Helicopter Pig Hunting

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I don't care how long it takes them to die
RockinU this is the only problem I have with anything you have said. I understand It is your livelyhood . I have a hard time believing you can't to find a early 20's country boy in Texas with a quad and a 357 that would just love to follow the chopper and finish of the hogs humanely
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That would make sense to me. Not only for the humanity, but to make sure they stay dead.
 
yeah... a guy on a 4 wheeler would be a great idea... what with how well a 4 wheeler can travel through a barbed wire fence

Maybe they could bury the pigs too..and have a priest riding shotgun who could say a prayer for their little pig families.
 
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You're right, RockinU. I really don't understand.
I don't understand how a bounty on the hogs was ended more than 5 years ago after a pay-out of less than $20,000. That's not much of a budget for such a severe problem; especially compared to the alternative cost of the operation of a helicopter to take out perhaps 150-200 hogs when the single year bounty experiment netted over 2000. (Numbers gotten from The Texas Dept. of Agriculture and Van Zandt County.)
I don't understand if hunters are allowed access to property and the animals are so prevalent, that hunting "ranches" in that area can make any money charging anywhere from $300 to $2000 per hunter with a single or two-hog limit per hunter. To me that's like a gun store asking top dollar for ammo that another dealer down the street is giving away for free...or even paying to take off their hands.
Maybe it's because I can't see it first hand; but you are right, I don't understand.
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You are right, 20k isn't much for a problem of this magnitude. We aren't getting any help from the state. We successfully eradicated the screw worm decades ago, we have a state funded program dedicated to the eradication of the boll weevil, but so far we are basically on our own for hogs, although there have been discussions of late for more help. As for 2000 hogs, well that is 0.1% of the estimated population...and that estimate is getting dated. There are some places that are charging some people to shoot hogs, but most places with a bad problem have people who come hunt them for free (I have a couple places I hunt for), and lots of ranches include hogs with their hunt packages, others have a shoot on sight policy...but it's not enough. Hogs are hard to hunt, specially in the brush country of south Texas and the Big Thicket of East Texas. The sheer numbers, and their incredible adaptability and reproductive rates just have us on the ropes. Extreme situations require extreme actions.
 
the reason the program ended was because it ran out of funding, not because it wasn't a success...

There are plenty of other texas counties that have bounties on wild hogs right now.
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I would be very interested to find out which ones. Can you post a link?
 
smith county started one just last year. I was still living in tyler when they implemented it. I heard around the Lampassas area has one as well.

The biggest problem is the counties have a hard time convincing the average voter how bad of a problem hogs are and no one wants to stick their neck out to allocate funding for "shootin' pigs"

I would imagine you could call some district TPW offices to see what additional ones are offering bounties.

The district office in Tyler had a fairly open message about advocating shooting hogs. They don't care what you do with them, there aren't any waste laws that pertain to them since they're non game... they just want them gone.



I would think helicopters and east texas wouldn't mix very well...once they get into the pine thickets, you can't see them at all. .

I have had my own issues with hogs... I'm telling you, you CANNOT conventionally hunt them down to decent numbers. Count the piglets in the litter... 10 of them...

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One of the ranches I hunt for is in Lampasas and San Saba counties, and unless things have changed since October (which very well could be) neither offers a bounty. I will have to do some research on that...thanks for the heads up though.
 
Heck! We went deer hunting in Vietnam by helicopter back in the mid 60's. The deer looked like small brown and black mules. It was something different than the chicken, chicken?, stew.
 
The state of Texas, home to about 2 million feral hogs, pays hunters $7 for each wild pig they kill.
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I copied the above from a link on a previous post. I wish it were true of all Texas counties, but it's not. I shot 56 hogs off of a wheat crop that belonged to a co-workers brother a couple of years ago in one growing season. At $7 a pop it may have payed for the gas and ammo. The fun I had was "Priceless" but it didn't even significantly dent the problem in the long term. I would love to do the Helicopter bit. I'd gladly pay for my flight time and supply my own ammo. I haven't flown in a Helo since I got out of the service and I already know not to shoot through the rotor arc, 'cause "bad things" tend to happen.:D
 
We now have feral hogs in the Rosillos Mountains of west Texas, and the NPS is scared spitless that they'll get to the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park. I recently learned that there's a feral hog problem upriver near Presidio, of all places. And the population is expanding in the Davis Mountains.

As has been said in earlier posts, the hogs are winning...
 
Texas isn't alone...
http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/i...p_calls_f.html
Once again though, they claim Texas pays a bounty when it doesn't.
I'm going to look into just why there isn't a state-wide bounty on them....and who opposes it. After all, they spent over half a million dollars to study the problem four years ago.
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Seems like I heard the last legislative session allocated like 7 million to start do deal with the problem, but I haven't heard anything else on it. Maybe I mis-remember, or the economy has put it on hold...don't know.
 
I don't know about shooting them from a little bitty helicopter whizzing around just above the ground, helo crashes make my butt pucker. But I would LOVE to get some trigger time on hog control! I can't think of a better use for my M1! I sure as hell ain't PAYING someone to do so though.

And for all those clustered around the feeders........

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Try these numbers, RockinU and Boba Fett,
Van Zandt county succeeded in eliminating over 2000 hogs in a single year with a, I'm going to say it, under-publisized, bounty program. I agree that 2000 hogs is a drop in the bucket compared to a state-wide population of over 2 million. However...
There are 254 counties in Texas. If a state-wide bounty were put in place and only 2/3's of the counties (some areas, approx. 10% of the counties, don't have the problem) were as successful as Van Zandt, then over 300,000 hogs per year would be eradicated at a cost of less than 2.5 million (not subtracting licenses and fees for hunters). I would offer that number could be significantly higher due to the simple spread of information among even out-of-state hunters.
 
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Try these numbers, RockinU and Boba Fett,
Van Zandt county succeeded in eliminating over 2000 hogs in a single year with a, I'm going to say it, under-publisized, bounty program. I agree that 2000 hogs is a drop in the bucket compared to a state-wide population of over 2 million. However...
There are 254 counties in Texas. If a state-wide bounty were put in place and only 2/3's of the counties (some areas, approx. 10% of the counties, don't have the problem) were as successful as Van Zandt, then over 300,000 hogs per year would be eradicated at a cost of less than 2.5 million (not subtracting licenses and fees for hunters). I would offer that number could be significantly higher due to the simple spread of information among even out-of-state hunters.
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Hey, I'm all for the bounty...would help pay for gas and ammo. I have no idea on "harvest" data for hogs in Texas, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that many more than that many are being killed a year now. The problem lies in keeping up with their reproduction. The most common number used as the current population in Texas is 2,000,000 although many consider that number light. If only 1/4 of that population is breeding sows, then that gives you 500,000 breeding sows. Lets be ultra conservative and say that each sow only produces 5 piglets in a year (pretty conservative considering they face no real predation issues, and can eat almost anything). That gives you 2.5 million new pigs produced this year (half of which are female and able to reproduce themselves at 6-8 months). As I already stated, hogs don't face many predation issues, and are highly adaptable and not very picky as to food intake and live an average of 6-8 years, so your natural mortality rate obviously isn't enough to help, but again, to be generous lets say that 1,000,000 die from natural causes. That is still a net increase of 1.5 million, you kill 300,000 with the bounty and you have made a whopping 20% dent in the net INCREASE.

So to summarize: 2,000,000 hogs in Texas, if 25% of them (one quarter) are breeding sows that gives you 500,000 breeding sows. If those 500,000 sows average a conservative 5 piglets raised a year that is 2,500,000 replacements every year. Being Generous and saying that 1,000,000 hogs die of old age/nature=net increase of 1,500,000. That means that WE HAVE TO KILL 1.5 MILLION EVERY YEAR JUST TO KEEP UP!! We can't even keep up, how in the heck is a bounty going to get us ahead? At $7 a head it will cost the tax-payers of Texas 10.5 million in bounty money if we were able to keep up, and at the end of that we still wouldn't have gained on them. It's numbers guys...and they have them.
 
Look to history. Before the Vikings landed in Iceland the place was covered by forest. Because of the extreme northern latitude of the place, the environment was pretty fragile. It was generally assumed that the Vikings, the people, cut down all the trees for firewood and to build boats.

Archaeology now suggests strongly that pigs turned loosed or escaped did the worst damage by eating the small seedlings and saplings and devouring the seeds and acorns and what have you. Look at Iceland today...the land of fire and ice...but not of trees. Iceland is an example of one of the worst ecological disasters in mankind...and pigs did it.
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The Vikings cut down all the trees and released the pigs that without other resources, then ate the saplings, but it is the pigs fault for the ecological disaster? I think you shoed the wrong horse. Pigs didn't cut down the trees in the first place or build the boats needed to invade the island. Humans did it.

I think you also forgot to mention all the goats and sheep that were brought along as well that also grazed their way through anything vegetative they could find..
 
I have a hard time believing you can't to find a early 20's country boy in Texas with a quad and a 357 that would just love to follow the chopper and finish of the hogs humanely
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Are you kidding me?, until either you fly yourself or watch it being done, there isnt a quad and rider on the earth that can keep up with a chopper running down swine. That's what makes shooting them from air so effective, there are very few obstacles other than powerlines, towers etc. to get in the way. Besides the object is to put holes in hogs and not direct someone on the ground to follow up. As a matter of fact we would prefer that there is no one riding around on the ground trying to shoot at fleeing hogs, it's just not a good idea.
 
The Vikings cut down all the trees and released the pigs that without other resources, then ate the saplings, but it is the pigs fault for the ecological disaster? I think you shoed the wrong horse. Pigs didn't cut down the trees in the first place or build the boats needed to invade the island. Humans did it.
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So we should dig up the dead Vikings and kill them again:confused:
The problem exists no matter who was at fault.
 
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