Feral Hogs
General Information
The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission receives many inquiries each year about feral ("wild") hog hunting. Feral, free-roaming hogs degrade wildlife habitat, compete directly with wildlife for food, and can pose a disease threat to humans and domestic livestock.
Effective July 30, 1999, hogs may be taken during open hunting seasons if they are roaming freely upon public lands and the weapon used is legal for the season. Feral hogs may also be taken on private lands at any time, as long as the hunter has legal access and the landowner’s permission.
A hog that has escaped from its pen is not considered a feral hog for five days. If the owner gives notice to adjacent landowners, the hog isn’t feral for ten more days.
You cannot turn hogs loose on public land to hunt. With landowner’s consent you can release them on private land.
Hunters with a revoked hunting license may not hunt or take feral hogs.
Feral
"Wild" Hog Hunting Season
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Description
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Season Dates
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Rules
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Public
Land
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Open Hunting Seasons
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Subject to methods allowed for hunting season
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Private
Land
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All Year
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With owner's permission
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What is a feral hog, anyway? Any hog (Sus scrofa), including Russian and European wild boar, which is roaming freely upon public lands and is living in a wild or feral state.
According to the dictionary, feral means "having returned to an untamed state from domestication". Since swine are not native to North America, any free-ranging hog is by definition feral. And when any animal is introduced to the wild outside its native range, there can be problems.
With hogs, the problems are numerous.
Habitat destruction
: Feral hogs are rooters and wallowers, and their feeding and wallowing activities destroy terrestrial and aquatic vegetation, ruin water holes used by other wildlife, and contribute to erosion and siltation, which can adversely affect water quality.
Ground nesting bird predation:
Hogs are omnivores and eat anything that gets in their way. This includes nests of ground nesting birds, such as turkeys, quail, killdeer, terns, and many other birds.
Damage to endangered or sensitive plant/animal communities:
Many sensitive habitats are small and fragile, such as the unique acid seeps in portions of the Ouachita mountains and the cedar glades in the Ozarks. These places are attractive to feral hogs, and they cause major, sometime irreparable, damage.
Disease transmission to domestic livestock and pets:
feral hogs carry brucellosis, which has been documented to have been transmitted from feral hogs to domestic stock, pseudorabies, which causes domestic pigs to abort, and other diseases. These problems can result in direct economic loss and indirect loss through quarantines.
Disease transmission to humans:
There have been cases documented in Arkansas of feral hogs transmitting diseases such as brucellosis and trichinosis to humans, either directly or indirectly.
Direct food competition with native wildlife:
One of the mainstays for many wildlife species is acorns. Deer, squirrels, ducks, turkeys, birds, bears and many other species depend on acorns for a significant part of their diet. Hogs also love acorns, and are very efficient at finding them (in the process, incidentally, tearing up wildlife habitat).
Crop depredation:
A feral hog in a cornfield is every bit as, destructive as a feral hog in a woodlot. Hogs often cause heavy damage to row crops; gardens, flower beds, pine plantations, orchards, tree farms and pastures.
Abuse of landowner rights:
Hogs can't read posted signs, but people can. The problem is, many people apparently don't care about landowner rights. It is fairly common practice in Arkansas for individuals to raise, buy or otherwise obtain hogs and pigs, then release them on public or private, land for future hunting opportunities.
There is also both an opportunity and a need to increase recreational hog hunting opportunities on both public and private land. Despite the problems hogs cause for wildlife, habitats and people, they also provide recreational hunting opportunities. There is already much hog hunting being done, in the state-- hunting, is, in fact, the major reason hogs are released into the wild.
Other control measures include trapping and removal, at fencing to exclude hogs from critical areas: however, both these methods are time-consuming and expensive, arid neither provides foolproof control.
All the above methods can help the problem areas. However, the most effective means of controlling the feral problem is preventing the hogs from being released in the first place.
Arkansas
was known for its razorbacks long before it was known for its razorbacks. These lean, mean hogs were known as Razorbacks because of their high, hair-covered backbone: the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville didn't choose the Razorback as its mascot for nothing.
Early settlers used the wild lands of Arkansas as the growing place for their hogs, letting them turn the forage of the forest into usable protein. In the fall, usually, the settlers would trap hogs in large pens and take them to market to sell or slaughter.
This practice, continued into the 20th century, but the depression forced many hardscrabble farmers to abandon both their country lifestyle and their semi-wild hogs in favor of a more stable lifestyle in town. For a while, free-ranging hogs weren't common. Nowadays, the only true Razorbacks come from Fayetteville but there are still feral hogs roaming the lands of the natural state. Today; they are again a problem, with feral/free-ranging hogs present in over 50 counties