Published: October 06, 2008 12:21 am      

Cherokee County pigs making more trips into town

By Kelly Young

kyoung@jacksonvilleprogress.com

G.A. Dotson woke up Monday morning to find much of his lawn destroyed. During the night, a group of feral hogs had visited his home in the 1100 block of Glenfawn, rooted through most of his back and side yards and left devastation in their wake.

According to Dotson, this is the first time he has fallen prey to the porcine creatures, but he fears this won’t be the last.

Feral hogs have been a nuisance in East Texas for decades now, but Jacksonville Animal Control said they have seen an increase lately in pig problems within the city limits.

“We have been seeing a lot more pigs around town recently. We’ve probably had six to eight calls from landowners in the city in the last six months, and that’s a pretty big increase from what we used to see,” said Animal Control Officer Susie Clements. “They are all over the place now. They run in packs, and they just do so much damage when they come through.”

Clements said the hogs aren’t focusing on any one area of town, but are hitting different sections of Jacksonville as they trek through the area.

“We are basically finding them in any area of town that has lots of woods and a water source. There are quite a few around Driprock Road, Lon Morris College has had trouble with them tearing up their grounds and we have gotten calls about damage on Woodhaven, Lakeshore and Pineda,” she said. “You see them most in the early morning and late evening. They have been spotted in Highway 175 and on the loop you are liable to see a herd of them.”

According to Clements, packs of swine follow a pattern where they may not visit the same area again for weeks or months, but because of their excellent memories, they tend to eventually return to a location where they successfully found food before.

She said their intelligence is part of the reason why they have proven so resistant to efforts to eliminate them.

“We trap a couple in a good month, but some of them are smart. If they have ever been around a trap when something got caught in one, then they know to avoid traps from then on, so you really have to camouflage your traps,” she said.

Clements said the city used to own three large feral swine traps, intended to catch groups of pigs at once, but one of them was recently destroyed by a falling tree during Hurricane Ike.

Animal Control has used numerous different types of baits in their traps, including Hog Wild, corn, Pig Out, Gatorade, Kool-Aid and anything else that “smells real fruity.” Clements said they most recently caught a pig on Tuesday, and that trapping as many as possible is basically all they can do to fight the problem.

Anyone caught disturbing one of the city’s traps will be subject to legal consequences, Clements said.

With a high reproduction rate, a willingness to eat virtually anything and no natural predators, feral hogs are currently causing problems in 39 states and four Canadian provinces. Texas has a higher wild pig population than any other state in the nation, and East Texas’ ample tree cover gives the animals plenty of room to hide from hunters.

It is estimated that wild swine are responsible for $52 million worth of damage each year to Texas’ agricultural industry — not counting the destruction they cause to residences like Dotson’s and to institutions like Lon Morris.

According to Clements, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Web site has a lot of good information on how to deal with hogs. The site includes hunting and trapping tips, bait ideas, information on preparing hog meat for consumption and additional control methods. Just visit www.tpwd.state.tx.us and click on nuisance wildlife.

Dotson said he is making plans to fence off his property in the hopes that that will keep the pigs off his land.

“Nothing like this has ever happened here. It’s just amazing how much they were able to tear up in one night. I don’t know how much this is going to cost to fix, and I don’t really know how to even do it,” he said.