Solving a Pig Problem

Since their introduction to North America in the 16th century, uncontrolled populations of wild pigs have wreaked havoc across North America.They can disrupt native wildlife, decimate riparian ecosystems, cause billions of dollars in agricultural damage and more. 

Reducing the population has proved complex, but the state of Missouri has successfully removed feral swine populations from nearly 10 million acres throughout the state since 2016. 

In this episode of “Our Wild Lives,” Alan Leary, wildlife management coordinator for the Missouri Department of Conservation and Travis Guerrant, state director for both the Missouri and Iowa U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services programs, join us to explain how they approach eliminating this invasive species from the landscape.

Read more: 

TWS Issue Statement: Feral Swine in North America: https://wildlife.org/tws-issue-statement-feral-swine-in-north-america/

Why has Missouri succeeded in wild pig control?: https://wildlife.org/why-has-missouri-succeeded-in-wild-pig-control/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Music

[00:00:01] Travis Guerrant: At the beginning of this, we never invested any resources into trying to figure out what the population was because we thought the resources were best used trying to put them on the ground to eliminate hogs. Because the number we're interested in is zero, right? You either have pigs in a watershed or you don't.

When we started to now, it's about 82% reduction or about nine, almost 10 million acres. 

Intro Music

[00:00:37] Ed Arnett: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Our Wild Lives podcast and today we have a couple of guests joining us, some TWS members, Certified Wildlife Biologists from the great state of Missouri. We have Alan Leary, who is the wildlife management coordinator for the Missouri Department of Conservation, and we also have Travis Guerrant, who's with the USDA Wildlife Services he's the director for [00:01:00] Missouri and Iowa. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us today. We got a fun topic to talk about with feral hogs, don't we? 

[00:01:05] Alan Leary: Yeah, absolutely. Lots to talk about 

[00:01:09] Katie Perkins: Could you define what a feral hog is versus a wild pig, and then kind of tell us how they got here to North America? 

[00:01:16] Alan Leary: Well, they got here, we know for sure as, as far back as the 1500s. We know DeSoto brought hogs with him on his explorations to feed his, his group. And, uh, they reproduced so fast that they couldn't eat them as fast as they were reproducing, so some of them were left. We've had them here in Missouri for probably, you know, a long time since the days of open range, but they really didn't start becoming a problem here in Missouri until maybe the mid-1990s, and that's when we really started getting a lot of damage.

The feral hogs that we have here are kind of a, I guess you'd call mutts. Some of them have some, you know, Russian boar in them, European wild hog. Some that were just, you know, farmers just kicked out because they didn't want them anymore. You know, there's times where pork prices [00:02:00] get low enough that it, it doesn't pay to raise them, and they just release them or they get out.

I don't know if you've ever had hogs, but they're pretty hard to keep in. You got to have a pretty good fence. So all these things just go out, they mix together, and they're running wild and, and they eat anything. They can pretty much adapt to any climate. They're found in Canada. they're found in Hawaii, they're found in Texas, they're found in Michigan, California, New York. And they have tremendous reproductive rates. So, um, yeah, they're, they're kind of like the perfect invasive species. 

[00:02:29] Ed Arnett: But we also have pure, kind of pure genetic strains of the Russian or european wild boar that have been introduced as well, right? 

[00:02:36] Travis Guerrant: Yeah. We have that in some of our strains as well, where they've been introduced over time by people that wanted to hunt them before some of these laws were changed, and we were able to really get on top of this population here in Missouri.

[00:02:50] Alan Leary: That was kind of part of how they got going in the mid-'90s here in Missouri, is that people started bringing them in to hunt, put them in, you know, they were bringing them in, putting them in high fence facilities. And [00:03:00] again, they're really hard to keep behind a fence. When they want to get out, they can get out. And so those, some of those got out, and some of those facilities, you know, didn't make a living and they just released what they had or whatever. And, and it all just got out in the wild, and they find each other and, and breed and we get what we got.

[00:03:17] Ed Arnett: Yeah. Well, you mentioned they eat everything and, and I've witnessed this. They certainly do. I think it's important to put it out in context of just the damage that they are capable of doing and the impacts they may have on native wildlife as well as the landscapes if they're left unchecked. Let's, let's talk about that a little bit. 

[00:03:36] Alan Leary: Yeah, they definitely do a lot of damage. There's been studies done, like down at the Savannah River lab and stuff, on, um, how where you have hogs, you tend to have fewer turkeys, and the same with deer. They're all competing for acorns and, and some of the same forage. And, and hogs can be pretty aggressive, so they'll run other animals off. Um, they're also bad on, obviously, ground nesting birds. They'll eat the eggs of ground nesting birds. [00:04:00] And then vegetation as well. We've got one federally listed plant species here in Missouri, and our largest population the folks have to go in very regularly and maintain the fence, 'cause the hogs get through the fence. Again, they're they, they're hard to keep in, but they're also hard to keep out if you don't want 'em in. And so they get in, and they're destroying this federally listed plant species that we have here. So yeah, they're a very destructive creature and, and they'll eat up... you know, if we don't have a great acorn year, they're gonna eat most of it, and the deer and turkey aren't left with much 

[00:04:31] Travis Guerrant: Yeah. Not to mention, you get stream bank destabilization, things like that, that just all around, they they just cause so much damage. Any kind of restoration work that the Department of Conservation or other natural resources agencies are trying to undertake in areas where feral swine exist in high densities is, is just really kind of fraught with trouble from the beginning. But if we can reduce those populations, and we can... And like Alan referred to that, that federally listed [00:05:00] species, we've been able to get that to where the fences are still there, but in a lot of those areas they don't need 'em anymore because we're making good progress on suppressing those populations and reducing them, so. 

[00:05:11] Ed Arnett: So does that suggest there is a threshold of population size that is manageable from a landscape damage perspective? Or just any time you have any amount of feral hogs, it's gonna create serious impacts? 

[00:05:24] Travis Guerrant: I mean, a single, a single boar can cause significant damage. I mean, like, we run into this with landowners all the time. We'll go out, visit their site, and they swear up and down based on the damage they see in their fields and in their, on their property that they have a group of pigs. And, And, our guys will be like, "No, you have a boar that's been visiting for three or four nights in a row." And they're big, they're strong, and they can just rototill, you know, just huge areas. So they can get themselves into, into areas and cause a lot of damage, just a single animal. That's why, that's why we're trying to eliminate them in those areas to go to zero, so we don't have that as a, as a threat [00:06:00] to the native landscapes or, or agriculture for that matter, matter moving forward.

[00:06:04] Alan Leary: And it, it's kind of a little bit of a different mindset when Travis says we're trying to eliminate. When, when you're in the elimination mindset, the the whole goal, the only objective is to catch the whole sounder at once. Whereas folks that are, you mentioned managing the damage or whatever, and they might be happy if there's a group of 20 hogs of removing 10 of them because they're reducing the amount of damage. But we're not interested in reducing here. We're going for elimination. So we'll take longer, you know, baiting this, this group of hogs to get them coming consistently to the trap site before we set the trap, so we get all 20 of them. Because if we leave 10, those 10 become 50, you know, in a month or two. And so that's, that's not how we're trying to go about it. In Other areas of the country, you know, the, the, the population is, they have a lot more, and elimination may not be a short, you know, kind of a short-term attainable goal. But here we're we're not trying to manage damage, we're trying to [00:07:00] eliminate

[00:07:00] Ed Arnett: Yeah. That's actually an important point. I'm gonna go back a little bit to the basic biology of the animal. They have They have extraordinary reproduction rates, don't they?

[00:07:09] Alan Leary: Yes. Yes. Yes.

[00:07:11] Ed Arnett: Yeah.

[00:07:12] Travis Guerrant: They start reproducing at what? Six months old? Yeah. And they can have up to three litters a year. It doesn't, doesn't take long. If you, if you overlook an area... And, and I mean, we've had this in, in our partnership where we've had to go back and clean up some areas where we thought we were there and must have missed a sow or two. Had to go back, get on top of it again. But luckily we, you know, we have a, a, good partnership with lots of folks working towards this goal, and it b- it becomes pretty apparent in the data, and we're able to, to address that when it, when it comes up and keep this moving in the right direction, so.

[00:07:46] Alan Leary: Well, and you can even kinda see it a lot of times when we catch hogs, the sow might be with piglets of three different sizes. She's had, she's still got, you know, three litters running with her because [00:08:00] the the oldest ones are still not really old enough to be on their own yet. 

Right. But she's already had two more litters. She'll get pregnant again three weeks after she has a litter. And they almost always do. I don't... th- We hardly ever catch a, a sow that's not pregnant. I mean, they just, their entire life they're just reproducing. Not unless you catch them right after they just dropped them. Yeah, exactly.

[00:08:20] Katie Perkins: And how long will they live? Like, what's their average lifespan? 

[00:08:23] Alan Leary: You know, boars when they get older, they get kinda, well, kinda like people. Old men, get grumpy and don't wanna be around people anymore, right?

So they go off and do their thing, come visit the sounders. They can live years, like 10. Yeah, We've had it where it's several years before we can catch up with them to remove them. But with a boar, they can't create a population without a sow, right? 

So, so, time's on your side, but with a sow, those boars are going to find that sow if she's on the landscape. So, so we're really hyper-focused on eliminating sounders, the sows, the females, and then we'll go back and, and try to clean those, those boars up after we've reached [00:09:00] biological elimination in some of these areas, 'cause those boars disperse out pretty big ranges anyway looking for sows. 

So to answer your question, I think they're pretty long-lived from what we've seen, but we try to shorten that as much as we can here in Missouri if you know what I mean. 

[00:09:13] Katie Perkins: Right. 

[00:09:14] Ed Arnett: Well it's not like they have a lot of natural predators either in certain parts of the country.

[00:09:17] Alan Leary: No, they don't 

[00:09:18] Ed Arnett: I think out west here they're gonna meet up with some big things with fangs, but that's not necessarily the case in your region. 

[00:09:25] Alan Leary: No, no. No, and even, you know, even out there the the predators probably aren't eating them as fast as they're reproducing. I mean, you know, if she, if a female's- dropping three litters a year averaging six piglets per litter, they're just not eating them fast enough. 

[00:09:41] Ed Arnett: Yeah

[00:09:42] Alan Leary: We did at one point have a video of a, of a black bear getting into a trap and getting one. We were hoping that that black bear did a lot of breeding, but probably not enough. We wanna keep that genetics. Yeah. 

[00:09:56] Ed Arnett: Behavioral transfer of food source information like they do in the wild

[00:09:59] Travis Guerrant: [00:10:00] Yeah. Smorgasbord, buffet. 

[00:10:01] Ed Arnett: Yeah.

[00:10:02] Katie Perkins: Yeah, all you can eat bacon. No kidding. 

[00:10:04] Alan Leary: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

[00:10:06] Katie Perkins: Well, could you dive a little bit more into how this impacts private landowners? How do they affect crops and lawns and, and what does that look like? 

[00:10:16] Travis Guerrant: Yeah where the, where the hogs exist in missouri, it's a lot of it's Ozark, it- so there's a lot of pasture ground, but there is some, some creek bottoms and things like that where they've had row crops. And we, we had one h- just, what, six years ago, we had people that had stopped trying to plant corn in certain areas because they had so much damage. They couldn't get it in the ground. The pigs would follow the rows, eat the seed corn when they planted it, and then when it got grown and got into a milk phase, they, they just flattened that corn to get that, get to the food, you know, 'cause it's sweet and it's good and, you know. So but now in, in those same areas, now those guys are able to plant a lot of, of row crops and not have any damage from, from hogs at all.

So the damage [00:11:00] is significant. It's, you know, upwards of, of millions of dollars a year I would say across the United States, maybe even more than that. It's, it's significant what, what these landowners and folks are up against. And I mean, you know, you're even talking pasture and hay ground for, for cattle. Missouri's a big cattle state. We got, you know, we're third in the nation in mother cows I think, or somewhere in that range. These guys are out cutting hay, and these hogs have turned a boulder up in your hay field, and you don't see it, and you run it through your hay bind. I mean, that's significant cost to repair that thing after these hogs have, have done that.

And not to mention, you gotta go back and fix your fields and do all that stuff and reseed and all that you know, every, every year, and, and that gets frustrating and, and hard. I mean, it's already tight margins for these, for these producers, and then you, you put that on top of it. It's, it's, it's a tough deal. So, we've been pretty well received now that we're making some pretty good progress here in Missouri. People are pretty happy with with not seeing a lot of hogs on their property and things like that. I mean, there's some hunting groups that aren't happy with us, but You know, you [00:12:00] take the good with the bad. So.

[00:12:01] Alan Leary: Actually, the, the latest estimate they were mentioning at the wild pig conference a couple weeks ago was $3.4 billion, billion annually in the United States alone for agriculture. 

[00:12:13] Katie Perkins: Wow. 

[00:12:14] Alan Leary: You know, we actually had the folks from the Colorado, the Wildlife Research Center work on kinda trying to get estimates on natural resource damages, you know, the value of that. But it's so hard to, you know, people have done that with the value of a muscle and the value of things like that, and it's really hard to quantify. But agricultural value, when you lose an acre of corn, you can figure out what that cost. And, and about 15 years ago, the, the estimate I think was $1.2 billion- but it's up to $3.4 billion now was the, what they were saying a couple weeks ago.

[00:12:46] Ed Arnett: Well, to that end, what does your investment look like to control them?

And I know that's a big question. I think you can speak specific to Missouri, and then we just kinda uh, a little bit later we'll get in more to specifics on how you do it. But [00:13:00] what does your investment through wildlife services, maybe broadly, but specific in Missouri look like, uh, to control these pigs? 

[00:13:08] Travis Guerrant: Well and really, it's, it's not a, a one agency situation in Missouri. We've got, you know, we've got our own logo here the Missouri Feral Hog Elimination Partnership, and it's MDC and Wildlife Services and a, and a bunch of other landholding agencies, NGOs, all working together to try to move this elimination forward. You know.

And, some of those other folks might not be contributing staff or, or funding, but they they support things like laws when we need to strengthen laws about transporting feral swine in the state, things like that. But, I think between Missouri Department of Conservation and Wildlife Services, we got upwards of 30 staff on the ground eliminating hogs in the southern half of the state full-time. 

And, and that's one thing we've learned over time is that, that having feral swine as a collateral duty, as, as a third thing on your list of things to do as a [00:14:00] wildlife professional, that doesn't work out very well. You need to be focused. These things are hard to catch, they're cagey, and you have to learn them. You have to know what you're doing. You know, you have to be a good technician, trapper. You gotta be focused on, on your job, and you don't need other stuff to do. There's plenty of work to do with that. And, and once we switched to this full-time technician model and really focused in on being strategic on how we move across the landscape, we've, we've been very successful.

Feral swine are a little different than some species like, you know, you've seen studies where, where coyotes, they have that vacuum effect. You remove a pair, and then you have animals move back in there pretty quickly. Feral swine, they will do that, but there's some, some site fidelity with those sounders.

They don't cross each other's paths, and it takes them a while to realize that there's a, there's a gap over there. So if you put a hole in, in the population, you can build on that success across the landscape, you know, eliminating feral swine from that point forward. And if you do that on a big [00:15:00] enough scale with enough people, you can really make some big impacts to that population.

[00:15:04] Alan Leary: But they're, they're extremely smart animals. I read a study one time that they're the third smartest animal on the planet behind monkeys and dolphins. And so that's another advantage to having, you know, full-time staff that 40 hours a week plus are out there, dealing with this situation, and they learn different ways to place the bait inside the trap and where to set the trap and all those sorts of things that folks that we used to have doing it that were, you know, foresters by trade, and they were out cruising timber, you know, in the morning, and then they were running their hog traps in the afternoon. They're just not picking up on that stuff. That's not what they were hired for, and so they may drop the trap too soon and not get the whole sounder, like we talked about earlier or whatever. So yeah, we have seen a huge impact when we went to full-time, and, we no longer loan out traps or, or give them corn to use in the trap that they made, but we say, "We wanna do it all. We wanna set the trap. We wanna bait the trap. We wanna do it all." 'Cause [00:16:00] landowners also have something else to do. They're trying to make a living from their land. They go out and, you know, looking at the trap, watching the trap, maybe drop the trap too soon, and so it's really a benefit that we have full-time trappers.

[00:16:12] Travis Guerrant: And, one thing we found on the trapping front is your worst enemy is an educated pig. They're smart. They learn. Getting them back under a trap after they've had a negative experience there, been shot at, had the trap drop and didn't get caught, that, that's enough. You might never... Like, we've had, we've had sounders where it took us two years to catch them. Like, it took- you know, a lot. A lot, of times you'll have to go in and remove the educated leaders of that group, the, the, the adult sows with, with different techniques, and then you can catch the young ones 'cause they're not as smart. 

You know, you wanna reduce the, the education level of them to where you can get them in the trap. And you know, the other thing is, is it's not just trapping. There's a lot of other tools that help us get on top of these populations. We use a lot of aerial operations, you know, helicopters to remove these animals from the [00:17:00] air. Um, we've, we've incorporated a lot of technology into that effort through, through UAS with, with, thermals on them and finding to make ourselves more efficient, finding those sounders when we have aerial operations going on so that helicopter's not spending time searching for pigs.

It's going from group to group to group to group, you know, to remove them on the landscape. And this year we actually had a, a, an additional helicopter with a thermal on it that really made it efficient and effective when you were flying them in conjunction with each other. You could make sure that that entire sounder was, was removed when you engaged them with the, with the aerial operations. So another technique and tool that we use a lot is a, is a Judas pig, where you put a collar on them, a satellite collar on a juvenile boar. They're looking for sounders. A lot of times pigs are your best asset for finding other pigs we found. And that's, you know, back before we had these other technologies with the, the thermals and things like that, that was one technology [00:18:00] that we did use on the western side of the state where we've been pretty close to elimination or eliminated in some of the areas.

We use that to find those last groups of pigs, find holdout properties, 'cause they will go find sows, those young boars will, you know, being what young males do. 

They, they go find the sows, you know, find the groups. So so that, that works. That's a really, really important tool for us. Those in conjunction, you know, it's, it's never one tool with a damage management or a, or an elimination effort. You gotta use all the tools to try to get to that goal.

[00:18:32] Ed Arnett: Just a couple quick threads on the investment part of it. So if I'm a landowner and I call your office and say, "Hey, I've got a pig problem, would you come out and help me?" The landowner doesn't necessarily have to pay that even though they pay taxes, which covers government salaries and such. But what's the investment portfolio look like?

Is that coming from farm bill? Is it coming out of the Missouri Department of Wildlife's Wildlife general Fund or [00:19:00] Pittman-Robertson dollars? So trade-offs to doing this, I suspect. 

[00:19:04] Travis Guerrant: Yeah. So for on our side, we have some allocated funding that comes from the National Feral Swine Program, comes into, into our program through, through my office. And then we also, we had the farm bill funding coming in as a level three state. We had some projects funded jointly. MDC was the partner on the NRCS side.

We were receiving the funding on our side. The big beautiful bill money is being processed right now. We have some proposals in on that, so hopefully since the farm bill money was, had lapsed, hopefully that big beautiful bill money or now there's, there's talk of, of the farm bill being moved through the House.

I think it got through the House, and it's at the Senate now. So we got some, some things in the air there, and we also have a cooperative agreement with the Department of Conservation. They moved some resources our way. 

They have full-time technicians, and Alan, you can talk about more, more on your side of it.

[00:19:55] Alan Leary: Yeah. It doesn't come from general revenue. In Missouri, we have a 1/8 of 1% sales tax that helps [00:20:00] fund our agency, and so that money, you know, is generally divvied out. And back in 2017 when, when Missouri wrote our strategic feral hog plan, we kinda came up with this is, this is how many people, and this is what we think we need for a budget.

And then we went and asked our commission to fund that, and, and they chose to do that, but that meant we don't get extra money. That meant other sections, our fisheries, our forestry, our private lands, they got less money because this money was going to feral hogs. But fortunately, and at the time it was our fisheries chief, he stood up and said, "Well, you know, this is a no-brainer. There's no point in doing stream bank stabilization if the hogs are gonna come in the next day and destroy it, so we need to... you know, this money needs to go to getting rid of this species." And so fortunately we've, we've had that buy-in, but we had to because, you know, we didn't just say, "Hey, we need this money and, and, extra money fall down." We had to take it from elsewhere.

[00:20:53] Travis Guerrant: And, and I will say we do have some other partners, you know, like Fish and Wildlife Service, Army Corps of [00:21:00] Engineers, Forest Service, DNR Parks here in Missouri. They've all come to the table with funding through cooperative service agreements, inter-agencies to help fund this effort.

So we probably have the biggest amount of funding wrapped up into this program, but we have other partners also with a lot of skin in the game.

[00:21:18] Alan Leary: And contributing to like our staff aren't the only one... we talk about having 30-plus full-time hog trappers, they're, they're USDA or, or Department of Conservation staff, but the other agencies contribute with technology and like Travis said, funding and, you know, allowing us to go onto their property to, to remove hogs and many other things that they can contribute to the, to the partnership to help with this effort.

[00:21:42] Katie Perkins: Right. So pretty much everyone benefits when the feral hog population is reduced? 

[00:21:47] Alan Leary: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And even we mentioned before in the partnership there's- Some non-governmental organizations that have, you know, even contributed weapons and different things. You know, turkey groups and, and deer groups and quail and [00:22:00] those groups, they, they, don't want the hogs here either 'cause they're not helping

[00:22:03] Ed Arnett: Right 

[00:22:03] Alan Leary: the things that they love. So they're, they're very much on board as well. 

And the, agricultural groups, the Farm Bureau and the Cattlemen's and, and those groups are, are part of our partnership as well.

[00:22:13] Travis Guerrant: It's really interesting in, in dealing with feral swine. It's one of the few areas that I've ever been involved in where the ag side and the conservation side, and we all agree this, this needs to be dealt with. Like we are on the same page. 

[00:22:28] Alan Leary: So... 

[00:22:29] Ed Arnett: Well and this is part of this investment thread and everybody benefiting, as Katie just said, that the, reality is, is we put a lot of money, whether it's through the state agencies or the federal agencies or even the private NGOs into wildlife conservation, and some of that may be all for naught. I mean, we've experienced this in the West with feral horses, and it's a 

[00:22:50] Alan Leary: Oh, Yeah. 

[00:22:50] Ed Arnett: Not a totally different situation, but a very similar situation, just a different critter with a different... Yeah, feral hogs don't have a lot of advocates the last time I checked. 

[00:22:59] Travis Guerrant: L- [00:23:00] lot more emotion around the horses. Yeah. 

[00:23:02] Ed Arnett: Exactly. But I think, I think this is a really important point because you don't wanna pour money into conservation if you can't resolve an underlying problem with seeing success of that, of that conservation investment 

[00:23:16] Travis Guerrant: You've got such limited resources for doing some of this work, and you hate to see... it poured into something where it's just gonna get destroyed right out of the gate, you know? So that's for sure.

[00:23:26] Katie Perkins: Right. So you've, you've kind of dove into how Missouri is managing it, and some of those techniques are so interesting. I never would've imagined that that is how that work gets done.

Where does Missouri stand, like, on your population level? Would you say you've reduced it to maybe 25% of what it once was? Or, or what is, what is that looking like now? 

[00:23:46] Travis Guerrant: Well, so we, at the beginning of this, we never invested any resources into trying to figure out what the population was for a population density, because we thought the resources were best used trying to put them on the ground to eliminate [00:24:00] hogs. Because the number we're interested in is zero, right? You either have pigs in a watershed or you don't. 

And so what we have done is a, is a presence absence by watershed. We broke the state where we had feral swine into 12-digit watersheds, and then where we have hogs, where we have sightings, we lay a buffer over that based on, on research, you know, it's about 1.75 miles.

And if a watershed's touching that, we count that as a, as an occupied watershed, whether there's a boar a sow or, or whatever. But like I said, we're focusing on sows first, and then we'll go back and get those. But we've reduced the footprint by, what is it, 82% in the state? Yeah, about 84. Yeah. From 2016 when we started the strategic plan, from that point to now, it's, it's about 82% reduction or about nine, almost 10 million acres.

[00:24:48] Alan Leary: Yeah, we went from 11.2 million acres occupied to about 1.9 million acres, yeah. I think it's 1.9. Yeah.

[00:24:53] Travis Guerrant: So it's been- Significant ... a pretty significant reduction.

[00:24:56] Alan Leary: Well, and even some that- that were previously very vocally [00:25:00] opposed to what we're doing, and now vocally supportive will even go do an interview for a media outlet or something saying how, how successful it's been you know.

'Cause like Travis mentioned before, some of them, after three, four years of, you know, planting corn three times and losing all three crops, they just simply quit using their land, and now some of them are back to actually farming again, and they're thrilled by it. 

[00:25:24] Travis Guerrant: And you know, some of the things we did that's a little bit outside the box with some of this farm bill funding we had the, the, last round is, is to try to, try to show landowners that we were in this with them together and trying to do this.

We actually went out and bought equipment to help repair feral swine damage, and if they were working with the, the partnership, they could go use that equipment to fix their pastures, fix their fields, do whatever. And we, we stationed those in the counties that had feral swine at the soil and water districts that were already... You know, they already do that, rent equipment out for conservation repairs. But a lot of [00:26:00] the equipment we bought can also be used to plant warm season grasses, things like that. So that, that's been from, from MDC side, a conservation win, 'cause they can use it for that for other programs.

But from our side, it builds goodwill with the communities down there, 'cause we actually are investing in trying to help them get back to what they had before those feral swine were on their, their landscape.

[00:26:21] Ed Arnett: So the 82 percent reduction is pretty phenomenal particular critter, you got a toolbox and You define that pretty well. But everybody has access to the same tools, right? They should. What's unique about Missouri, if there is anything, and kinda how does that 82% compare to some things you might have heard in, at the conference you mentioned and know from the literature? How does it compare across the country?

[00:26:48] Travis Guerrant: I think one of the big things that's, that's different in, in Missouri and, is we have so much alignment in the partnership with the partners and, and politically in the [00:27:00] state to move this forward and to accomplish that. You know, everybody talks about the resources that we, we have more resources in Missouri because of X, Y, or Z.

You gotta get the politics in line first before you can even talk about eliminating feral swine.

You know, some states, it's just not even a conversation that's gonna be worth having because the hunting culture, people are making money on it, things like that. So I think the, the thing that's unique in Missouri is we got on this at about the last hour before it became a cultural deal where, you know, hog hunting is part of the culture of the fiber of these areas of Missouri.

If we wouldn't have got on top of it when we did and shown that we could make this progress, I I don't know that we'd be where we are today, you know, politically or anything else.

[00:27:45] Alan Leary: Yeah, and I think maybe, maybe we assume, and didn't mention this earlier, but the reason we're where we are is because we banned hog hunting in Missouri and that is absolutely

[00:27:55] Ed Arnett: Interesting.

[00:27:56] Alan Leary: where the results started. And, and I say we banned it in Missouri, we [00:28:00] banned it on all public property, and this is another difference among states is, is what hogs are classified as.

In Missouri, they're an invasive species, and so as the Department of Conservation, we... There is no hunting season, there is no hunting license, so we can't say we're just gonna close the hunting season 'cause there never was one.

So we don't have authority on private property over feral hogs in Missouri, but we started and, and the Department of Conservation banned it on our property, e- everything that we own, in 2016, and then in 2019 the Forest Service followed, and then in 2020 the Park Service followed, and the Corps of Engineers, and Fish and Wildlife and the, the Army, they were all, they were kinda came along at some point or they already had, like the DNR state parks, all they ever had was managed deer hunts, so they never did allow hog hunting.

And so it's still not banned on private land in Missouri, but it's banned on all public land, and so that's a huge step. And when Travis talks about the hunting culture not getting [00:29:00] going, most landowners don't own enough land that somebody can turn dogs free and run hogs and get 'em on one property, therefore, hunting them on private property, unless you're willing to trespass, is not gonna be a very productive thing.

And we could see that here when we started. If we took a map of where the feral hogs were in Missouri and overlaid it on a map of public property, it almost was a, an exact match because when people were intentionally releasing them, they were intentionally releasing them on Mark Twain National Forest and on some of the department's larger areas.

And so that's why they're in southern Missouri, 'cause that's where most of the public land is, and that's where they were releasing them. So when we were able to ban hog hunting on public land in Missouri, that's why we got started.

[00:29:42] Travis Guerrant: And to add to that, the hunting ban in Missouri really worked because we were, we were committed to eliminating the pigs, and we had the staff to go in and remove those pigs.

You know, in some of these states if you did a hunting ban and you didn't have the resources to do anything in some of those public [00:30:00] areas, it, it probably wouldn't work the way it did in Missouri. We're unique in, in that case, if that, if that makes sense, you know? , You gotta have the resources behind it if you, if you make a, a bold move like that.

And, and here I don't know that we could have gotten where we're at today with- without that move. Because you couldn't... Like our, our technicians would try to trap on Forest Service property, and they literally, people learned to start following them around. 'Cause if we built a trap, there was hogs in the area, start your dogs there, blow that sounder up. Well, then our guys are back to zero. They gotta wait for that group to get back together,

[00:30:34] Ed Arnett: Yeah,

[00:30:34] Alan Leary: And then, you know, they're also, if they started near the trap, then you got educated pigs that might be scared of that corn pile, scared of that trap, they think they associated to that, you know? So so 

[00:30:46] Ed Arnett: Well, yeah, that was one of our questions as it related to recreational hunting and does it help or hurt the mission and such. And I, I think you explained it extremely well, and that probably is a main differentiation of, of Texas's ability, for example, [00:31:00] to go to Katie's home state. Um, if I wanted to get involved with eliminating hogs, by and large, I'm paying a fee to go hunt them, 

[00:31:08] Alan Leary: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:09] Ed Arnett: Doubt seriously you could have enough recreational hunters, let alone successful ones, to even put a dent in the population, so thus the aerial gunning approaches. But that's become a commercial endeavor as well. 

[00:31:22] Alan Leary: It has, and there's people making a lot of money on that. You put

re

[00:31:25] Ed Arnett: right 

[00:31:26] Alan Leary: monetary value on, on a resource like that, and it, it gets really hard to tell people you're not gonna be able to do that anymore.

Well, and there's -

[00:31:34] Katie Perkins: So they don't want to see the population go down is what the issue is with hunting, is what we're saying? 

[00:31:39] Travis Guerrant: Hunters are the best conservationists in the world. They're not gonna kill the last of anything they enjoy pursuing,

[00:31:44] Ed Arnett: Right.

[00:31:45] Alan Leary: It's the same reason a bounty's not gonna work because if you're gonna pay me to go out and shoot the, you know, you're gonna give me $20 for every hog I shoot, I'm gonna make sure there's gonna be a hog there for me to shoot tomorrow.

But the other thing too is, you know, we talked earlier about entire sounder removal, and [00:32:00] we're never gonna get ahead without entire sounder removal. And if you've got a sounder of 20 pigs, a hunter's not gonna take 20 pigs at once. A hunter's gonna take two, one, two, maybe three. You know, we had one time- I believe one of Travis's staff got 72 hogs in one trap in one night. No hunter with three dogs is gonna take out 72 hogs. And so you're just not getting that whole sounder removal that we're talking about.

[00:32:24] Ed Arnett: Yeah. I wanna come back to that, but this kinda transcends, um, invasive or non-native species management. We chatted with the, the folks at the Wild Sheep Foundation on native and wild sheep conservation. And I was not fully aware, I haven't lived in Texas for a while, but I was not aware of the crisis they have with aoudad in that state.

And it's the same kinda situation where they make, landowners can make money on that,

[00:32:51] Alan Leary: Yeah. 

[00:32:52] Ed Arnett: And, it creates this conflict potential to, to reduce aoudad to a state where, where wild sheep can thrive. It's [00:33:00] a very interesting dynamic there with that whole hunting... But I love the way you guys couch this, the culture, and once you, once that gets established, then it's much, much harder to break. 

[00:33:09] Travis Guerrant: It is. 

[00:33:10] Katie Perkins: So we've seen great success in Missouri Is it possible that feral hogs could ever truly be eliminated from, let's say, the United States? And what would it take to accomplish that if that was even possible?

[00:33:23] Travis Guerrant: I think personally you could eliminate feral swine anywhere they exist if you got the politics, and with the politics come the resources. But man, it would be a heavy lift in some of these states where, where, for the reasons we talked about earlier, you know, the, the people making money off, off, of these animals. It's a cultural thing. Like think about Florida. How long have they been hunting feral swine in, in, Florida? 1400s. That's a long time ago, you know?

[00:33:51] Ed Arnett: Yeah.

[00:33:52] Travis Guerrant: So I think, I think you could do it. The thing is you gotta be incremental. You gotta have a strategic plan, and you gotta, you gotta, have the resources to implement it, [00:34:00] you know?

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. But you, you've gotta have all those other things in alignment before you can even have a discussion about that. But it would be a real challenge. I mean, like Texas, where it's a big, big money-making operation, it, I- it'd be a tough deal.

[00:34:15] Ed Arnett: limiting factor of, of success, yeah.

[00:34:18] Alan Leary: Oh, for sure. 

Yeah, and like Travis mentioned earlier, we had to, when we banned hunting, we had to be able to handle, that was one of the biggest pushback we got from the people who hunted. The hunting culture that was starting to develop here was, "You can't handle it. You need our help. You can't handle it." And we had to be able to guarantee that every landowner that called and said, "I want help," we would get somebody there within a very short amount of time. We were fortunate we had hogs only in the southern third of the state, and, you know, 11.2 million acres we figured were occupied, but

Texas has them in every county.

That's a lot more than 11 million acres in Texas, and, you know, they would they [00:35:00] would probably have to start smaller. You know, start, "Hey, we're gonna start in this corner of the state or on these wildlife management areas," and then build on that success rather than tackle the whole state like we did. Because I don't know that they could...

You know, it'd be hard to have enough staff in some of these states where the hogs are over the entire state to respond to everybody that wanted assistance.

[00:35:19] Travis Guerrant: Well, and, and I mean, our strategic approach has always been, we decided early on we were gonna start on the edges where we could have success.

Because when you start something like this, you have everybody telling you you can't do it, right? You're never gonna be able to do this. But we needed to have some wins. Early. So we started in the lower density populations where we could have some wins, and it's, it's really kind of like a, like a, a battle.

You gotta win all these little battles to win the war, right? So you're, you're slowly working your way from the lower density populations, and you're moving your staff and resources in, and in and in. We're down to the hard part now, where we gotta go find these critters on the landscape, get access to these holdout landowner [00:36:00] properties.

I mean, this private landowner access has been paramount to our success, and their buy-in allowing us onto their property to do this work. I mean, Missouri, what is it, 7%, 5% is publicly owned?

[00:36:12] Alan Leary: Yeah. Yeah. 93% is is private ownership ... yeah ...

[00:36:15] Travis Guerrant: without the private landowners buying in and letting you access their property and do this, you'd never be able to do it.

But, but, but that success. It, and it's not us telling them that we're being successful, it's their neighbors telling them that, "Hey, you need to work with these guys. This is for real. They, they, they're gonna do it," you know? And you get that buy-in to the point where we have landowners that are putting signs up that they're members of the Missouri Feral Hog Partnership, like literally putting signs on their, their driveways. I would have never thought I'd see that in a million years, but it's, they're doing it and they're proud of it, and they should be. It's, it's incredible. It's incredible what we've been able to accomplish as a group in Missouri to date, and we're gonna, we're gonna finish this thing out.

So we're, we're [00:37:00] getting there.

[00:37:00] Ed Arnett: You know, one last question as it relates to Katie's question, is it possible to eliminate hogs? And i'm not attempting here to pit you against your neighboring states, but that could be an issue in terms of your success relative to other s- six states' programs. So for example, does Illinois have a similar program to your east? Does Nebraska and Iowa have, you know, your surrounding neighbors? How does that play out in terms of helping achieve your your goal of no, no feral hogs?

[00:37:33] Travis Guerrant: Well, and I think we've actually been having a lot of discussions about this as we get closer and closer to eliminating in Missouri. We do have some border states that we, we have to work with to ensure success, otherwise we're gonna be camped out on the border.

You know, Arkansas's got a, a fairly substantial population of feral swine and, and honestly, so does Oklahoma. You know, it's, it's just a couple counties in Missouri, but there's an awful lot of pigs right there in [00:38:00] Oklahoma that, that we know we pick up coming across. So we're, we're working now, I'm working with my counterpart in, in Arkansas, the state director down there, and we're, we're trying to develop a plan of of how can we address this and, and how can we help them try to build a buffer? Helps us, helps them, gives them a toehold.

Like we're trying to figure that out now, 'cause it's kinda uncharted water for some states. But there's other states that have had some, luckily Kansas has been very proactive on, on feral swine, all but eliminated except along the Oklahoma border. They have some trickle over situation there. Illinois, they've, they've eliminated... They've actually moved into an elimination status, I think this year, where they've, they've gotten on top of, they had a very small population, but they were able to get on top of it.

Kentucky just passed some feral swine laws that are just incredible, and if that builds into moving the direction that we're going, we're, we're gonna be in pretty good shape.

You know, nothing's really in Iowa. They're an elimination state. They had a [00:39:00] few around, and we've, we've eliminated those, so they're, they're for right now feral swine free. You know, so we've, we've got some good neighbors, but we still have some issues to the south we gotta deal with. But I think we got the right people, and I think we can, we can come up with a plan working with the Conservation Department, Arkansas Game and Fish, and you know, all the partners and figure out a way forward on this.

[00:39:20] Alan Leary: But it's, it's interesting because Kansas is a little bit ahead of us, and actually early on as we were going through this, whenever I would hear Kansas give a state report, they would say, "Well, the only hogs we have left are on the border with Missouri and with Oklahoma," 'cause they were getting our hogs, and we were the problem for them. So yeah. We, 

[00:39:38] Ed Arnett: Yeah, 

[00:39:38] Alan Leary: But I know years ago, years ago that's what they would always say. "Oh, yeah, all ours are coming from right over there."

[00:39:45] Travis Guerrant: That's fair.

[00:39:47] Ed Arnett: Well, wildlife damage and invasive species management and feral species management is some of the components we don't always talk enough about and how critically it is, and really appreciate what you guys are doing because [00:40:00] I think, you know, our members, most of them I assume, would realize, you know, the, the challenges for landscapes and native wildlife and what the impacts can be if you eliminate these feral hogs.

So thanks for everything you're doing for native wildlife and landscapes, and it's good for people as well. So thanks for joining us on the podcast. Really appreciate it 

[00:40:20] Alan Leary: You bet. Appreciate the time. Thank you Yeah, thank you.