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Farmers think of feral hogs as a menace. The USDA says they cause at least $2.5 billion of damage every year across 35 states. Kelly Kenoyer from member station WHQR reports how feral hog trappers are trying to do their part.
KELLY KENOYER, BYLINE: Jammie Pearson is a farmer in Sampson County, North Carolina, and he's seen the damage feral hogs can do. Three years ago, feral hogs struck some of his fields like a hurricane.
JAMMIE PEARSON: I mean, that sounds crazy, but, you see now, it don't take them long to go across 250 acres.
KENOYER: He says his hayfields had craters and, his cornfields looked like they had crop circles. He was desperate, and then he found a USDA eradication program. It employs people like trapper Randy Pulley. He is, more or less, at war with feral hogs in rural North Carolina.
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RANDY PULLEY: Hog trapping is - it takes a lot of patience because we don't want to educate - you don't want to catch half the group and educate the other half.
KENOYER: Educate them as in unintentionally teach the remaining hogs how to avoid capture - yes, hogs are that smart. Pulley uses corral traps on farmers' properties, big circular cages with guillotine doors.
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KENOYER: He uses cameras to monitor about a dozen traps across multiple counties, and he tries to catch the entire family group in one go.
PULLEY: Because once you drop that door and a pig outside sees that - they're very smart - he's going to learn that. It's ingrained in his mind. You'll never catch him in a trap again, not a corral trap.
KENOYER: When that door falls...
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KENOYER: ...The entire sounder - that's what a family group of pigs is called - starts sprinting around the corral.
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KENOYER: Biologists say trapping is the most effective way to take out feral hogs. You can kill the entire group in one go. Pulley says hunting them individually isn't as effective.
PULLEY: Going in a cornfield to stand in corn when you can't see - you're going row to row. You're trying to get downwind of the pigs. You can hear them breaking. You're trying to get to them without them knowing you're there. You can only see down one row at a time.
KENOYER: But recreational hog hunting is big business in North Carolina. There are over a dozen companies offering hog hunts in the state, including Carolina Razorback Outfitters. Owner Jody Rhodes says it's become his full-time gig. He charges $350 per person per night for hog hunting. Rhodes says hunting helps cut down the population.
JODY RHODES: If they stop hunting - or, i.e., overregulate it - they're just going to increase the population. So if we can't get rid of them, let's nurture them. Let's make some money off of them.
KENOYER: But Pulley doesn't think it really helps that much.
PULLEY: Usually, recreational hunters are looking to, you know, take the trophy hog, the big hog, the male hog with the, you know, biggest cutters or - they're not there to euthanize the entire group.
KENOYER: A handful of states have banned hog hunting entirely, hoping to end the incentive to have hogs on rural land and eventually eradicate them through trapping. But that's a tough sell, says North Carolina wildlife biologist Falyn Owens. That's because hog hunting culture is well established here.
FALYN OWENS: So it's challenging to institute feral swine hunting bands because of the cultural and socioeconomic benefits that some people have for having feral swine on the landscape.
KENOYER: It's spring now, and those swine are certainly on the landscape, eating corn seeds and keeping Pulley on his toes.
PULLEY: Now I'm out four, sometimes five nights a week, weekends. So it's very, very busy.
KENOYER: He'll be waking up every time his phone goes off, telling him hogs have entered his traps. For NPR News, I'm Kelly Kenoyer in Sampson County, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF OHNO SONG, "DROWSY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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