4 ms·

you haven’t had fun on this planet until you've gone hunting for invasive hogs in florida or texas. stars, night observation devices, suppressed semiautomatic r

you haven’t had fun on this planet until you've gone hunting for invasive hogs in florida or texas. stars, night observation devices, suppressed semiautomatic rifles. regardless of your stance on guns or killing things almost as smart as humans, you should give this fun and useful activity a try sometime. you’ll learn some skills and make solid friends along the way.

propagandist 4y ago
It sounds like a great way to earn the company of fellow psychopaths. The ecological need is easy to understand, but turning it into a "sport" tells you a lot about the caliber of people we're living with. The people engaging in this activity are worse than poachers; at least poachers kill to earn a living.
- causality0 4y ago
  Worse how? Because they're enjoying something that needs to be done? These hogs would be more than happy to kill and eat you if they could. They regularly break into back yards and kill pets. If an animal is happy to pop slats off a fence and disembowel my cousin's dog I'm happy to put a bullet in it.
  - propagandist 4y ago
    You're free do the research into what the Texas model is actually achieving. States with more amenable conditions for pigs don't have the problem that Texas has. There is a responsible way to manage a population. Shooting pigs to get a kick ain't it.
    - c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
      >States with more amenable conditions for pigs don't have the problem that Texas has. Which states would those be?
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      It’s also deeply concerning how he didn’t make one mention of how dangerous wild boars can be. If you don’t take it down it is 100% going to try and kill you. And they don’t go down that easy.
      - rdevsrex 4y ago
        I just watched this video where the brother of one of the French kings, died by falling from his horse after tripping over a pig: https://youtu.be/fjalQSOLZE4?t=76 https://youtu.be/fjalQSOLZE4?t=76
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    Yep. I’m not an opponent of capital punishment for example but wouldn’t want a government executioner to get a hardon while he does it.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Spivak 4y ago
      Totally opposed to capital punishment, but as long as the person who enjoys the work isn't the person who decides that it needs done it seems fine, maybe even better if they enjoyed it. You probably want the person who isn't going to get PTSD from it carrying it out if minimizing human suffering is the goal. I can't decide if doing the same thing with pedophiles and CP moderation is terrible or not. My gut reaction is terrible but after hearing about how traumatizing it is for the people who do it maybe it's some kind of fucked up win win. Because I could straight up not do that job, but that job being done prevents real life abuse.
      - imtringued 4y ago
        Just pay euthanasia doctors, they don't seem to mind killing healthy people.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > The people engaging in this activity are worse than poachers Sausage is yummy, and pigs do ecological damage.
  - bacon_waffle 4y ago
    If poisoning pigs were known to be more effective than shooting, would that change the calculus?
    - everforward 4y ago
      I'd be fine with it, if it wasn't going to impact other species, wasn't absurdly more cruel, and they could still be used for meat (and I could probably give up on the meat; it's not that much of a factor). From what I can recall, it's been tried, but had problems. The USDA has cyanide traps that are meant to kill boars (along with wolves and coyotes). In 2017, one of them killed a dog and injured a boy when the dog went after the trap. They're meant to shoot the cyanide into the animals mouth, but there's an area of effect apparently. Laying out poisoned food tends to kill near everything in the forest. The problem with most methods that don't involve humans is the inability to discriminate between problem species and normal species. It's hard to build a device that will kill boars but not deer or squirrels or whatever. Boars are big and hard to kill; most things in the forest are far more fragile.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > If poisoning pigs were known to be more effective than shooting, would that change the calculus? Depends on a lot of things. Relative cruelty of poisoning vs. shooting the pigs; utility of hunters enjoying pig meat; costs & effectiveness of both strategies; etc. I suspect you'd probably end up doing both. On the other hand, it's a bit moot, because I don't think we know how to effectively poison pigs without greater harms. Texas was using specialty-warfarin in addition to the hunting efforts. It's arguably crueler than shooting them. We definitely do trap wild pigs in many jurisdictions, but this is much less effective than shooting them, IMO.
  - usednet 4y ago
    Do you think your sausages are being made from wild pigs?
- King-Aaron 4y ago
  If you don't enjoy undoing environmental damage, you're a psychopath! If you enjoy undoing environmental damage, you're a psychopath!
- wyager 4y ago
  I hear where you're coming from, but there's definitely some sort of weird carve-out in human psychology that allows people to simultaneously be compassionate towards animals while also being OK with killing them. Most hunters I know (who don't do it out of necessity or anything) are very morally upright people, and many of them are good friends to animals (conservationists, rehabbers, etc.).
  - propagandist 4y ago
    Yeah hunting is not in the same moral landscape as some of the Texas wild hog "hunts". A lot of people are drawn to it because it involves shooting semi automatics at fleeing pigs from a helicopter, without even gathering the meat. Killing an animal for meat/hide/oil or as part of a cull is in a different universe from gleefully shooting at them as a form of entertainment.
    - salawat 4y ago
      Username checks out. >Yeah hunting is not in the same moral landscape as some of the Texas wild hog "hunts". A hunt is a hunt. >A lot of people are drawn to it because it involves shooting semi automatics at fleeing pigs from a helicopter, without even gathering the meat. I don't know anyone loaded enough to dedicate a vehicle that can require up to 10 hours maintenance per flight hour to hog hunting on the regular, but I suppose with all the Cali money heading Texas' way that might be a thing. Fewer still who can even pull off a shot reliably/safely from that platform. That semi-automatics are used isn't even controversial. When you're dealing with a pest that isn't guaranteed to go down in one shot, you don't hanstring yourself with unnecessary handicaps. I also assure you, the maintenance and loading just for the firearm for the expedition is no small investment of time or resources. Most land owners I know have a rifle and a truck, and even then, it's ususlly a dedicated field truck, because you do not want to get stuck out in bumf Texas. We still have areas you can effectively get lost in. Stop romanticizing hunting (which is exactly what you're doing when kavetching about how people hunt). It's a fact of life, and an important part of ecological stewardship. If you don't handle hogs on your property when they become a problem, they just stick around and become someone else's. If you'd like to share the address of your property, I'm fairly sure it would be no trouble at all to wrangle up a few specimens and ship em out to you so you can get hands on experience. Might want to warn your local gov and neighbors though. It can rapudly get out of hand...
- nemo 4y ago
  If you think about this in consequentialist terms poachers are far worse in every respect. I'm a pacifist, a vegetarian, and an ecologist. I am glad the hogs are getting culled, that's a valuable outcome. I don't care if the people who cull the hogs enjoy it. I wouldn't, I'm glad someone does, they're doing something with a good outcome, even if you think their motivations are unsavory.
  - propagandist 4y ago
    Culling is not the issue. The passion is. You don't need to be any of the things you mentioned to understand the problem with killing for entertainment.
    - salawat 4y ago
      Look. Tend a garden. You too will soon realize it's all a part of doing what comes naturally. Nature, as it turns out, laughs in the face of anything unwilling to speak the language of death.
      - propagandist 4y ago
        Sorry, you have trouble reading. Death is not the issue.
        salawat 4y ago
        I'm afraid you're the one not getting it. The passion, and the deed go hand in hand. It is hard work to cultivate and maintain something against encroachment by Nature. Anyone that tells you there is no satisfaction gained from securing the safety of their environment from an intrusive force is either lying to you, or deluding themselves. Death wish, and its management is all a weird part of being alive, and in fact, it's channeling into productive active activity instead of straight up warfare is crucial to peaceful coexistence. It's one of the few things Freud may have actually kind of gotten right, tbqh. Heidigger calls it angst, and it's central to the concept of care, and by extension, to the act of Being. It takes time to become comfortable with.
King-Aaron 4y ago
I've spent time in the past shooting feral rabbits, foxes and cats here in Australia, which do immeasurable harm to the native ecosystems. It can be a fairly engaging activity, but it does pay to keep in mind that it's not the animals fault that they're born into the environment they're in, and as such you do try to minimise the level of suffering around it (i.e. I'm not a fan of people bow hunting which isn't an instantaneous kill). I suppose it helps to keep a level of mindfulness around what you're doing and remember that causing unnecessary pain is something to avoid.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  If you're in Australia the wild boar in Queensland, kangaroo & feral goats in South Australia, and the fallow deer in Tasmania should be added to the list. I'd also argue for permanent open season on roaming cats.
  - King-Aaron 4y ago
    Yep feral pigs and goats are a big issue in WA too, as well as camels in the north.
trash3 4y ago
shzusnwxbwj 4y ago
wyager 4y ago
I used to help friends manage destructive hog populations on TX farmland. It was really crazy. I remember a few years back people on twitter were ragging on some guy for saying he needed an AR to kill "30-50 feral hogs", acting as if that was some sort of insane fictional scenario, when in reality he was being perfectly veracious. I haven't helped with hog control in 5+ years, but I'm interested to see how it's changed with the proliferation of NVDs and thermal optics. It would have made our jobs a lot easier, but the equipment was much more expensive back then - no one I knew at the time had better than gen2 technology.
- rdl 4y ago
  I assume a lot of of it is people with the latest/greatest gear for "prepper" use doing live-fire testing against hogs, not so much people buying gear solely for addressing hogs. (I have pvs-31/gen3 and a separate thermal monocular, trying to get an eCoti or make a clone of one, and am super into the new digital stuff for sensor fusion, but while I'd love to go hog hunting, it's not primarily stuff I've bought for the purpose of shooting hogs. A good "tell" here is people who don't run full-time IR illuminator to be realistic training against adversaries who might themselves have NV)
morsch 4y ago
Are they a different species than the wild hogs in Germany? They look the same. They're a pest, here, too. But hunters don't require night vision goggles and semi automatic guns to control them. They're considered dangerous to pets (mostly dogs, which probably started the fight) and I wouldn't get too close to them. But deadly encounters are extremely rare; way less than 1/year in a population of 80m humans and 2m pigs.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  Some are similar to European boars but a lot are hybrids. It's relatively rare for them to kill people, but they can wreck a farm pretty quickly.
sacrosancty 4y ago
You should kill pigs regardless of your stance on killing pigs?
- rdevsrex 4y ago
  I would say yes unless some other solution exists to keep them from destroying the ecosystem.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    That's just arrogance though - "Even if you disagree with me for any reason, including reasons I never thought of, but excluding the one possible reason I did think of, I'm still right so disregard your silly opinion and do it my way.".

propagandist 4y ago

It sounds like a great way to earn the company of fellow psychopaths. The ecological need is easy to understand, but turning it into a "sport" tells you a lot about the caliber of people we're living with. The people engaging in this activity are worse than poachers; at least poachers kill to earn a living.

causality0 4y ago
Worse how? Because they're enjoying something that needs to be done? These hogs would be more than happy to kill and eat you if they could. They regularly break into back yards and kill pets. If an animal is happy to pop slats off a fence and disembowel my cousin's dog I'm happy to put a bullet in it.
- propagandist 4y ago
  You're free do the research into what the Texas model is actually achieving. States with more amenable conditions for pigs don't have the problem that Texas has. There is a responsible way to manage a population. Shooting pigs to get a kick ain't it.
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
    >States with more amenable conditions for pigs don't have the problem that Texas has. Which states would those be?
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    It’s also deeply concerning how he didn’t make one mention of how dangerous wild boars can be. If you don’t take it down it is 100% going to try and kill you. And they don’t go down that easy.
    - rdevsrex 4y ago
      I just watched this video where the brother of one of the French kings, died by falling from his horse after tripping over a pig: https://youtu.be/fjalQSOLZE4?t=76 https://youtu.be/fjalQSOLZE4?t=76
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Yep. I’m not an opponent of capital punishment for example but wouldn’t want a government executioner to get a hardon while he does it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Totally opposed to capital punishment, but as long as the person who enjoys the work isn't the person who decides that it needs done it seems fine, maybe even better if they enjoyed it. You probably want the person who isn't going to get PTSD from it carrying it out if minimizing human suffering is the goal. I can't decide if doing the same thing with pedophiles and CP moderation is terrible or not. My gut reaction is terrible but after hearing about how traumatizing it is for the people who do it maybe it's some kind of fucked up win win. Because I could straight up not do that job, but that job being done prevents real life abuse.
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Just pay euthanasia doctors, they don't seem to mind killing healthy people.
mlyle 4y ago
> The people engaging in this activity are worse than poachers Sausage is yummy, and pigs do ecological damage.
- bacon_waffle 4y ago
  If poisoning pigs were known to be more effective than shooting, would that change the calculus?
  - everforward 4y ago
    I'd be fine with it, if it wasn't going to impact other species, wasn't absurdly more cruel, and they could still be used for meat (and I could probably give up on the meat; it's not that much of a factor). From what I can recall, it's been tried, but had problems. The USDA has cyanide traps that are meant to kill boars (along with wolves and coyotes). In 2017, one of them killed a dog and injured a boy when the dog went after the trap. They're meant to shoot the cyanide into the animals mouth, but there's an area of effect apparently. Laying out poisoned food tends to kill near everything in the forest. The problem with most methods that don't involve humans is the inability to discriminate between problem species and normal species. It's hard to build a device that will kill boars but not deer or squirrels or whatever. Boars are big and hard to kill; most things in the forest are far more fragile.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > If poisoning pigs were known to be more effective than shooting, would that change the calculus? Depends on a lot of things. Relative cruelty of poisoning vs. shooting the pigs; utility of hunters enjoying pig meat; costs & effectiveness of both strategies; etc. I suspect you'd probably end up doing both. On the other hand, it's a bit moot, because I don't think we know how to effectively poison pigs without greater harms. Texas was using specialty-warfarin in addition to the hunting efforts. It's arguably crueler than shooting them. We definitely do trap wild pigs in many jurisdictions, but this is much less effective than shooting them, IMO.
- usednet 4y ago
  Do you think your sausages are being made from wild pigs?
King-Aaron 4y ago
If you don't enjoy undoing environmental damage, you're a psychopath! If you enjoy undoing environmental damage, you're a psychopath!
wyager 4y ago
I hear where you're coming from, but there's definitely some sort of weird carve-out in human psychology that allows people to simultaneously be compassionate towards animals while also being OK with killing them. Most hunters I know (who don't do it out of necessity or anything) are very morally upright people, and many of them are good friends to animals (conservationists, rehabbers, etc.).
- propagandist 4y ago
  Yeah hunting is not in the same moral landscape as some of the Texas wild hog "hunts". A lot of people are drawn to it because it involves shooting semi automatics at fleeing pigs from a helicopter, without even gathering the meat. Killing an animal for meat/hide/oil or as part of a cull is in a different universe from gleefully shooting at them as a form of entertainment.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Username checks out. >Yeah hunting is not in the same moral landscape as some of the Texas wild hog "hunts". A hunt is a hunt. >A lot of people are drawn to it because it involves shooting semi automatics at fleeing pigs from a helicopter, without even gathering the meat. I don't know anyone loaded enough to dedicate a vehicle that can require up to 10 hours maintenance per flight hour to hog hunting on the regular, but I suppose with all the Cali money heading Texas' way that might be a thing. Fewer still who can even pull off a shot reliably/safely from that platform. That semi-automatics are used isn't even controversial. When you're dealing with a pest that isn't guaranteed to go down in one shot, you don't hanstring yourself with unnecessary handicaps. I also assure you, the maintenance and loading just for the firearm for the expedition is no small investment of time or resources. Most land owners I know have a rifle and a truck, and even then, it's ususlly a dedicated field truck, because you do not want to get stuck out in bumf Texas. We still have areas you can effectively get lost in. Stop romanticizing hunting (which is exactly what you're doing when kavetching about how people hunt). It's a fact of life, and an important part of ecological stewardship. If you don't handle hogs on your property when they become a problem, they just stick around and become someone else's. If you'd like to share the address of your property, I'm fairly sure it would be no trouble at all to wrangle up a few specimens and ship em out to you so you can get hands on experience. Might want to warn your local gov and neighbors though. It can rapudly get out of hand...
nemo 4y ago
If you think about this in consequentialist terms poachers are far worse in every respect. I'm a pacifist, a vegetarian, and an ecologist. I am glad the hogs are getting culled, that's a valuable outcome. I don't care if the people who cull the hogs enjoy it. I wouldn't, I'm glad someone does, they're doing something with a good outcome, even if you think their motivations are unsavory.
- propagandist 4y ago
  Culling is not the issue. The passion is. You don't need to be any of the things you mentioned to understand the problem with killing for entertainment.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Look. Tend a garden. You too will soon realize it's all a part of doing what comes naturally. Nature, as it turns out, laughs in the face of anything unwilling to speak the language of death.
    - propagandist 4y ago
      Sorry, you have trouble reading. Death is not the issue.
      - salawat 4y ago
        I'm afraid you're the one not getting it. The passion, and the deed go hand in hand. It is hard work to cultivate and maintain something against encroachment by Nature. Anyone that tells you there is no satisfaction gained from securing the safety of their environment from an intrusive force is either lying to you, or deluding themselves. Death wish, and its management is all a weird part of being alive, and in fact, it's channeling into productive active activity instead of straight up warfare is crucial to peaceful coexistence. It's one of the few things Freud may have actually kind of gotten right, tbqh. Heidigger calls it angst, and it's central to the concept of care, and by extension, to the act of Being. It takes time to become comfortable with.

King-Aaron 4y ago

I've spent time in the past shooting feral rabbits, foxes and cats here in Australia, which do immeasurable harm to the native ecosystems. It can be a fairly engaging activity, but it does pay to keep in mind that it's not the animals fault that they're born into the environment they're in, and as such you do try to minimise the level of suffering around it (i.e. I'm not a fan of people bow hunting which isn't an instantaneous kill). I suppose it helps to keep a level of mindfulness around what you're doing and remember that causing unnecessary pain is something to avoid.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
If you're in Australia the wild boar in Queensland, kangaroo & feral goats in South Australia, and the fallow deer in Tasmania should be added to the list. I'd also argue for permanent open season on roaming cats.
- King-Aaron 4y ago
  Yep feral pigs and goats are a big issue in WA too, as well as camels in the north.

trash3 4y ago

shzusnwxbwj 4y ago

wyager 4y ago

I used to help friends manage destructive hog populations on TX farmland. It was really crazy. I remember a few years back people on twitter were ragging on some guy for saying he needed an AR to kill "30-50 feral hogs", acting as if that was some sort of insane fictional scenario, when in reality he was being perfectly veracious. I haven't helped with hog control in 5+ years, but I'm interested to see how it's changed with the proliferation of NVDs and thermal optics. It would have made our jobs a lot easier, but the equipment was much more expensive back then - no one I knew at the time had better than gen2 technology.

rdl 4y ago
I assume a lot of of it is people with the latest/greatest gear for "prepper" use doing live-fire testing against hogs, not so much people buying gear solely for addressing hogs. (I have pvs-31/gen3 and a separate thermal monocular, trying to get an eCoti or make a clone of one, and am super into the new digital stuff for sensor fusion, but while I'd love to go hog hunting, it's not primarily stuff I've bought for the purpose of shooting hogs. A good "tell" here is people who don't run full-time IR illuminator to be realistic training against adversaries who might themselves have NV)

morsch 4y ago

Are they a different species than the wild hogs in Germany? They look the same. They're a pest, here, too. But hunters don't require night vision goggles and semi automatic guns to control them. They're considered dangerous to pets (mostly dogs, which probably started the fight) and I wouldn't get too close to them. But deadly encounters are extremely rare; way less than 1/year in a population of 80m humans and 2m pigs.

Rebelgecko 4y ago
Some are similar to European boars but a lot are hybrids. It's relatively rare for them to kill people, but they can wreck a farm pretty quickly.

sacrosancty 4y ago

You should kill pigs regardless of your stance on killing pigs?

rdevsrex 4y ago
I would say yes unless some other solution exists to keep them from destroying the ecosystem.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  That's just arrogance though - "Even if you disagree with me for any reason, including reasons I never thought of, but excluding the one possible reason I did think of, I'm still right so disregard your silly opinion and do it my way.".