Tennessee Starts Aerial Hunting of Feral Hogs

Tennessee is stepping up efforts to control feral hogs – wild pigs that eat crops, sometimes carry disease, and are prolific breeders.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says they’re almost impossible to eradicate, and costly to control. So to keep the hogs’ population in check, the state is beginning to hunt them from helicopters.

Brett Dunlap, with USDA Wildlife Services, says feral hogs aren’t that different from farmyard pigs – just with a longer snout, shorter tail, and bigger canine teeth.

Dunlap says feral hogs are nothing new to Tennessee, particularly in the East and the Cumberland Plateau. But in the last few years Dunlap says they’ve expanded into more developed areas, including Williamson and Sumner Counties.

“Probably the large part of it is due to population increase. Feral swine are quite productive from a reproductive standpoint. They can have anywhere from four to eight young per year. Sometimes they can reproduce twice a year. And they can begin reproducing at less than a year of age.”

Dunlap says with few natural predators to control that surging population, it’s not enough to open the hogs to sport hunting. That’s why Tennessee has turned to aerial hunting –

“– Where we’re actually shooting the pigs from the air from a helicopter. It’s expensive. It’s about a thousand dollars an hour. But when you look at the cost per effort, all of a sudden it’s not that expensive.”

Dunlap says eight hours in the air can potentially kill up to 400 hogs. But he says parts of Tennessee are just no good for aerial hunting, particularly after winter, when the leaves make sighting through trees impossible.

Dunlap says it’s hard to know how many feral hogs Tennessee has. The U.S. total is estimated around 5 million. Dunlap says they cause roughly a billion dollars of damage each year to agriculture alone.

EXTRA:

Dunlap says the feral hog problem has intensified in Tennessee over the last decade, and will likely get worse before it gets better.

“There are very few areas in Tennessee that don’t have hogs right now. But we really don’t even have a really good handle on that. It’s not going to be very long before I would say it’s going to be a safe bet the vast majority, if not already, of Tennessee counties have a feral swine population.”