Country Living: Wild Hogs on Parade

If you have ever lived in the country, you know one of the things you deal with on a regular basis are the wild hogs. Wild hogs can be a menace. They break through barbed wire fences used to contain cattle; they eat the corn hunters used to lure deer; and they tear up baseball fields by rooting around in the mud.

We have 10 acres, and we currently let one of our neighbors use a good portion of it to allow his cattle roam around. The gate between our middle yard and the more substantial part of our property is just a barbwire gate stretched across the opening with poles. The hogs broke the bottom line on the gate and made a hole that one of my neighbor’s calves used to get into our yard and then to take a stroll down the road. My brother and my dad herded it back into the field and put another temporary gate over the barbed wire so that the calf could not get out again.

My husband and my brother each have feeders set up for the hunting season, but as they review the game camera footage, they notice wild hogs eating all the corn which consistently plagues the feeder. On one occasion they caught 30 hogs on camera. We have caught four hogs and no deer this year.

If you have been to the baseball field in the past couple of months, I am sure you have noticed the damage the hogs have done to the field. If not, read on.

I say all this to express just how much of a nuisance these hogs can be. There is much debate about what should be done to deal with the hog problems this year. Some have said that the hogs should be poisoned but doing so could cause other unwanted deaths in the animal kingdom. Some people trap the hogs and sell them to places that allow people to hunt them. Still, other people believe that when you see hogs, you should put them down immediately to reduce the population. I can honestly say that I am not sure where I stand on this topic. The hogs are a menace, but do I believe that they should just be killed outright? I don’t know. I know there are people in other parts of the world that would love to have this problem because it would mean there is food.

What do you think should be done about the hog problem? Send your point of view in a letter to the editor to editor@olneyenterprise.com.