re: Wild hogs chomp and stomp their way through $90 million worth of Louisiana crops

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There are now at least 35 states with wild pig communities: California recently relaxed restrictions around hunting its growing population, and in Florida, where pigs have been spotted in every county, panthers feast upon them. Humans have, as yet, found no way to kill feral pigs fast enough to keep up with their profound fecundity. It’s a problem of our own making. Over thousands of years, humans in Europe and beyond bred pigs to achieve fertility younger and to have more piglets every year. “We created an animal that was capable of doing exactly what it’s doing,” Tomecek said. A sow as young as five or six months old can conceive, on average, four to six piglets, and Texas Wildlife Services typically observes sows delivering a litter every seven months for the duration of their reproductive life spans—a volume of piglets that inspires an involuntary Kegel. DNA tests show that litters often reflect multiple paternity, in which different piglets in the same litter have been fathered by different boars. Like a virus that is infectious well before symptoms appear, pig populations explode so quickly that landowners often fail to recognize they have a problem in time to swiftly contain it.

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Many look hopefully, or at least curiously, to a research team at Auburn University, which is working to develop immunocontraception for pigs. That team faces the same strictures of any contraceptive targeting an invasive species, however: either it must be engineered to affect only wild pigs or it must be delivered using a method that ensures no other wildlife is likely to consume it. Pigs could be caught and hand-injected with a contraceptive, Tomecek said. “The argument is then: Why would I let them go?”

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