Wild Hog

Nearly 500 years after his three-year 3,100-mile trek through Florida and 14 other states, one particular legacy left behind by Hernando DeSoto is creating an ecological nightmare.

We’re referring to Sus scofra, more commonly known as the wild hog, wild boar, wild pig and a bunch of other names.

According to the University of Florida, there are at least 1 million of these animals roaming the Sunshine State, destroying habitat and crops, spreading disease and competing with native animals for resources like food and water. Wild hogs are found in all of the state’s 67 counties.

But it’s not just Florida. For centuries, their population was concentrated in the southern tier of the United States. In the last 30 years or so their range has expanded dramatically to include 39 states as far west as California, as far east as Vermont and New Hampshire and far north as North Dakota. It’s expect that eventually there will be wild hog populations in all 50 states.

In short, they’re an invasive menace. In fact, the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that wild hogs soon will be the “greatest wildlife damage management challenge in the United States and worldwide.”

The problem, in short, is that there really isn’t a single, effective method for controlling them. You can hunt them, you can trap them, you can fence them in or out, but they are an intelligent, bullish species and more often than not, they will defeat you.

DeSoto, the 16th century Spanish explorer, began his epic trek by landing at Charlotte Harbor in 1539. He provisioned his expedition by bringing a herd of hogs to be slaughtered for their meat. Along the way, many escaped into the wild; others were traded to or stolen by Indians, who would allow their hogs to roam wild, allowing more to escape, thus creating the first permanent wild hog population in Florida and the United States.

Other Spanish explorers had done the same thing earlier — none other than Ponce de Leon in 1521 and Lucas Vasquez de Allyon in 1526. But it’s not known what happened to their hogs.

And while DeSoto’s contribution is notable, it’s taken a cast of thousands, at least, to create a problem this big and widespread. Later explorers, both Spanish and English, including Sir Walter Raliegh, used herds of hogs similarly, and similarly many escaped into the wild.

Not only that, European settlers commonly would let their herds of hogs graze free range, and of course some would wander off into the wild never to be seen again by their owners.

There are various estimates of the number of hogs that DeSoto had with him when he landed in Florida, ranging from as low as nine to as many as 300. According to one account, at the time of his death on the banks of the Mississippi, DeSoto’s possessions included four slaves, three horses and 700 hogs. That’s a lot of reproduction.


In the 1880s and 1890s, hunting enthusiasts introduced Eurasian wild hogs to parts of the United States. Most were sent to enclosed reserves, but some would escape into the wild just the same. Even state game officials, including those in Florida, would trap hogs from areas where hogs were creating problems to areas where their numbers weren’t as great as a means of improving the hunting. It’s a practice the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission no longer employs.

As recently as the 1970s, there were hog releases in Mississippi until the state banned the practice.

Even today, there are hunters who capture the animals and clandestinely release them on other lands, a practice that is illegal in many states, including Florida.

To understand the threat wild hogs pose and why it’s so difficult to manage there numbers, some wild hog basics. First, a male is called a boar, a female a sow and a family group is a sounder. Young piglets are called squeakers; between 10 and 12 months they're called juveniles, and then pigs of the sounder until two years old.

North American wild hogs have two distinct lineages: those Euarasian wild hogs brought over in the late 19th century, and domesticated hogs that once had been the property of explorers and farmers. There are also hybrids, mixes of the Eurasian and domesticated hogs.

They are large animals, able to grow to five or six feet in length, three feet tall at the shoulder, while weighing as much as 275 pounds. Boars have two sets of canine teeth that continue to grow into large “tusks.” The top are called whetters or grinders, the bottom are called cutters and can be seven inches long. Hunters consider any boar with cutters over three inches to be trophies. They’re not called cutters for nothing — continuous grinding keeps them knife-like sharp.

Sows have the same teeth, but they're not as pronounced as the guys.

Boars have hide nearly an inch thick around the shoulders, which is known as the shield. The protection it affords comes in handy during mating season, which can be violent affairs as males fight off other males and defend their sows.

Hogs have a strong sense of smell and excellent hearing, but poor eyesight. They can smell odors as far away as seven miles and as deep as 25 feet.

Most of the encounters we’ve had with wild hogs have been brief — as soon as the hogs have noticed our presence, they’ve taken off into the brush. But boars can be aggressive, though they rarely attack humans. Sows with a litter also can be aggressive if you get a little too close to their offspring.

They are extremely intelligent with excellent memories; hunt them and they’ll learn your patterns. Trap them and they’ll learn to avoid the corrals, cages and boxes set up to capture them.

They’re also mostly nocturnal animals, which adds to the degree of difficulty in dealing with them.


Another major factor why wild hogs are an invasive pest is their ability to reproduce like crazy. Gestation is only 115 days, and each litter can have six to eight piglets. A sow can have two litters a year, three in 14 to 16 months. That’s potentially 24 piglets in less than a year-and-a-half.

That’s a lot of offspring in a relatively short period of time. It’s among the highest reproduction rates of any North American mammal.

On the other hand, wild hogs do have an extraordinarily short lifespan — on average only one or two years. That’s largely because of a high mortality rate during the first year. As much as 80 percent of wild hogs die before their first birthday.

Generally speaking, the maximum lifespan for a wild hog is nine or 10 years, with a few exceptional individuals maybe reaching 12 to 14 years. Out of every thousand piglets born, only 10 will live to see their eighth birthday.

More wild hogs die from human causes — hunting and collissions with cars and trucks — than disease and predation.

Thing is that even their high mortality rate doesn’t dent the surging wild hog population. The University of Florida estimates that there are at least as many 500,000 wild hogs living within the state’s 67 counties, and it notes that that number might be low.

Favorite habitats include cabbage palm hammocks, marshes, sloughs, flatwoods and agricultural areas. Wild hogs lack sweat glands, so water is essential not only for drinking but to regulate body heat. They will wallow in mud to cool their bodies and coat themselves with mud to protect their skin from the sun and biting insects.

Wild hogs are what the USDA calls opportunistic omnivores, meaning they’ll eat just about anything they can get their mouths on.

And it’s not hard to tell where wild hogs have been feeding, because the ground looks like a tractor has been through it. The hogs use their snouts and tusks to dig up the soil looking for insects, roots, vegetation or anything else to eat.

“They are ecological zombies. They eat everything. They eat deer fawn. They uproot endangered salamanders. They eat ground-nesting birds and their eggs,” said Shari Rodriguez, a Clemson environmental conservation professor, who wrote a report on the wild hog problem in South Carolina. “They really eat anything.”

Studies done in Texas have shown that wild hogs can have significant impact on the populations of ground-nesting birds.

The “plowing” that wild hogs do can have a devastating effect on plant communities that native animals need for survival and potentially open up ground to invasive species.

And when they take up residence in farm lands, they can do substantial damage to crops. It’s estimated that wild hogs cause more than $1.5 billion in agricultural losses annually — crops eaten, uprooted or trampled. They’ll also eat livestock.

The environmental damage their plowing causes on natural lands is believed to be as much or more in dollar terms as agricultural losses.

They can do damage to golf courses, lawns, national historical sites, archeological sites, sacred native American sites. Pretty much anything you can name.

Wild hogs also carry as many 45 diseases and parasites that can infect other wildlife, pets and humans, including salmonella, e coli, giardia and pseudorabies, to name just a few. They can also damage water quality.

On the other hand, defenders say wild hogs have been around for centuries and have become part of Florida’s ecosystem, an important source of food for predators such as the Florida panther.

Wild hogs live in small family groups or alone, females together or with litters, while adult males tend to disperse. Generally speaking, you’ll find between two and eight wild hogs per square mile of habitat, but there can be as many as 288, depending on availability of water, food, predators and climate.

In Palm Beach County, you expect to encounter wild hogs in the larger, rural natural areas such as the 14,000-acre Loxahatchee Slough or Hungryland Slough, neighboring the expansive J.W. Corbett Wildlife Management Area, but they’ve also become more common and more of a problem in urban natural areas as well.

So how do you manage the wild hog population? In Florida, it’s pretty much open season on wild hogs. A license isn’t necessary to hunt hogs, nor is there a bag limit. Trapping is allowed and they can be taken alive, though permission of the landowner is necessary if the hog is to be released. A caviat: certain state lands do regulate hunting to an extent, and while a state hunting license isn’t necessary in these areas, a hunting stamp might be. Check state regulations to be sure before you shoot.

In preserves where hunting isn’t permitted or practical, land managers employ live trapping as the alternative. (Using poisons is illegal under Florida law.)

According to Mississippi State University, trapping is the most efficient method of managing wild hog populations. There are corral traps that can handle whole sounders, and there are smaller traps, like boxes and cages, that can handle fewer hogs but are easier to set up. Snares can be used but they have to be set up in way to avoid “non-target” species like deer.

MSU emphasizes that trapped hogs should be humanely dispatched immediately.

MSU adds that hunting is also necessary to eliminate trap-wary hogs. The problem generally with hunting is the time and effort required while killing fewer hogs. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that somewhere around 70 percent of the population has to be killed annually just to keep the population where it is. At best, hunting might take out 40 percent of the population.

An outfit in Texas called Helibacon makes the process a little more efficient by employing helicopters and automatic weapons. Hunters can buy packages that range from $2,995 to $5,495 per person and fly over neighboring farms and ranches (with permission) and shoot at herds of hogs using semi automatic weapons (unlimited ammunication provided) or even an M2 .50 caliber machine gun, the famous Ma Deuce.

Helibacon says there are some 4 million wild hogs roaming Texas, the most of any state, and eliminating the animals is helping the environment.

There are cheaper, more prosaic commercial hunting ranches that offer hunting stands and hunting guides here in Florida and elsewhere.

According to MSU the least effective — and without doubt the most controversial — form of hunting is using dogs to track and hold a hog until the hunter arrives, in theory to dispatch it.

It’s a practice that stems from the days when farmers would allow their herds of hogs to roam free to forage. When they needed to gather them, they would use dogs to herd them in. Somewhere along the line, it morphed from herding into hunting.

Two types of dogs are employed — bay dogs that pursue the hog and corner it, and attack dogs that grab the hog, wrestle it to the ground and hold until the hunter comes along and offs the hog.

Critics say the practice is inhumane both for the dogs and the hogs. The dogs can suffer injuries from those long teeth hogs possess while exposed to some serious diseases that the hogs carry. On the hand, the dogs can inflict painful, serious injury on the hog before it’s dispatched.

Where hog hunting is popular, including Florida, there are hog rodeos, baying contests, where baying dogs are used to corner a hog, and hog attack trials, where attack dogs are let loose to do there thing against a wild hog. It’s not always a fair fight — the hog may have his tusks cut giving him little chance to defend himself. If the hog survives the mauling, he’ll be hauled out days later to face another dog.

Hog attack trials are illegal in most states but they go on anyway.

Wild hogs are members of Suidae, the hog family.

Hungryland Slough Natural Area