Okay, I just don't get this

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Very true, and in a lot of ways, it's a far better use of land than the kind of suburban sprawl we have here.
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Better by whose standards? I've lived there .....would not do it again.

I could no more live happily in that kind of density than I could fly to the moon.

Housing tends to be very concentrated -- which means, among other things, that people can walk to shops, are more likely to know their neighbors, etc. And outside big cities, it generally means that anyone can walk a short distance and be in the countryside -
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I know all my neighbors ...... and have a yard with a garden. SMALL towns are Great.
 
Brewster County, Texas, is the size of the state of Delaware. We have yet to exceed 10,000 people. Driving south from Alpine, the highway fence of the west pasture of the O2 Ranch is 28 miles long; the pasture is 17 miles deep.

Then there are the federal lands of the western US.

I think it's in Montana that Ted Turner owns a half-million acres; he has a similar tract in New Mexico. Texas' King Ranch is some 800,000+ acres.

Sure, there is open land in Europe. It's just nowhere near the scale of what we have in the US.

Our urban sprawl is due to the fact that the land was available and on average a US person needs more space than the average foreigner. That is not even arguable; it's well established in the literature. By and large, foreigners can live more closely together, sit closer, and stand closer while conversing. They're more emotionally comfortable with "non sprawl".
 
Art, no doubt, everything is bigger in Texas! ;)

It's kinda like my initial thoughts about New Jersey as a native Floridian. I always imagined a place of wall-to-wall concrete where everyone drives poorly and cannot make left turns. Then when I was stationed there I found out that the southern 1/2 of the state is mostly wooded, with lots of farmland, sod farms, cranberry bogs, everyone drove poorly and nobody could make left hand turns...:D

Europe, for all its population, still has a lot of open land. If you compare it to west Texas, Montana, or Wyoming, it doesn't equate, but it certainly is more than a lot of places.

And those small farms' produce often is what winds up in the local restaurants, as well as in Germany, some of the local game!
 
Art,

I know what you mean about urban sprawl!

Memorial day weekend was spent on the Red-Desert looking for rocks and such.

Sunday we drove a 84 mile loop, 100% on two track roads, and never saw a single other vehicle!

We did see 200+ elk, 200+ antelope and two horned lizards!

We didn't see any hogs, though. They don't like the winters!

I kind of got claustrophobic on Monday, we hit the highway to go home and saw 30 cars! Damn Urbanites!
 
jimbob86 said:
Better by whose standards? I've lived there .....would not do it again.

I could no more live happily in that kind of density than I could fly to the moon.
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It's a better use of land from the point of view of the residents, compared to endless, sterile suburban sprawl, and it certainly is from an economic perspective. The Netherlands is a good example. It's a very small country with a population density of 477 people/sq. km (:eek:), yet it is the world's second largest agricultural exporter; agriculture accounts for 10% of Dutch GDP.

That's efficient use of a limited resource.
 
Sometime around the late 1960s or in the 1970s, I read that annually there were more people who'd become lost in the boonies and had to be rescued by searchers in the southern part of New Jersey, compared to anywhere else in the nation.

Drifting: I think it was in Reader's Digest that I read of an effort to build a railroad across the Great Dismal Swamp in New Jersey. The first effort sank into the bog: Crushed stone, cross ties and rails. They tried again. Same result. Being slow learners, a third effort was made.

Maybe you could find that railroad with a metal detector. Maybe.
 
compared to endless, sterile suburban sprawl,
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I could not live thereabouts, either.

There are something like 500 folks living in the friendly confines of my little ville, which I doubt covers a square km ....... it's not endless, and certainly not sterile (that'd be Europe, where children playing in the streets are considered a nuisance).....

It's the inborn idea that only government could solve any problem that I hated about Europe- I noted that nobody owned a pick-up truck there ...... "How do you move anything?", sez I...... "We hire "Moving Men"(unionized, of course!) ...... the idea of solving your own problems without consulting some "-Ampt" or Trade Union Rep was just as foreign to the Europeans I knew as paying the landowner for any game I shot was to me...... completely unthinkable...... which brings us back to the topic at hand: You have a pig problem? I have a bacon deficit. Where's the problem?

Europeans see problems as things to be managed. Americans see problems as something to be solved, and by themselves, on the spot, preferably. Completely different mindsets.
 
It's the inborn idea that only government could solve any problem that I hated about Europe- I noted that nobody owned a pick-up truck there ...... "How do you move anything?", sez I...... "We hire "Moving Men"(unionized, of course!) ...... the idea of solving your own problems without consulting some "-Ampt" or Trade Union Rep was just as foreign to the Europeans I knew as paying the landowner for any game I shot was to me...... completely unthinkable...... which brings us back to the topic at hand: You have a pig problem? I have a bacon deficit. Where's the problem?
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There are a lot of generalisations in your post. Europe is a big place with lots of countries with different traditions and cultures some even have pick-ups.

My impression is that hunting in the UK is primarily a rich man's sport.
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No most hunting would be done by working class people.
 
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Apparently in England wild boar are considered beloved creatures who deserve respect and protection (and what they call a 'proper' hunting season). One hunter said that using a night scope to kill boar is considered murder, and he only shoots them when they have a sporting chance.
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I had seen the video before and found the "murder" reference lacking. The guy simply wants a sustained hunting population and anybody hunting in what he considers to be an unethical manner (not fair chase) is committing murder. It is something of the mindset that "If you aren't hunting like I do, then you aren't really hunting. If you aren't hunting, then you are just killing or murdering the animals." He is setting himself as the noble hunter, doing what is good, just, and fair. It is an attitude you can see repeated widely, not just with hogs, on hunting shows and discussed in hunting forums.

Note that wild boar in Britain were extirpated. They were reintroduced to farms/wildlife centers, lost control of, and now there is a viable living population, but this new population is not indigenous to England and is very recent, sort of like elk in Texas. We had them, hunted them out (extirpated), and now they have been reintroduced.
http://www.britishwildboar.org.uk/index.htm?britain.htm

While I hate to think of it in this light, a good problem with feral hogs or actual wild boar may be what England needs to help jump start a pro-firearms movement, though they will probably fail and limit hunting to single shot or double barrel guns and the like.

Because the boar is native to Europe, Asia, and Africa, those areas harbor diseases and parasites to control its population. We don't have those diseases here. We don't want them.
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For the life of me, I cannot find any evidence to support this. Scorch, specifically what diseases and parasites keep the boar population in check in the Old World that we don't have here? Pretty much every single disease carried by hogs in the Old World are diseases we have here, either naturally in wildlife or because of the domestic animal population we have had here in North America for hundreds of years. I don't know about parasites, but I do know that given that hogs have been here and being imported for the last nearly half century, we have already imported the parasites as well. It isn't an issue of us not wanting them here. They are here and are well established.
 
My impression is that hunting in the UK is primarily a rich man's sport. Hunting in the US is becoming that way when there is no BLM land or substantial state owned property. But as always, these lands are not often/usually the "best" places to go.

They stipulated the hogs must be "relocated". We took the live hogs out of the traps, loaded them into the toter, hauled them off, shot and field dressed same.
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I found this humorous. Beyond humorous actually. I wonder if the people "relocating" the feral hogs in that one TV show actually relocate them in the same fashion once the cameras are turned off? I could never understand why they went to so much trouble except that it would make an interesting TV show and not offend the PETA folks.

The only place I have ever seen wild hogs was Texas. I read about them in my state and see the damage for example in Cades Cove in the Smoky Mt NP, but actually seen one... no.
 
How do they plan on keeping the wild boar population controlled? It will get away from them. It may take a few years, but eventually the pig bomb going to go off there as well. How can they stop it? That's how it's been here; for about 15 years we'd see the occasional boar, it was absolutely no big deal, kind of a novelty, and then it seemed like overnight, they were... everywhere. All the time. Breeding like crazy, getting really aggressive, destroying the land, destroying the crops, attacking people and dogs and local wildlife. We can't trap enough of them, or shoot enough of them, to make a dent, and the population continues to multiply. I walked out one morning, and my front and back lawns were gone overnight; we have to do control burns now to limit the brush, but that doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. The land that is ripped up overnight takes time to heal, and since the hogs just come back again...

I don't get the Brits' attitude, because they are looking at a future that is our present condition, and it ain't pretty. If the boar is not native to England, then they have to choose between ethical hunting, or seeing a lot of their beautiful countryside decimated, and that would just be awful.

We had this great toll road that opened up recently, it gets you to San Antonio so fast, but the pigs are all over it at night. There have been accidents since day one it opened. I don't take it at night, if I can avoid it, or at least I drive it slower (which kind of defeats the purpose!) They say that hitting a pig (or a sounder) is like hitting a bunch of little tanks.

I also don't like when hunters on some forums say that the problem is exaggerated for tv, for ratings, because they don't see that many hogs where they live in Texas. To me that's disrespectful of both nature and their neighbors; just because someone hasn't experienced something personally doesn't mean the threat is not there. People out here are frustrated, and they need help, but even parks and wildlife doesn't have an answer. Trap them, hunt them with dogs, shoot them, poison them (not good, since people eat boar)... but the math doesn't add up to getting even close to an effective response. At least if the pig bomb does go off in England, they can't say they weren't warned.
 
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They aren't unaware of the problems. Here's a piece from the Guardian:
Locals have complained that rampaging boars plough up gardens and crops, panic horses, rip up roadside verges, open rubbish bags and are increasingly causing road accidents. "In 18 months' time, it is said we could have 1,000 wild boars in the forest. Nobody knows how many it can sustain," said Martin Quayle, the district council cabinet member for the environment. "They make a hell of a mess of the verges. Some people say the place is so untidy that it's begun to look like a tip. On my lane, they have dug up the verge three times in the last year."

"A lot of people get really steamed up about them. But it's very delicate. Everyone feels there should be some culling, but others say it should be turned into a tourist attraction and that we should attract hunters. Some poaching already goes on."​
It's just that the English have a... peculiar attitude toward animals. But if the boars are frightening the horses, that will make then get serious about the problem. That is right out. ;)
 
About 4 years ago, my wife's grandfather gave me a nice lecture at Thanksgiving about feral hog management here in Texas. He went into great detail about identification of sows and not shooting them. The idea was that you wanted to preserve the population for future hunting and if you kill off the sows, you ruin your hunting.

Mind you, it had been since the 80s, probably early 80s since he last had a lease or hunted hogs. Where he did have a lease was not good hog habitat either.

No matter how I tried to explain to him that times had changed, he thought me the dolt for wanting to shoot sows.

The Brits don't have a crisis with their boar population at this time. It may take a while before they do. Until then, folks like the guy in the OP's Youtube video or folks like my wife's grandfather will vehemently oppose what they consider to be wrongful hunting or overhunting.
 
It won't be long before wild hogs are tearing up the beautiful British countryside. Folks who don't deal with wild hogs on a regular basis have no idea of their destructive capabilities.

On another website a guy who never saw a wild hog took me to task for a photo showing dead hogs in a trap. He accused me "unsportsmanlike conduct" for shooting "game animals" in a trap. i played nice guy and tried to explain that wild hogs here are out of control and adversely impact wild game. Attempted to explain that wild hogs here are not game animals; to no avail.

This photo set the guy off:

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That picture doesn't bother me a bit. But show me a picture of a dog or house cat that someone has shot and is proclaiming that they are ridding a menance.... I get a bit irratated. I know they can be problems. But nothing like hogs.
 
I guess you can agree with him that that is not hunting, nor is it meant to be. If he had a barn full of rats, would he insist on killing them one at a time? Hogs are not protected because they are considered a dangerous, invasive pest, harmful to the native environment and native species, and as such are not afforded a hunting season.

I saw a documentary on the problem of raccoons in Japan. Apparently in the sixties there was an introduction of raccoons as pets because of, I think, a cartoon. When they realized that raccoons do not make good pets their owners just released them. Four decades later the raccoon population exploded, and the raccoons are destroying the wooden houses and shrines in this area of Japan. Now all raccoons are killed on sight. It is heartbreaking, because it was the ignorance of people that caused the problem; it wasn't the raccoons' fault, but they pay the price. Starlings and English Sparrows were introduced into Central Park (to honor Shakespeare), and now they are successful competitors of native birds like Purple Martins and Bluebirds, and they are also not protected (and again, it's not their fault). We've got to stop being so short-sighted.

By the way, was the trapper able to donate the meat? There are lots of people here who would be very grateful to be able to fire up the grill and feed them to their families.
 
Speaking of a barn full of rats, there is a woman in UK who kills them with an airgun with night vision - she is pretty darn good! https://www.youtube.com/user/snypercat

And if anyone wants to know more about hog population control in Texas: http://feralhogs.tamu.edu/

A "fair use" quote from their FAQ page:

11. How hard they are to kill?

How hard are they to kill with what? Very hard with a sling shoot or BB gun! Seriously, most archers shoot wild pigs in the heart /lung region immediately behind the shoulder from broadside or at a slightly quartering away angle. Hunters using firearms are advised to shoot the pigs in the neck or in the vitals (heart/lung region). Preferred rifles for pigs are 25 to 30 caliber. Regardless of the caliber/weapon, shot placement is essential for a clean and ethical kill. Archers typically limit their shots to 25‐30 yards to help ensure a clean kill.
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I will add that a .223 soft point in the chest works too, even is it is considered an anemic round.
 
By the way, was the trapper able to donate the meat?
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Yes, my trapper friend kept the small one; the others were field dressed and given to a family who needed the meat. So far this year we have given away about 70 hogs.
 
I can remember very vividly when my uncle together with 4 other hunters allowed me to join them on a boar hunt in a small forest near Tours. I was 11 years old then and they charged me with holding their shotgun shells and sandwiches. We walked for what seemed hours through the woods, seeing signs of boars everywhere, but no boar. Finally, as the day ended, a very large boar was spotted and it charged one of the men who didn't see it, and gored him in his legs. The animals was shot dead and I found myself up in a tree without remembering how I got there.

Massive beast it was, at least to the boy I was. The injured man was sent to the hospital and came through ok, and we all had a cut of good meat which we brought home - one of the men was a butcher by trade and made quick work of it. It was without a doubt the most frightening boar hunt I've ever witnessed. Today, they are still there. If you visit the castles of the Loire River, you will find Château de Chambord, and find signs of wild boar everywhere. They dig the ground with their tusks and there are holes everywhere. Today, my uncle is 87 years old, and once a year, he still goes to hunt boar, thought now he rides a small electric golf cart while others walk.
 
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