June 7, 2024 • 23 mins
Brent's talking wild hogs this week and sharing his brother Tim's story that could've turned tragic. You'll hear why so many put so much value on pigs in the past and how they've affected not only the environment, but also a lot of the creatures that share the habitat. Say it with us, "WOO PIG SOOIE!" It's time for MeatEater's This Country Life podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I
think I got a thing or two to teach you. Hogs,
pig suey. We're talking about hogs this week, and unfortunately
(00:47):
their presence on the landscape outside of the confines of
a pen or a skillet mostly bad. I'm gonna tell
you how this whole hog iss you started where we
are now, But first I'm gonna tell you a story. Now.
(01:09):
I've thought about whether to include this story or not
for quite a while. It's a little intense for how
I normally start to show. But our topic this week
is important, and I want to show you how serious
folks were back in the day and even recently when
it comes to hog claims and the hogs that roamed
on them. Now, this one comes from my brother Tim
(01:31):
and maybe one day I'll convince him to sit down
with me and talk, and y'all can hear these stories
straight from him. But I asked him to write it
in his own words and let me read it, and
he did just that. The only things I omitted from
Tim's version was the name of the man in the
boat who caused the problem, and the name of our
family friend who wanted to fix it when it happened.
(01:54):
Here it is my brother Tim's words in my voice.
In nineteen seventy seven, I was nineteen years old and
had been married a month in February when Dad called
(02:14):
me to see if I wanted to go squirrel hunting
with him and a family friend. And we started out
south of the little Lake on the lower Potlatch Road
where you go to Vince Bluff, which was a ferry
crossing during high water and just a place to cross
the saline River during the low water times. We downloaded
the horses, saddled up, and turned the dogs loose. Besides Peanut,
(02:40):
I don't remember what all dogs we had, but our
friend had brought a couple of his own, so I
know we had at least three. The river was about
half bank full, so all the sloughs had water in them,
and we'd killed several squirrels that morning. As we approached
the river at Vince Bluff, we hunted up along the
river from there and got to a place called Little Mill.
(03:03):
I don't know if there was ever a saw mill
there or what, but there was a place on the
bank that pushed out towards the river where you could
make an easy trip to get down to the river
from because there was a fairly high bank there. We
got off the horses to let them rest and take
a break. We were sitting on the ground about ten
(03:23):
yards from where we had the horses tied. Our twenty
two rifles were secured in the scabbards. We just set
there visiting, resting the dogs and horses and ourselves, and
we heard a boat coming up the river. It was
an old man that we all knew. He knew us
as well, and he had a black and white shaggy
(03:44):
dog in the boat with him, and the dog looked
like some kind of shepherd. Anyway, the man seize us
and pulls up into the pushed out place and went
down to the river, and due to the river being up,
his boat hit the bank about even where we were sitting.
He was ten yards to our front, and we were
about as directly in the middle of him and our
(04:06):
horses as we could get. And when his boat came
to a stop, he stood up with a Remington Model
seven forty two rifles. I heard the safety click off
as he faced us and said, I've been listening to
y'all's dogs, and I know y'all are hog hunting. What
y'all need to remember is not very far from where
(04:28):
you're sitting. Someone got killed over this hog plane. He
had just killed the hog and got caught with it
and was killed right here close. Dad and our friend
both said, we ain't hog hunting, we're squirrel hunting. The
man in the boat said, I don't care what you say.
(04:49):
I know what you're doing, and you need to remember
when you're bent over gutting a hog, someone may be
behind a tree out there in the woods about to
kill you. Our friend said you need to remember that too,
the next time you're out in the woods. Now. My
dad called him by by name and said, my grandpa
(05:09):
ran hogs down here for fifty years. This was and
is our hog claim, not yours. The man yelled back,
it's mine now, and remember what I said. He laid
that rifle down in the boat, never put the safety
back on. He grabbed a bank beside where he was
sitting and pushed his boat out on the edge of
the river and up the river. He went, I don't
(05:33):
mind telling you. I was thinking to myself, I got
to get me a pistol to toad or never get
off the horse without a gun. Close by, while I
was thinking that, I heard our friend say to my
dad as he stood up and made his way toward
his horse, I'm fixed to kill that sob when he
comes back by us going down river. Now, that's when
Dad said, you sat down, now, you ain't gonna kill him.
(05:58):
My friend just stood there looking at my dad, and
for a minute he looked like you wanted to say something,
but he never did, which is remarkable, especially if you
know this fellow. Now, I do believe if it hadn't
been for my dad that day, my friend might have
done the According to my brother Tim, that's just how
(06:20):
that happened. Now. Let me add a little extra here
about Tim's story. The old man in the boat referenced
an incident that took place on the river where a
person was killed over a hog, and the fellow that
shot him was acquitted. Due to the stock laws and
(06:42):
the feeling towards ownership of free range stock at the time,
and even though it had happened years before that day,
it would have been a little solace to those on
the wrong end of the gun, as was the case
up in North Arkansas in twenty seventeen when a man
was victed of murdering another fella over hog hunting territory. Unfortunately,
(07:06):
some folks take this stuff seriously, and there were plenty
more stories just like that one from our part of
the world, and they're not exclusive to South Arkansas. And
that was the feeling most everywhere, because hogs were such
a valuable commodity in each family's survival. Hogs running loose
were caught with dogs and traps, and the boarders would
(07:27):
be castrated and released, and the rest would be marked
and by cutting their ears in a specific way. Now
each family had their own mark, like a brand for cattle.
Three's family mark is a crop split on the right
and half under crop on the left. Now that translates
into the end quarter of the right ear of the
(07:50):
hog being cut off. Then that same ear was cut
right down in the middle for the split. The left
ear was then cut, removing the bottom quarter of the
ear in the vicinity of where the hog's earload would be.
If a hog had one, that was our mark, and
it was as proof positive of ownership as a fingerprint
(08:12):
back then, all right, you know what a marked hog
is and the feelings folks had for him. Let's get
on with the show. Wild hogs, pine routers, rousians, razorbacks,
whatever you want to call them. Pharaoh pigs have a
(08:35):
deep history woven into the tapestry of our culture. For me,
it runs deep in the heritage of my family, both
in survival and to a degree sport. Also, as you
just heard a little drama. Thankfully that all ended there,
but nine generations of reeves have run the salin ry
of botties in Cleveland County, Arkansas, making victials out of
(08:57):
the animals that lived there. Arkansas now has an estimated
whitetail deer herd of one million, but back in the
day they just about hunting to zero before Europeans lit
in Arkansas deer where everywhere. Old Hernando de Soto and
encountered Native American folks dressed in deer skins. The Catto
(09:17):
people depended heavily on deer meat for survival. Early settlers
hunted the whitetail deer without restriction for decades. Roads, houses, farms,
and towns soon encroached on their habitat, and it led
to a steep decline in deer populations. In nineteen sixteen,
the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission established the state's first
(09:40):
deer season, and in the nineteen twenties created deer refuges.
By the mid thirties, however, there was only a few
hundred remaining in Arkansas now. My family, no doubt played
a part in the almost extirpation of deer from the
state on the micro scale as it related to the
area where I'm from, as did every everyone else who
(10:00):
was struggling to scratch out of living on the edge
of the American expansion. We also shoulder some of the
responsibility for the current situation when it comes to wild hogs.
Pigs have been here since introduced by wait for it,
wait for it, Hernando de Soto in fifteen forty one.
It's believed that that well meaning, that adventure seeking spaniard
(10:23):
let some of its hogs get loose, and from that
moment on, the poor science courage on humanity has been
at the root of a lot of problems, both environmentally
and socially. Once a breeding pair gets loose, lookout hogs everywhere.
It's literally that simple. Check this out. Female paral hogs
(10:45):
can be ready to start making bacon as young as
three to four months age, the majority of waiting till
e're about a year old, but not all of them.
sALS come in season every eighteen to twenty four days
until they're successfully bred. Then an average about four months later,
congratulations Earth, one to fourteen more little piggies are dropped
(11:07):
on your landscape to do their evil bitting, the average
doing that twice a year, all of them every year.
It's estimated that it would take a mortality rate of
at least sixty six percent to keep the population of
hogs in check, just to keep it where it's at
without letting it grow anymore sixty six percent. Arkansas is
(11:30):
one of the top ten states with the largest wild
pig populations. They're reported in all seventy five counties, with
as many as four to five million total in the
natural state, and they'll eat anything they can find. They're
the catfish of the landscape. Anything and everything is on
the menu for the plant or animal, alive or dead. Frog, snakes, deer, fongs,
(11:53):
turkey posts. It don't matter. They can catch it, they'll
eat it. Don't let them fool you either. They're quick,
They're vicious and adept catching their own groceries on the
hoof as they were rooting them up out of the ground.
I remember seeing them catch live chickens off the ground
with the quickness and speed of a cutting horse. Now
those live chickens got caught in a chicken house, todd
(12:17):
across the field over a fence and chucked in the
hog pen is a mystery to me. The important part
of that story is that they'll get you if they
want to get you. Now. Recently, I was watching an
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission meeting that was recorded on
May the sixteenth of this year, and among the items
presented that day was an annual report by Ryan Farney,
(12:39):
the Farreal Hall coordinator for the Game and Fish. It's
been out for two weeks and as the particular moment
in which I'm looking at it, it's only been viewed
one thousand, nine hundred and fifty six times on the
YouTube channel owned by the Game of Fish. Good gosh,
there was more folks than that at last March is
Black Bear Bonanza. There's some good info in these meetings,
(13:01):
and those of us that liked to ramble around or
even have a general interest in what the Game of
Fish is doing, owe it to themselves to watch it
when you have a chance. But Ryan gave a great
presentation on the state of faral hogs in Arkansas. The
numbers were quite staggering for me, and I've been around
woods hogs all my life. We've already established the fact
(13:22):
that they were important to folks, some more than others.
But the facts that during the times when deer numbers
were thin and money was tight, hogs were a valuable commodity.
They were a main source of protein in the advent
of being able to cure and store me to downright
necessity for families living in the country like mine. But
they'd always been pretty well held in check. Their numbers
(13:45):
were fairly levelized by the folks that handled them, and
it wasn't until the nineteen eighties that hog hunting got
popular and hog numbers started to increase. Now that mirrors
the pinnacle of turkey numbers, at least here my state.
And with the hog numbers increasing, the turkey numbers did
just the opposite. I was listening to an interview of
(14:08):
doctor Steven Ditchkoff, a leading authority on the topic, down
at Auburn University, in preparation for this episode, and doctor
Ditchcoff said, hogs move slowly from one area to another,
but on the interstate they move at seventy miles an hour.
Now what he means by that is folks are catching
them in other places and moving them to areas where
(14:30):
they can hunt them. And then folks ought to be
in jail. Now, when I was a kid growing up,
seeing hogs in the woods wasn't uncommon in certain places.
The areas with hogs in Southeast Arkansas were all historically
the same places that they'd always been, But now they're everywhere.
Tim has them in his yard at night, rooting up
(14:51):
the world like there's no tomorrow. He's trapped them, shot them,
and just like the jelly of the month club, hogs
are the gifts that keeps on give it. As we've
already said, a hog normally has two litters a year,
but if she times you right, she can dominate another
bushel of infestious pork chops at the end of the year,
just as the females in her first litter are prepping
(15:14):
to drop theirs too. That's a lot of hogs. Now,
you don't have to be a brain scientist or a
rocket surgeon to see that if we're going to have
a chance of getting ahead of them, that hunting them
the traditional way ain't the answer. It's an enjoyable pastime
for sure, and I love it and I support my
friends that do the traditional way that we've always done
(15:36):
it with hog dogs, But as a sound tool of conservation,
it doesn't even rest her on the scale of effectiveness.
Arkansas Gaming Fish partner with numerous state and federal agencies
through a conservation incentive program and are helping private landowners
battle the problem. There's a lot of information on the
(15:58):
program on the Game and Fish Well website, and for
those that don't live in Arkansas, well, first I'm sorry,
but secondly, check with your state's Department of Natural Resources
or Game Commission and see if you're part of the program.
You can just about bet that if you have a
team competing in the SEC or from a state next
to one that does. You've got a program that covers you,
(16:22):
so big deal. There's hogs in the bottoms. Who cares
if some folks turn some loose to hunt them on
the weekends. Why should I care? Well, here's why. As
we've already found out, once they get started having piglets,
there's no way to get ahead of them. And I
mentioned turkey is at the beginning, saying that they started
a downward trend as soon as hogs started, there's upward.
(16:47):
That's just my opinion and observation. I can't back that
up with anything other than what I saw on the landscape.
Maybe it's a coincidence that here's something that ain't farl
Hoggs hack turkeys in three ways. They consume their eggs,
they compete for resources and als of the habitat. That's
three out of three. Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of
(17:10):
the Green Bay Packers, was famous for not wanting to
pass the football. He said, there are three things that
can happen when you throw a pass. Two of them
are bad. There is no one out of three with faril,
hogs and turkeys. They're all bad. Sixty four percent of
a farrel hog's diet is massed. That's not only affecting turkeys,
(17:33):
but deer, quail, squirrels, and every other native game and
non game animal in the ecosystem. One study showed that
farrel hogs accounted for twenty five percent of turkey nespidation.
That was higher than any other known nest robbery, including
skunks and coons. Some control studies showed hogs hitting eighty
(17:55):
percent of nest predated. These rascals have got to go now.
I touched on it earlier, but I was surprised at
how much of an issue it is. I can also
see how it can get misconstrued with a narrow mindset
on how all this works. But cutting a few hogs
loose to chase on the weekends is exactly how all
(18:17):
this has got to where it is now. Now, y'all
hang on with me through this part. We've got some
forgotten to do. Ryan Farley's Band of Untouchables pulled genetic
samples from the hogs that were taking off wildlife management
areas in Arkansas. By the way, that's twenty three thousand
and eighty one over the last ten years from these hogs.
(18:39):
They've identified six distinct populations. Only one of those was
exclusive to one spot. Now, those hogs live on Fort Chaffee,
a US Army installation famous for seed tics Cuban refugees
in Elvis's first military haircut. Now, why is that significant
in the grand scheme of hogs Arkansas? I'm glad you asked,
(19:02):
because access is extremely limited. Folks ain't just running around
at Fort Chaffee for the fun of it. Trust me,
I've been there. It ain't fun. I'm the one that
can testify to the seriousness of the seed ticks Elvis
and the Cubans were before my time. Anyway, limited access
means hogs aren't being brought in there or taken from
(19:25):
there to other areas. Of all the other areas tested,
sixty percent were found to be from other places, and
the distance had to be significant. The Arkansas information said
that over two hundred kilometers would raise a flag because
the genetics of place found in a hog would only
remain for three generations. And since we've already learned that
(19:49):
one hog can theoretically have three generations in one year,
that's pretty compelling evidence that either these pigs can fly
or someone has given them a ride down the road.
Sixty percent sixty percent of the efforts used in controlling
the feral hog issue were because of translocated hogs. Come on, man,
(20:13):
we need to do what Barded five said and nip it,
nip that in the bud. But they can't do it
without us, and we can't do it without them. We
got to decide right now, and I'm not just talking
about us here in Arkansas, but everywhere. We got to
decide if we're ever going to have turkeys like we
used to, or even have a remote chance of getting
(20:36):
our quail numbers up to a respectable level. We got
to act now. Michael Rosemann and I bumped a covey
of birds last February when we were rabbit hunting, and
I about fainted. It had to be thirty in that
covey and was the first wild birds I'd seen in years.
One place you won't find quail now where you used
(20:56):
to is in southeast Arkansas, where I grew up. They're
delicate creatures to begin with and are fighting a number
of environmental factors. But a rising tide of dead hogs
raises all the ground nest and bird boats. Dang mistretch
that analogy to death. But you know what I mean,
Fewer hogs, more turkeys and quail. That's it in a nutshell. Also,
(21:22):
I want you to understand that I love hogs. They
hold a cherished part of my memories and the stories
of hunting them with my father and our family dealing
with hogs both wild and domesticated or innumerable. But right now,
at this moment, knowing what I know about the situation
we're in and in neighboring states, if I could mash
(21:43):
a button and get rid of every feral hog in
the country, I'd mash it twice just to make sure
I got em all. Brent, that was harsh. Well, these
are harsh times. And who knew there was such a
storied history of hogs at Arkansas well, with the University
of Arkansas's mascot named the Razorbacks, just about everybody, Yeah,
(22:05):
that's probably true. That's going to do it for me
this week. I appreciate y'all listening and all the wonderful feedback.
It's not all doom and gloom, and I don't want
to end on a bad note. But we can all
work together. We can solve this hog problem. We're just
going to have to work, and we're going to have
to work hard. Please share our podcast with someone who
you think might enjoy it really helps in connecting us
(22:29):
with the like minded folks. Check out our other podcast
in the media or family when you can. There's something
for everyone in one of them and guarantee it. But
until next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all
be careful STI
Welcome to This Country Life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves
from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living.
I want you to stay a while as I share
my stories and the country skills that will help you
beat the system. This Country Life is proudly presented as
part of Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best
(00:25):
outdoor podcast the airways have to offer. All right, friends,
pull you up a chair or drop that tailgate. I
think I got a thing or two to teach you. Hogs,
pig suey. We're talking about hogs this week, and unfortunately
(00:47):
their presence on the landscape outside of the confines of
a pen or a skillet mostly bad. I'm gonna tell
you how this whole hog iss you started where we
are now, But first I'm gonna tell you a story. Now.
(01:09):
I've thought about whether to include this story or not
for quite a while. It's a little intense for how
I normally start to show. But our topic this week
is important, and I want to show you how serious
folks were back in the day and even recently when
it comes to hog claims and the hogs that roamed
on them. Now, this one comes from my brother Tim
(01:31):
and maybe one day I'll convince him to sit down
with me and talk, and y'all can hear these stories
straight from him. But I asked him to write it
in his own words and let me read it, and
he did just that. The only things I omitted from
Tim's version was the name of the man in the
boat who caused the problem, and the name of our
family friend who wanted to fix it when it happened.
(01:54):
Here it is my brother Tim's words in my voice.
In nineteen seventy seven, I was nineteen years old and
had been married a month in February when Dad called
(02:14):
me to see if I wanted to go squirrel hunting
with him and a family friend. And we started out
south of the little Lake on the lower Potlatch Road
where you go to Vince Bluff, which was a ferry
crossing during high water and just a place to cross
the saline River during the low water times. We downloaded
the horses, saddled up, and turned the dogs loose. Besides Peanut,
(02:40):
I don't remember what all dogs we had, but our
friend had brought a couple of his own, so I
know we had at least three. The river was about
half bank full, so all the sloughs had water in them,
and we'd killed several squirrels that morning. As we approached
the river at Vince Bluff, we hunted up along the
river from there and got to a place called Little Mill.
(03:03):
I don't know if there was ever a saw mill
there or what, but there was a place on the
bank that pushed out towards the river where you could
make an easy trip to get down to the river
from because there was a fairly high bank there. We
got off the horses to let them rest and take
a break. We were sitting on the ground about ten
(03:23):
yards from where we had the horses tied. Our twenty
two rifles were secured in the scabbards. We just set
there visiting, resting the dogs and horses and ourselves, and
we heard a boat coming up the river. It was
an old man that we all knew. He knew us
as well, and he had a black and white shaggy
(03:44):
dog in the boat with him, and the dog looked
like some kind of shepherd. Anyway, the man seize us
and pulls up into the pushed out place and went
down to the river, and due to the river being up,
his boat hit the bank about even where we were sitting.
He was ten yards to our front, and we were
about as directly in the middle of him and our
(04:06):
horses as we could get. And when his boat came
to a stop, he stood up with a Remington Model
seven forty two rifles. I heard the safety click off
as he faced us and said, I've been listening to
y'all's dogs, and I know y'all are hog hunting. What
y'all need to remember is not very far from where
(04:28):
you're sitting. Someone got killed over this hog plane. He
had just killed the hog and got caught with it
and was killed right here close. Dad and our friend
both said, we ain't hog hunting, we're squirrel hunting. The
man in the boat said, I don't care what you say.
(04:49):
I know what you're doing, and you need to remember
when you're bent over gutting a hog, someone may be
behind a tree out there in the woods about to
kill you. Our friend said you need to remember that too,
the next time you're out in the woods. Now. My
dad called him by by name and said, my grandpa
(05:09):
ran hogs down here for fifty years. This was and
is our hog claim, not yours. The man yelled back,
it's mine now, and remember what I said. He laid
that rifle down in the boat, never put the safety
back on. He grabbed a bank beside where he was
sitting and pushed his boat out on the edge of
the river and up the river. He went, I don't
(05:33):
mind telling you. I was thinking to myself, I got
to get me a pistol to toad or never get
off the horse without a gun. Close by, while I
was thinking that, I heard our friend say to my
dad as he stood up and made his way toward
his horse, I'm fixed to kill that sob when he
comes back by us going down river. Now, that's when
Dad said, you sat down, now, you ain't gonna kill him.
(05:58):
My friend just stood there looking at my dad, and
for a minute he looked like you wanted to say something,
but he never did, which is remarkable, especially if you
know this fellow. Now, I do believe if it hadn't
been for my dad that day, my friend might have
done the According to my brother Tim, that's just how
(06:20):
that happened. Now. Let me add a little extra here
about Tim's story. The old man in the boat referenced
an incident that took place on the river where a
person was killed over a hog, and the fellow that
shot him was acquitted. Due to the stock laws and
(06:42):
the feeling towards ownership of free range stock at the time,
and even though it had happened years before that day,
it would have been a little solace to those on
the wrong end of the gun, as was the case
up in North Arkansas in twenty seventeen when a man
was victed of murdering another fella over hog hunting territory. Unfortunately,
(07:06):
some folks take this stuff seriously, and there were plenty
more stories just like that one from our part of
the world, and they're not exclusive to South Arkansas. And
that was the feeling most everywhere, because hogs were such
a valuable commodity in each family's survival. Hogs running loose
were caught with dogs and traps, and the boarders would
(07:27):
be castrated and released, and the rest would be marked
and by cutting their ears in a specific way. Now
each family had their own mark, like a brand for cattle.
Three's family mark is a crop split on the right
and half under crop on the left. Now that translates
into the end quarter of the right ear of the
(07:50):
hog being cut off. Then that same ear was cut
right down in the middle for the split. The left
ear was then cut, removing the bottom quarter of the
ear in the vicinity of where the hog's earload would be.
If a hog had one, that was our mark, and
it was as proof positive of ownership as a fingerprint
(08:12):
back then, all right, you know what a marked hog
is and the feelings folks had for him. Let's get
on with the show. Wild hogs, pine routers, rousians, razorbacks,
whatever you want to call them. Pharaoh pigs have a
(08:35):
deep history woven into the tapestry of our culture. For me,
it runs deep in the heritage of my family, both
in survival and to a degree sport. Also, as you
just heard a little drama. Thankfully that all ended there,
but nine generations of reeves have run the salin ry
of botties in Cleveland County, Arkansas, making victials out of
(08:57):
the animals that lived there. Arkansas now has an estimated
whitetail deer herd of one million, but back in the
day they just about hunting to zero before Europeans lit
in Arkansas deer where everywhere. Old Hernando de Soto and
encountered Native American folks dressed in deer skins. The Catto
(09:17):
people depended heavily on deer meat for survival. Early settlers
hunted the whitetail deer without restriction for decades. Roads, houses, farms,
and towns soon encroached on their habitat, and it led
to a steep decline in deer populations. In nineteen sixteen,
the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission established the state's first
(09:40):
deer season, and in the nineteen twenties created deer refuges.
By the mid thirties, however, there was only a few
hundred remaining in Arkansas now. My family, no doubt played
a part in the almost extirpation of deer from the
state on the micro scale as it related to the
area where I'm from, as did every everyone else who
(10:00):
was struggling to scratch out of living on the edge
of the American expansion. We also shoulder some of the
responsibility for the current situation when it comes to wild hogs.
Pigs have been here since introduced by wait for it,
wait for it, Hernando de Soto in fifteen forty one.
It's believed that that well meaning, that adventure seeking spaniard
(10:23):
let some of its hogs get loose, and from that
moment on, the poor science courage on humanity has been
at the root of a lot of problems, both environmentally
and socially. Once a breeding pair gets loose, lookout hogs everywhere.
It's literally that simple. Check this out. Female paral hogs
(10:45):
can be ready to start making bacon as young as
three to four months age, the majority of waiting till
e're about a year old, but not all of them.
sALS come in season every eighteen to twenty four days
until they're successfully bred. Then an average about four months later,
congratulations Earth, one to fourteen more little piggies are dropped
(11:07):
on your landscape to do their evil bitting, the average
doing that twice a year, all of them every year.
It's estimated that it would take a mortality rate of
at least sixty six percent to keep the population of
hogs in check, just to keep it where it's at
without letting it grow anymore sixty six percent. Arkansas is
(11:30):
one of the top ten states with the largest wild
pig populations. They're reported in all seventy five counties, with
as many as four to five million total in the
natural state, and they'll eat anything they can find. They're
the catfish of the landscape. Anything and everything is on
the menu for the plant or animal, alive or dead. Frog, snakes, deer, fongs,
(11:53):
turkey posts. It don't matter. They can catch it, they'll
eat it. Don't let them fool you either. They're quick,
They're vicious and adept catching their own groceries on the
hoof as they were rooting them up out of the ground.
I remember seeing them catch live chickens off the ground
with the quickness and speed of a cutting horse. Now
those live chickens got caught in a chicken house, todd
(12:17):
across the field over a fence and chucked in the
hog pen is a mystery to me. The important part
of that story is that they'll get you if they
want to get you. Now. Recently, I was watching an
Arkansas Game and Fish Commission meeting that was recorded on
May the sixteenth of this year, and among the items
presented that day was an annual report by Ryan Farney,
(12:39):
the Farreal Hall coordinator for the Game and Fish. It's
been out for two weeks and as the particular moment
in which I'm looking at it, it's only been viewed
one thousand, nine hundred and fifty six times on the
YouTube channel owned by the Game of Fish. Good gosh,
there was more folks than that at last March is
Black Bear Bonanza. There's some good info in these meetings,
(13:01):
and those of us that liked to ramble around or
even have a general interest in what the Game of
Fish is doing, owe it to themselves to watch it
when you have a chance. But Ryan gave a great
presentation on the state of faral hogs in Arkansas. The
numbers were quite staggering for me, and I've been around
woods hogs all my life. We've already established the fact
(13:22):
that they were important to folks, some more than others.
But the facts that during the times when deer numbers
were thin and money was tight, hogs were a valuable commodity.
They were a main source of protein in the advent
of being able to cure and store me to downright
necessity for families living in the country like mine. But
they'd always been pretty well held in check. Their numbers
(13:45):
were fairly levelized by the folks that handled them, and
it wasn't until the nineteen eighties that hog hunting got
popular and hog numbers started to increase. Now that mirrors
the pinnacle of turkey numbers, at least here my state.
And with the hog numbers increasing, the turkey numbers did
just the opposite. I was listening to an interview of
(14:08):
doctor Steven Ditchkoff, a leading authority on the topic, down
at Auburn University, in preparation for this episode, and doctor
Ditchcoff said, hogs move slowly from one area to another,
but on the interstate they move at seventy miles an hour.
Now what he means by that is folks are catching
them in other places and moving them to areas where
(14:30):
they can hunt them. And then folks ought to be
in jail. Now, when I was a kid growing up,
seeing hogs in the woods wasn't uncommon in certain places.
The areas with hogs in Southeast Arkansas were all historically
the same places that they'd always been, But now they're everywhere.
Tim has them in his yard at night, rooting up
(14:51):
the world like there's no tomorrow. He's trapped them, shot them,
and just like the jelly of the month club, hogs
are the gifts that keeps on give it. As we've
already said, a hog normally has two litters a year,
but if she times you right, she can dominate another
bushel of infestious pork chops at the end of the year,
just as the females in her first litter are prepping
(15:14):
to drop theirs too. That's a lot of hogs. Now,
you don't have to be a brain scientist or a
rocket surgeon to see that if we're going to have
a chance of getting ahead of them, that hunting them
the traditional way ain't the answer. It's an enjoyable pastime
for sure, and I love it and I support my
friends that do the traditional way that we've always done
(15:36):
it with hog dogs, But as a sound tool of conservation,
it doesn't even rest her on the scale of effectiveness.
Arkansas Gaming Fish partner with numerous state and federal agencies
through a conservation incentive program and are helping private landowners
battle the problem. There's a lot of information on the
(15:58):
program on the Game and Fish Well website, and for
those that don't live in Arkansas, well, first I'm sorry,
but secondly, check with your state's Department of Natural Resources
or Game Commission and see if you're part of the program.
You can just about bet that if you have a
team competing in the SEC or from a state next
to one that does. You've got a program that covers you,
(16:22):
so big deal. There's hogs in the bottoms. Who cares
if some folks turn some loose to hunt them on
the weekends. Why should I care? Well, here's why. As
we've already found out, once they get started having piglets,
there's no way to get ahead of them. And I
mentioned turkey is at the beginning, saying that they started
a downward trend as soon as hogs started, there's upward.
(16:47):
That's just my opinion and observation. I can't back that
up with anything other than what I saw on the landscape.
Maybe it's a coincidence that here's something that ain't farl
Hoggs hack turkeys in three ways. They consume their eggs,
they compete for resources and als of the habitat. That's
three out of three. Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of
(17:10):
the Green Bay Packers, was famous for not wanting to
pass the football. He said, there are three things that
can happen when you throw a pass. Two of them
are bad. There is no one out of three with faril,
hogs and turkeys. They're all bad. Sixty four percent of
a farrel hog's diet is massed. That's not only affecting turkeys,
(17:33):
but deer, quail, squirrels, and every other native game and
non game animal in the ecosystem. One study showed that
farrel hogs accounted for twenty five percent of turkey nespidation.
That was higher than any other known nest robbery, including
skunks and coons. Some control studies showed hogs hitting eighty
(17:55):
percent of nest predated. These rascals have got to go now.
I touched on it earlier, but I was surprised at
how much of an issue it is. I can also
see how it can get misconstrued with a narrow mindset
on how all this works. But cutting a few hogs
loose to chase on the weekends is exactly how all
(18:17):
this has got to where it is now. Now, y'all
hang on with me through this part. We've got some
forgotten to do. Ryan Farley's Band of Untouchables pulled genetic
samples from the hogs that were taking off wildlife management
areas in Arkansas. By the way, that's twenty three thousand
and eighty one over the last ten years from these hogs.
(18:39):
They've identified six distinct populations. Only one of those was
exclusive to one spot. Now, those hogs live on Fort Chaffee,
a US Army installation famous for seed tics Cuban refugees
in Elvis's first military haircut. Now, why is that significant
in the grand scheme of hogs Arkansas? I'm glad you asked,
(19:02):
because access is extremely limited. Folks ain't just running around
at Fort Chaffee for the fun of it. Trust me,
I've been there. It ain't fun. I'm the one that
can testify to the seriousness of the seed ticks Elvis
and the Cubans were before my time. Anyway, limited access
means hogs aren't being brought in there or taken from
(19:25):
there to other areas. Of all the other areas tested,
sixty percent were found to be from other places, and
the distance had to be significant. The Arkansas information said
that over two hundred kilometers would raise a flag because
the genetics of place found in a hog would only
remain for three generations. And since we've already learned that
(19:49):
one hog can theoretically have three generations in one year,
that's pretty compelling evidence that either these pigs can fly
or someone has given them a ride down the road.
Sixty percent sixty percent of the efforts used in controlling
the feral hog issue were because of translocated hogs. Come on, man,
(20:13):
we need to do what Barded five said and nip it,
nip that in the bud. But they can't do it
without us, and we can't do it without them. We
got to decide right now, and I'm not just talking
about us here in Arkansas, but everywhere. We got to
decide if we're ever going to have turkeys like we
used to, or even have a remote chance of getting
(20:36):
our quail numbers up to a respectable level. We got
to act now. Michael Rosemann and I bumped a covey
of birds last February when we were rabbit hunting, and
I about fainted. It had to be thirty in that
covey and was the first wild birds I'd seen in years.
One place you won't find quail now where you used
(20:56):
to is in southeast Arkansas, where I grew up. They're
delicate creatures to begin with and are fighting a number
of environmental factors. But a rising tide of dead hogs
raises all the ground nest and bird boats. Dang mistretch
that analogy to death. But you know what I mean,
Fewer hogs, more turkeys and quail. That's it in a nutshell. Also,
(21:22):
I want you to understand that I love hogs. They
hold a cherished part of my memories and the stories
of hunting them with my father and our family dealing
with hogs both wild and domesticated or innumerable. But right now,
at this moment, knowing what I know about the situation
we're in and in neighboring states, if I could mash
(21:43):
a button and get rid of every feral hog in
the country, I'd mash it twice just to make sure
I got em all. Brent, that was harsh. Well, these
are harsh times. And who knew there was such a
storied history of hogs at Arkansas well, with the University
of Arkansas's mascot named the Razorbacks, just about everybody, Yeah,
(22:05):
that's probably true. That's going to do it for me
this week. I appreciate y'all listening and all the wonderful feedback.
It's not all doom and gloom, and I don't want
to end on a bad note. But we can all
work together. We can solve this hog problem. We're just
going to have to work, and we're going to have
to work hard. Please share our podcast with someone who
you think might enjoy it really helps in connecting us
(22:29):
with the like minded folks. Check out our other podcast
in the media or family when you can. There's something
for everyone in one of them and guarantee it. But
until next week, this is Brent Reeves signing off. Y'all
be careful STI
Host
Clay Newcomb
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