Guns, Choppers, Wild Hogs: Congress Pressed to Fund More Hunts
A good hog-hunting helicopter pilot doesn’t just chase swine. It’s more like operating a giant, flying push broom.
A pilot spots the foragers in dense brush and hovers just over the trees, angling the helicopter to use its rotor wash to drive the hogs out into open fields. The flyer then pivots the helicopter to give aerial gunners, strapped in and hanging out the side, a clear shot.
“You could be a Marine Corps ace pilot, but you don’t necessarily qualify as a Wildlife Services pilot from Day 1,” said Michael Marlow, assistant program manager for the USDA’s National Feral Swine Damage Management Program.
Marlow wants to develop more of these specialized pilots to combat a fast-growing economic problem and environmental blight: 6 million feral hogs eating up American farmland while scouring for corn, roots, and grubs.
The omnivores have spread as far north as Washington state. But most stretch across the Southeast to Texas, where they’ve become one the nation’s most costly invasive species. That’s also where aerial gunning is starting to stem the tide.
But time and money to pay for helicopters are running low after a five-year pilot program’s authorization expired Sept. 30.
What happens next is unclear. The feral hog invasion now costing farmers and ranchers $2.5 billion a year is just one skirmish in the broad fiscal battles dominating Washington this fall.
Public Trough, Private Enterprise
When Congress gets down to negotiating a new five-year farm bill and annual government-funding bills, farm advocacy groups want lawmakers to prioritize extra money for more helicopters to attack the hogs from above — as well as to pay for large, high-tech traps and extra personnel power across much of the South.
“I think it’s pretty evident what we need to do,” said the Texas Farm Bureau’s Tracy Tomascik. “We need to align a little more funding to the aerial gunning.”
But not everyone welcomes a bigger federal role.
Chris Britt, CEO of Helibacon, charges $2,995 and up to let customers fire automatic or semiautomatic rifles at feral hogs from his company’s private helicopter. His Bryan, Texas-based business eliminates thousands of the invasive species a year at no cost to landowners or taxpayers, Britt said. And he’s not convinced the federal government can do better.
“Call me libertarian, or call me whatever,” Britt said. “I just don’t think they’re particularly efficient.”
The hog problem highlights tension between rural America’s small-government politics and its reliance on federal resources. Without the government’s help, landowners struggle to coordinate efforts to cull a species that doesn’t respect property or political boundaries.
‘Helicopters, They’re Not Cheap’
Pigs and hogs came to North America in the 1500s with European settlers, but feral swine — a mix of escaped farm hogs and Russian boars — became a major problem in just the last 30 years or so, after people released them into new areas to expand hunting opportunities, according to John Tomeček, an associate professor at Texas A&M University and chair of the National Wild Pig Task Force.
The feral hogs — with no natural predators in much of the country — took off, and have been found in 34 states. In addition to economic damage, they’ve caused the decline of nearly 300 native plants and animals, the USDA says.
In 2018, Congress created a $75 million pilot program in the five-year farm bill to expand its work to kill feral hogs, building on a smaller program launched four years earlier. The pilot program evenly divided funds between trapping and aerial gunning — mostly from helicopters, but sometimes from airplanes.
In Texas, federal officials killed 42,333 feral hogs last year, including 23,301 shot from helicopters, according to USDA data. Nationally, Agriculture Department officials recorded killing 551,558 feral hogs from 2018 to 2022. The project is working, Marlow said in a phone interview.
The USDA would like to increase the use of helicopters, buy more traps, and hire more people to kill feral hogs if Congress could provide more money. That could come through the new farm bill, which lawmakers hope to enact early next year, or through annual appropriations bills, which have provided about $30 million annually to battle feral hogs in recent years.
“We utilize the funding to increase boots on the ground, and tools we need,” Marlow said. “Helicopters, they’re not cheap. Fixed wing airplanes. These traps aren’t cheap.”
It’s probably impossible to eradicate the hogs in Texas and some other areas in the South, but officials aim to contain and then reduce their population, Marlow said. In some Northern states, the goal is to eliminate the hogs entirely.
Tough and Hungry
Agricultural workers describe feral hogs as nasty, tough, and intelligent enough to learn about threats posed by certain kinds of traps.
A big feral hog can survive a gunshot to the neck and shoulder area, said David Caudell, farm manager for Goodland Farms in Hearne, Texas, about 25 miles northwest of College Station.
Caudell manages farmland between the Big Brazos and Little Brazos rivers, land that’s surrounded by havens for feral hogs, which stay in the brush near the water during the day, before coming out at night to dig for food.
Caudell, a burly Arkansas transplant, keeps a rifle in his Polaris side-by-side off-road vehicle but says it might not do much good against a wild hog.
“That .22 rifle I carry in this thing — you’re just going to have to shoot him between the eyes or in the ear, or gut-shoot him or something like that,” Caudell said during an October tour of Goodland Farms. “You can shoot him in the shoulder and you’ll never faze him.”
David Stratta, a raspy-voiced retired farmer, said he’d shot a hog in the shoulder, only to have the bullet ricochet off.
Acres Destroyed
Hogs tear up the land on Goodland Farms in the spring, digging for recently planted corn seeds, Caudell said. Closer to harvest time they trample the plants and eat the corn. And in the fall and winter, they’ll dig for anything they can find, ruining Caudell’s work to prepare the land for planting.
“I’ve seen as many as 30 or 40 acres that are destroyed over two or three nights in a row,” said Gary Conn, a chemical applicator for farms in the area.
The hogs often dig a perfectly straight line when they find corn seed, Stratta said, attributing the pattern to both their sense of smell and their intelligence.
“They’ll start on that row and they won’t veer off it,” he said.
The animals love acorns, which sometimes draws them toward oak trees near people’s homes, Stratta said. They don’t seem to like soybeans or cotton seeds, but they’ll eat them if necessary, he added.
They’ll also eat rattlesnakes, Caudell and Stratta said — which has led to a popular legend that the snakes in Texas have stopped rattling out of fear of the hogs, though biologists are skeptical.
The Farm Bill
The 2018 farm bill pilot program started hog eradication projects in 34 areas across 12 states, including six projects in Texas. But the program didn’t allow USDA officials to expand to other areas once they succeeded in one spot, Marlow said.
Congress could give officials more flexibility if they make the pilot program permanent in the next farm bill, he said.
“We hope to have the ability to expand and have the freedom so that once we see success, we can move on,” Marlow said. “But these were defined by projects with somewhat rigid boundaries.”
But lawmakers have mostly debated spending cuts pushed by conservatives in recent months. House Republicans initially pushed for a slight increase in funding for the USDA to address feral hogs in their Agriculture-FDA appropriations bill. That was reversed by a conservative measure to require across-the-board cuts, which helped lead to the bill’s failure on the House floor.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced a bill (
‘Shooting a Machine Gun Out of a Helicopter’
There’s not much of a federal presence around Hearne and the Bryan-College Station area in East-Central Texas. Instead, landowners rely partly on private helicopters to hunt hogs, or at least scare them onto other properties.
Britt, the CEO of Helibacon, calls his business “a form of pest control” that landowners don’t have to pay for.
The business launched shortly after the 2011 enactment of a Texas state law that allows land-use agreements for helicopter hunting over private land, which currently doesn’t require a hunting license.
“The landowners give us free access to their land in exchange for us coming to kill the feral pigs as often as possible,” Britt said. “So that’s the quid pro quo, and then the customer is the one who’s paying for the whole thing.”
From the customer’s perspective, the appeal is clear, Britt said: “You’re shooting a machine gun out of a helicopter.”
But the federal government doesn’t like private helicopter hunting.
“These companies make a lot of money for allowing people to go up,” Marlow said. “It doesn’t make sense that they’d want to eradicate the swine because it would eliminate their ability to make money.”
Pigs ‘Going to Learn’
Farmers are concerned the hogs are learning to avoid helicopters and becoming more difficult to scare out of dense brush, Tomascik said. Private helicopter hunters make a lot of noise, teach the hogs to stay in wooded areas, and don’t kill very many hogs, he said.
USDA employees are “trained to not miss,” Tomascik said. “If I went up on a helicopter, and I pay however many thousands of dollars for it, I’m not going to be nearly as effective as the USDA employee. I’m going to have a great time, but the pigs are going to learn more from me being up there.”
An October outing with six customers on Helibacon’s Bell 212 HP helicopter didn’t yield many hogs. During a two-hour hunt, the group killed two hogs — and possibly a third, which ran into a wooded area after appearing to be shot.
Pilot Chase Roberts and crew chief Taylor Cary spotted a sounder of roughly a dozen hogs in the woods, but couldn’t scare them into open fields. During a safety training course before the flight, Cary acknowledged that groups aren’t shy about firing away, saying they average about 400 rounds fired for every hog they kill.
Despite any inefficiencies in Britt’s operation, he says he’s skeptical about an increased federal presence.
“Is the application of those funds down through the federal government going to be done efficiently?” Britt said. “That’s not my view.”
High-Tech Traps
While feral hogs shot from the sky are quickly picked clean by vutures, cage-trapped hogs often are slaughtered for their meat.
Paying for more traps would be an easy way for the government to make a bigger dent in the hog population, said Danny Tarver, a trapper based in Franklin, Texas.
The best traps — a 12-by-12-foot cage equipped with a 360-degree camera and a WiFi hotspot to connect to a trapper’s smartphone — cost about $4,500 each, said Tarver. He has four of those larger traps that he uses on nearby farms and ranches, as well as on land around prisons and power plants.
“A lot of people can’t afford them, and I’ve been one of them,” Tarver said, sporting a white beard and a “2nd Amendment” baseball hat. “If you had enough, say, if we could buy seven or eight of them, we could catch a load of hogs.”
Tarver’s high-tech traps are becoming the standard. Using an app by eWeLink, he presses a button and a small motor lifts the steel cage a few feet off the ground. Tarver gets an alert on his phone when something moves under his trap, detected by a camera he mounts above it. It’s equipped with a speaker, so he can yell at deer or hunters that get too close. And if hogs take the bait — corn, their favorite — Tarver presses a button and the cage comes clanging down around them.
The bells and whistles aren’t just a matter of convenience. Feral hogs learn quickly about the threats posed by traps, forcing humans to adapt just as much as the animals.
Small box traps don’t work well anymore, said Rebecca McPeake, a University of Arkansas professor who works on her home state’s feral hog task force. Trappers upgraded to larger traps with a gate, but hogs were hesitant to pass through. Trappers put in a second gate “so they can see straight through” and not feel boxed in. That eventually evolved to traps with three gates.
“I don’t know if it’s us or them, if the hogs are getting smarter or we’re getting smarter,” McPeake said in a phone interview. “But we’re upping the ante.”
Trapping is especially important in southeastern states where there’s too much tree cover for helicopters to work as well, said Mitt Walker, director of national legislative programs at the Alabama Farmers Federation. He’d like the federal government to expand staffing to help farmers and ranchers set up and bait the traps, especially now that the traps are getting bigger and heavier.
“When we’ve got farmers running a farm and manning these traps, the feedback is, ‘This is going to be a lot harder than we thought it would be,’” Walker said in a phone interview.
‘They Think They’re Really Cool’
Fences have to be especially tough to keep out feral hogs. Barbed wire doesn’t work, Conn said. Net-wire fencing works well and can last for years, but it’s more expensive than most fences, he said.
Even electrified hot-wire fencing might not work if a hog wants to get through. Stratta said he put up hot-wire fencing around farmland, heard a hog squealing when it got shocked, and then watched it run through.
“He knew it was going to shock him,” Stratta said. “He hit it and ran through it. He was hungry and he didn’t care about that hot wire.”
Some landowners aren’t interested in getting rid of feral hogs, like absentee landowners who spend most of their time out of state, according to Conn. Others harbor the hogs on their land because it’s good for hunting. Conn said he’s leased land from owners who “don’t want us to bother the hogs, because they think they’re really cool.”
So far, the hogs have taken advantage of the lack of coordination.
“You’re going to have to get everybody on the same page if you’re going to do some good,” Conn said. “And that’s hard to do. We can’t get five people to agree on anything, much less spend a little bit of money to help eradicate the problem.”
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