I do love how people want to come down to Texas and help us shoot hogs. They don't want to come help mend fences or muck out stalls, but instead just assume that we don't have enough people here who can or want to shoot hogs, LOL. We do. Not only that, we have a LOT of non-landowning people here who want to come and shoot for free as well, some of whom get rather ugly about the notion about why they won't be allowed to shoot for free.
Feral hogs are a problem, no doubt. So are deer. Deer still do a tremendous amount of damage, several times more than hogs (of course there are more deer, right?). However, feral hogs are a commodity as well.
Farmers may hate hogs, but they know something that seemingly every wannabe-free hunter does not realize. Shooting a few hogs on your weekend trip isn't really going to help out the farmer that much as you can't keep the hogs from returning.
Do the math. Say we do have 2 million hogs (see below) and $52 million annual damage. That means each hog does just $26 a year in damage. How much damage does a Johnny-come-lately hunter do if he puts a bullet through your tractor, house, drives across your wheat field in his truck to retrieve a hog, leaves a gate open, etc.?
Actually, TP&W says approx. one point five million in Texas, but what's a million here or there.
What there is in Texas is A LOT! of feral hogs any way you look at it.
And they're not going away any time soon.
Yep, and they have been saying that for years on this page. It is woefully out of date. They also have a map showing hogs not to be in localities where people currently hunt them, LOL.
http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/nuisance/feral_hogs/
Interestingly, TPWD doesn't do actual hog counts. So what they have listed isn't reliable. Of course as Old Stony noted above, nobody seems to know how many there really are. Current studies that I know of are out of A&M, but they are nothing more than statistical guesses based on limited sampling.
I wrote this back in 2012, but it fits here. Hopefully, all the links still work...
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I started hunting hogs in 2008 and shot my first in 2009. Since 2008, the hog population was said to be over 2 million hogs and doing 52 million in damage a year [note this is a working number used for years now that Art noted above and it hasn't changed despite years having passed and the hog population purportedly growing]. Since that time, I have also heard how the hog population is growing. It is getting bigger and bigger at an alarming rate. People even say it is growing so fast, exploding, can't be stopped, but the population seems to be stuck. It never seems to grow. Since I have hunting hogs, "over 2 million" has been the population estimate and they are still doing roughly 52 million a year in damage according to most articles, LOL.
It was at 2 million in 2005,
http://www.hpj.com/archives/2005/may05/may16/Texashogpopulationwreakingh.CFM
but It was thought to be close to 2 million back in 1997.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?i...81655&dq=texas+hog+population+2+million&hl=en
All this is interesting given that A&M estimates 21% population growth per year, but their estimate is 1.8 to 3.4 million hogs.
http://feralhogs.tamu.edu/files/2011/05/FeralHogFactSheet.pdf
So assuming 2.0 million as late as 2005 and 21% growth...
2006 = 2.42 million
2007 = 2.93
2008 = 3.54
2009 = 4.29
2010 = 5.19
2011 = 6.27
2012 = 7.59 hogs in Texas this year!
So where are the hogs? We should have 3-4 times the number of hogs people keep talking about, but when the experts speak on TV or put out an article, the population really hasn't changed much since 1997 when it was close to 2 million, reaching 2 million by 2005, and now is just over 2 million and has been for the last 5 years.
At the claimed growth rate, they should have armed guards having to shoot hogs off the playground of my kids' school (hogs are hunted on the ranch adjoining the school) and I can't even get them to come to my feeders with corn, sweetfeed, sour corn, or graphic pictures of Miss Piggy. Something ain't right. Even with a much reduced rate of growth, we should still be well over 5 million, but we aren't, not according to the experts.
Either somebody can't count or the population isn't growing as claimed, LOL!
Picture is of a boar at my feeder as I type...