The episode was inspired by a Twitter event, as Reply All is ostensibly about the internet and all the weird stuff that happens there. I like to listen to Reply All (and read Wired) in order to get some simulacrum of internet life, without actually having to spend time there.
Willie McNabb made a feral hog based non sequitur reply to the typical gun control debate and Twitter went bananas. PJ Vogt called it an internet "snow day."
Vogt talks to McNabb and a number of other people involved in feral hog America, and he comes to the conclusion that the feral hog epidemic is one of the top ten problems in our country. The hogs are invasive, but old school invasive. The hogs brought over by Hernando Soto, and the Spanish released them into the forest, where they could fatten up and then be killed for food. A portable pork larder. But soon enough the hogs went wild. Hog wild. The rest is history. Feral hogs are incredibly fecund-- they can have litters of up to 14 every six months-- and they are incredibly destructive. They destroy crops and ponds and wildlife and forests. They are large-- normal wild porkers weigh up to 300 pounds, but there are occasionally hogs that are larger, much larger. They are also intelligent, and teach each other how to avoid traps and electric fences.
The paradoxical problem with the hogs is that while most states have loosened hunting laws so that they can be eradicated, this has worked in two directions. Some people tried to hunt the hogs out of existence, but others realized that they are really fun to kill. And so while farmers might be trying to rid their lands of hogs, other folks were just as quickly introducing hogs-- stocking their land with them so they could hunt. But feral hogs reproduce really fast, so the population is out of control. They are estimated at 6 million strong and their range is rapidly expanding.
Vogt talks to the guys that made this video, in order to promote hog eradication-- because of the millions of dollars of crop damage they are responsible for. But the video instead inspired people to hunt the hogs in more extreme and creative ways. You can shoot feral hogs from a helicopter.
Texas nearly started using a very dangerous poison-- Kaput-- to kill the hogs, but there was enough backlash to put a hold on this plan. Kaput kills hogs in an incredibly painful and disgusting manner, and then the flesh is tainted and the hog must be buried, or animals who eat the dead hog might also die.
This is a problem so weird and crazy that it's outside my liberal central Jersey mentality and morality. I'm not a hunter, I don't own a gun, I couldn't imagine shooting any large animal-- let alone dozens in a night-- and I can't imagine thousands of poisoned carcasses, toxic and bleeding from every orifice, littering the countryside. There's no obvious way to solve this problem. There probably needs to be a ban on hunting the hogs, so that people stop introducing them to new lands, but there's got to be a dispensation for farmers and such. Poison seems an awful alternative, unless a more precise agent could be developed. I just can't imagine dealing with this, which is why I don't live in Texas.
In the meantime, there's a weird part of me rooting for the hogs. They're truly American. Invasive, persistent, corpulent, destructive, environmentally obtuse, omnivorous, at home in the country and the suburbs, clever, and willing to use their right to assemble (in groups of 30 - 50).
