Feral hog numbers are on the decline in Missouri.
The Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) announced on Feb. 9 the Missouri Feral Hog Elimination Partnership removed almost 10,000 feral hogs in the state during 2021.
Robert Kipfer, member of the Springfield chapter for the Missouri Master Naturalist Program, said these animals have been here for years. However, the MDC’s involvement with trapping them started around 20 years ago.
“They became worse when they were brought over for the purpose of sporting,” Kipfer said. “There were no feral hogs in North America, they were all brought from the Eastern hemisphere.”
Kipfer said the hogs are problematic for many reasons, including wildlife competition and destruction of property. Over the winter, feral hogs eat acorns, which decreases food supply for turkeys, deer and bears.
Another big problem with the hogs is they get into commercial hog raising facilities and could potentially infect other hogs with swine brucellosis, Kipfer said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, swine brucellosis is a bacterial infection that can affect a hog for life and can even infect humans. Symptoms in hogs include weakness in piglets, spontaneous abortions and lameness.
Jason Jensen, MDC’s community and private land services field chief, said the animals can also be an issue for farmers, as they are destructive with crops.
“Our goal with feral hogs is not to manage them, but to eliminate them,” Jensen said. “This last year, we worked with over 1,300 landowners who called us and requested our assistance with getting feral hogs off their properties.”
Once hog activity has been determined in an area, the community and private land service team sets traps for the hogs. Jensen said they have a variety of methods for removing the hogs, but they mainly utilize trapping and euthanization.
Before 2016, Jensen said, the Department of Conservation would make maps of where they found the hogs and gave the maps to hunters. That changed because the department noticed the populations were not decreasing as planned, so they made it illegal to hunt feral hogs in department of conservation areas.
“It seems very counterintuitive, but at the same time, that hunting culture is what brought the hogs here in the first place,” Jensen said.
Despite making feral hog hunting illegal, Jensen said there are exceptions to this rule. Private landowners are able to work with the elimination partnership to trap the hogs, and for hunters, incidental take during deer and turkey hunting seasons.
“If you have an unfilled deer or turkey permit, you could shoot a feral hog opportunistically with that tag,” Jensen said.
Kipfer suggests if someone sees a feral hog to report it to the Department of Conservation rather than shoot it. This is because if you see a feral hog, Kipfer said, there is likely a group of them, called sounders. Shooting a single hog can deter the rest of the group from the area, making removal efforts difficult.
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