue trending downward,” Crider said of the eradication figures.
Complicating the partnership’s efforts are individuals and groups of feral hog sport hunters. Crider said some hunters use dogs to track down feral hogs, and when they’re pinned, will stab a swine to death using large knives or spears. While hog hunting will kill one or a few hogs per outing, Crider said the net effect is it scatters the sounder and makes eradication by trapping more difficult for the partnership. Given that reality, hunting feral hogs was made illegal on state land and in 2019 the Mark Twain National Forest also closed hog hunting on its federal holdings.
Posing even more a challenge to feral hog elimination are feral hog hunting guides or hog sport hunting groups who want a wild population to hunt. Crider said some even go as far as buying hogs and releasing them to go feral, even though that is a crime in Missouri whether on public or private land.
“We continue this debate with folks about why we should or shouldn't do this closure on the forest,” Crider said, referring to the hog hunting ban. “Right now, the closure I think is helping us because there's no incentive to release more hogs since it’s a criminal offense. Secondly, if we were to reopen the closure on public lands, the problem inherent with that is that's going to incentivize folks to go pick up a load [of hogs] in Oklahoma or Texas, bring him up here, or go to the local sale barn, pick up a load of pigs, and turn them loose on the forest. That's going to start us all over again and we'll be right back where we started four years ago or five years ago.”
Crider said he and MU Extension Feral Hog Educators based out of Ava, Ironton and Polar Bluff are visiting with community leaders to combat misinformation and provide facts about the feral hog issue.
“The role of the educator is to do stuff like this, talk to the leadership of each county, every Farm Bureau, every soil and water conservation district, in each county that we cover,” Crider said. “The purpose of that is to enlighten, educate and let folks know in general what the program is doing, how it works, why it's working, and hopefully get in front of this problem so we can actually stop this property damage.”
Crider said his primary message is for community leaders to put the issue into proper perspective.
“I told some guys in Shannon County at the Farm Bureau meeting, I said, ‘Look, guys, you have 8,166 people in your county. How many people do you think actively hog hunt in your county?” Crider said. “They all said, we think it's probably 80 to 100, probably closer to 80. I said, if you’ve got 80 people out of 8,166 that live here, why should those 80 people dictate policy on hog hunting on public lands for your county? I guarantee you have way more cattle operations in this county than you do hog hunters. They're said we never thought about it like that before. I said that's less than 1% of your county population, although it's a very vocal minority. That's why some are listening, because they're making a lot of noise on feral hog hunter Facebook pages.”
For Phelps County, Crider said he has not received any recent local landowner reports of feral hogs but is aware of sounders in Pulaski County. Residents in the Duke and Edgar Springs areas were advised to make themselves aware of the feral hog issue by visiting mdc.mo.gov/feralhog. If feral hogs are spotted, reports can be made to that website or by calling (573) 522-4115 EXT 3296. If landowners need assistance in eliminating feral hogs from their property, the Missouri Feral Hog Elimination Partnership can help.
“This is a free service,” Crider said. “It is already taxpayer funded and paid for. It's there in place, at no cost to the landowner, and we have good folks that know how to do this and get these hogs off the landscape.”
