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The solution is to eat them. It's humane and it's free range pork. Let rural butchers test and certify the meat and sell it to local restaurants as a super prem

The solution is to eat them. It's humane and it's free range pork. Let rural butchers test and certify the meat and sell it to local restaurants as a super premium product, then leverage the now all electronic game tag system for supply chain management. The only thing standing in the way of solving the feral pig problem is the attitudes of the urban governing class toward people capable of hunting and our histrionic firearms regulations. Maybe the middle ground is to make it a military privilege to hunt feral hogs where you need to be a reservist, and if you join you get a lifetime rural open carry and hunting permit. Canada is uniquely vulnerable to feral pig problems owing to what can only be described as a popular resentment of rural culture, which makes solutions like commercial hunts and culling by hunters non-viable. Maybe I should move to a U.S. border state and operate a commercial hunt business.

darkwizard42 4y ago
Ah here is the issue, feral pig meat isn’t really pork the way most people know it. It’s gamey and often parasite ridden.
- motohagiography 4y ago
  Maybe the solution is to kill the parasites, through detection and processing technology, and spraying habitats. If we really can't eat them, the other solution is to use chemistry to make something that feral pigs get addicted to and that they will give up food, sex, and nursing their young in pursuit of, and which is a human controlled substance we can manage. Drop enough of it in their habitats that they can always become dependent. If you just try to poison them, you kill off their own competition for food and just create more resilliant ones, but creating a chemical dependency where they will seek out sources that humans control would provide the lever to manage the population. This solution is related to one I commented on about the rat population in new york city. Just make something they want. I should do a startup, we could call it Pied Piper.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    It’s very difficult to kill the parasites of precisely one species with broad applicability. Also, your goals and the goals of environmentalists seems to be quite different here. You’re suggesting farming them, but environmentalists don’t actually want them there at all.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    Animals in non-contrived normal environments don't actually do that. Furthermore poison of any variety is unlikely to be sufficiently targeted to just kill pigs and most isn't very humane.
- clbrmbr 4y ago
  Gamey me I can handle. But parasites? Count me out.
  - tra3 4y ago
    “Regular” pork has parasites too, that’s why you wanna cook it to the “safe” temperature.
    - linuxftw 4y ago
      The USDA inspects for parasites and rejects any animals that have signs of them. Very little US farmed pork has parasites.
      - taeric 4y ago
        I think this is also the case for salmon? First time I had wild salmon at home, I was... rather surprised by the number of parasites on it. It really is impressive how well farmed meat does at keeping that out. I don't think many of us have any sort of intuition for just how parasite ridden food was even a half century ago.
        clbrmbr 4y ago
        I’ll think twice before my next sashimi!
        Tagbert 4y ago
        That is why all commercial sales of wild salmon are frozen to kill the parasites. If you catch it yourself you need to either freeze it thoroughly or be very careful.
    - MichaelRo 4y ago
      Not really. Compared to the number of domestic pigs, parasite infections (like the deadly for humans Trichinellosis) are almost inexistent. And domestic pig meat is tested for parasites nevertheless. With all that I feel uneasy eating raw meat, although salami and prosciutto are very tasty and sometimes I submit to temptation. Feel like running the Russian roulette everytime although the probability of an actual parasite infestation is extremely low. Wild pigs would probably be okay if processed into I dunno, pasteurized canned meat. If that's guaranteed to kill parasites it should be okay for human consumption provided the meat is tested before nevertheless. One thing I'm thinking of is this problem: as far as I know testing the meat is a slow, manual process, where a human is required to take slices of the meat and check them under a microscope. Therefore it's only done on a statistical basis. That's enough for farm pigs, if a pig from a larger culture is parasite free, chances are very high that all are parasite free. But this is not possible for wild boars. Every pig they shot needs to be tested coze you never know otherwise. This is again feasible for the occasional hunt (here at least). Hunters will send a probe to the lab before consuming the pig and that's doable because it's like ... one or a few pigs. Not really possible if you massacre 1000 of them. So unless some technology is developed for automating this testing procedure, you can't safely eat the meat of a wild boar mass slaughter.
- dgb23 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've eaten feral pigs before. I remember it as being good quality. It's common to eat game in autumn where I live. Especially in rural areas. I think this might be one of these cases where meat consumption might be ethically sound and good for the environment. Feral pigs are hard to contain. They are smart, greedy, dangerous. They seem to be very similar to us humans in many regards, just less dominant overall, but the pigs we are talking about here also multiply very fast. There are very few animals who can fight large feral pigs, and even fewer who have good chances of not getting severely injured. Pigs come in packs and they can assess situations much better than typical prey. They can fight off wolves or scare them away, especially when they have a numbers advantage. So the typical wolf strategy often doesn't work. Wolves might have the stamina and composure, but the risk/reward isn't there. I don't think the article mentions it, but pigs track the schedule of human hunters. They know roughly at which times they will show up, so they carefully try to pick up the hunter's sent and track where they go in order to plan safer paths through the wild. So even if you hunt them actively, it's not an easy task at all.
- is_true 4y ago
  I've eaten wild board and it's gamey but tasty, a relative often does salami from a mix of wild board and axis deer. But I understand that feral and wild boards are different.
  - samstave 4y ago
    I've had Wild Boar in Borneo with the tribe that was many years ago the "head hunter" and "poison blow dart" tribes we know of from yore... Super fatty, greasy and gamey. Washed down with the alcohol they drink in thee Borneo Jungles, which is a certain leaf fermented in human spit. An experience, yes. Not one I'd seek out again, but a great memory.
    - is_true 4y ago
      That sounds awesome. Wild boars here don't have almost any fat, neither does deer.
      - samstave 4y ago
        I think "greasy" is a better word for it..
- karaterobot 4y ago
  This is true. You don't kill feral pigs for meat, you kill them for the same reason you kill rats. It's not the kind of meat you'd eat if you had any other choice.
  - cityofdelusion 4y ago
    Wild pig meat tastes fine if the animal is young, fit, and healthy. It is very lean and tough, I did an 18 hour slow cook and it as pretty good.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  well some stuff might but that's why you cook pork more than beef. it's not that gamey (depends on what it eats) but if you don't care for it, makes a good sausage with rabbit or squirrel.
13of40 4y ago
> Maybe the middle ground is to make it a military privilege to hunt feral hogs where you need to be a reservist, and if you join you get a lifetime rural open carry and hunting permit. I can't make out whether you're in the US or Canada, but where I live (Washington State) if you're out in the sticks, not only can you open carry but if you're hiking, fishing, hunting, etc. you can have a concealed weapon without a permit. Are you telling me there are states out east where you're no longer allowed to even *open* carry a gun in the woods? (Also the reservist tie-in is a little bit weird. I'm 50, I ain't drawing no TA-50. That makes me ineligible?)
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
  Seems like a suggestion by someone that isn’t aware of the classes and education that are needed to get a hunting license or concealed weapon permit.
- tra3 4y ago
  There’s no concealed carry in Canada. In fact handgun acquisition has been banned last year. Hunting requires a license and then additional per species license. Except for species like wolves and coyotes, I think.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/firearms/authorization-carry https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/firearms/authorization-carry There is, but it's not very common at all, and not in the sense that you can just grab a gun and wander wherever you want. I've always wondered if they process the application without any of the work check boxes checked. I assume the answer is "no".
cryptonector 4y ago
Just hunt them. You can't eat them all without going to huge expense having all-terrain refrigerator trucks to pick them up with. Vultures and other animals and just nature will take care of the carcasses. That's what people do here in Texas, where we have the largest wild pig population in the U.S., and it's a big big deal. There are hog hunting festivals. I've only ever seen videos of this, but this is one of those cases where an AR-15 is one of the most excellent firearms for hunting.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  It's not as simple as 'just hunt them'. For one thing, if you don't pick the right ammunition, that will damage the vulture population, as well as other scavenger animals. https://projectvulture.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lead-Poisoning-in-Vultures.pdf https://projectvulture.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lea...
- swalling 4y ago
  The open hunting season in states like California and Texas actually creates a perverse incentive among hunting guides and private land owners to deliberately introduce and maintain feral pig populations, in order to act as supply for their business. It’s widely accepted among wildlife ecologists that hunting has minimal control effect and might actually be causing more spread. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/reports/Wildlife%20Damage%20Management%20Technical%20Series/Feral%20Swine_WDM%20Technical%20Series_August%202020.pdf https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/reports/Wildlife%...
  - cryptonector 4y ago
    That shows how little you know about this. In Texas you can hunt feral hogs all day every day of the year and you don't even need a license. That's how much of a pest they are. There are more than enough feral hogs in Texas to last a lifetime of hunting and then some. No one releases hogs into the wild in Texas so there's more to hunt.
    - swalling 4y ago
Tade0 4y ago
> The solution is to eat them. To quote a certain president: sounds good, doesn't work. Over here in Poland despite having open season for boars all year round and eliminating 185k specimens due to ASF a few years ago there are still a lot of them. The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork. I mean, they disrupt ecosystems with their omnivoracity and propensity to multiply at a high rate so their population should be regulated, but you can't really compete on price with factory farming.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  > The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork. Is it actually wild boar? We have butchers and farms selling “wild boar” products in Canada, but it’s actually farmed from descendants of recent “adoptions” of wild specimens. It’s wild in terms of genetics; which might still be better; but isn’t accomplishing much in terms of culling.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    > Is it actually wild boar? There isn't much of a market for farmed boar, because it's still expensive. We have a strong hunting lobby (many members of parliament are active hunters) so there's actually more bureaucracy with maintaining a farm of them than hunting. Farms probably exist(never heard of any), but it's not a particularly profitable business. Becoming a hunter is actually one of the two most popular ways of acquiring a firearm permit(the other being sport). During the ASF epidemic there was controversy regarding the origin of some of the meat on the market because, according to the law, boars culled due to ASF can, ahem, only be eaten by the one who hunted them, so the spike in supply was suspicious.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Ah gotcha. In Canada, it's basically prohibited to let game meat enter commercial trade. Still happens informally, but nobody is going to be able to walk into a butcher and buy it.
- 4y ago
michaelmrose 4y ago
You have what is believed for instance to be hundreds of thousands of wild pigs in Saskatchewan Alberta and Manitoba. Sows are capable of producing up to 12 piglets per year. Meanwhile those 3 have a combined population of 7.3M around 18% living in rural areas or about 1.3M. You can already legally own some rifles in Canada and hunt pigs in accordance with the law however you need to kill around 70% of the population each year just to keep the population the same size due to fast breeding and the survivors being about as smart as dogs do learn and become harder to kill. It's not obvious that either gun control nor well earned disdain for the rural population are a meaningful contributor to the problem whatsoever. Nor is it obvious why any sane person who isn't already inclined to join the reserves would do so for the purpose of obtaining essentially a hunting license nor why tossing in rural open carry would improve the bargain. Instead such a license ought to be free since you are in effect doing the government a favor. It seems more likely that people just aren't sufficiently inclined to kill enough of them because its a lot of work that wouldn't be sufficiently rewarded. Establishing a demand for harvesting and marketing them is something you would have to do the ground work on BEFORE people are inclined to put in the effort and furthermore it seems incredibly unlikely that the market should demand enough at a price that would support the amount of harvesting at a high unit cost required to even stabilize the population. I would suggest government pay employees directly to shoot a shit ton of pigs. It is far cheaper than trying to store and process them and avoid incentivizing breeding them by not paying independent agents per kill.

darkwizard42 4y ago

Ah here is the issue, feral pig meat isn’t really pork the way most people know it. It’s gamey and often parasite ridden.

motohagiography 4y ago
Maybe the solution is to kill the parasites, through detection and processing technology, and spraying habitats. If we really can't eat them, the other solution is to use chemistry to make something that feral pigs get addicted to and that they will give up food, sex, and nursing their young in pursuit of, and which is a human controlled substance we can manage. Drop enough of it in their habitats that they can always become dependent. If you just try to poison them, you kill off their own competition for food and just create more resilliant ones, but creating a chemical dependency where they will seek out sources that humans control would provide the lever to manage the population. This solution is related to one I commented on about the rat population in new york city. Just make something they want. I should do a startup, we could call it Pied Piper.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  It’s very difficult to kill the parasites of precisely one species with broad applicability. Also, your goals and the goals of environmentalists seems to be quite different here. You’re suggesting farming them, but environmentalists don’t actually want them there at all.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  Animals in non-contrived normal environments don't actually do that. Furthermore poison of any variety is unlikely to be sufficiently targeted to just kill pigs and most isn't very humane.
clbrmbr 4y ago
Gamey me I can handle. But parasites? Count me out.
- tra3 4y ago
  “Regular” pork has parasites too, that’s why you wanna cook it to the “safe” temperature.
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    The USDA inspects for parasites and rejects any animals that have signs of them. Very little US farmed pork has parasites.
    - taeric 4y ago
      I think this is also the case for salmon? First time I had wild salmon at home, I was... rather surprised by the number of parasites on it. It really is impressive how well farmed meat does at keeping that out. I don't think many of us have any sort of intuition for just how parasite ridden food was even a half century ago.
      - clbrmbr 4y ago
        I’ll think twice before my next sashimi!
      - Tagbert 4y ago
        That is why all commercial sales of wild salmon are frozen to kill the parasites. If you catch it yourself you need to either freeze it thoroughly or be very careful.
  - MichaelRo 4y ago
    Not really. Compared to the number of domestic pigs, parasite infections (like the deadly for humans Trichinellosis) are almost inexistent. And domestic pig meat is tested for parasites nevertheless. With all that I feel uneasy eating raw meat, although salami and prosciutto are very tasty and sometimes I submit to temptation. Feel like running the Russian roulette everytime although the probability of an actual parasite infestation is extremely low. Wild pigs would probably be okay if processed into I dunno, pasteurized canned meat. If that's guaranteed to kill parasites it should be okay for human consumption provided the meat is tested before nevertheless. One thing I'm thinking of is this problem: as far as I know testing the meat is a slow, manual process, where a human is required to take slices of the meat and check them under a microscope. Therefore it's only done on a statistical basis. That's enough for farm pigs, if a pig from a larger culture is parasite free, chances are very high that all are parasite free. But this is not possible for wild boars. Every pig they shot needs to be tested coze you never know otherwise. This is again feasible for the occasional hunt (here at least). Hunters will send a probe to the lab before consuming the pig and that's doable because it's like ... one or a few pigs. Not really possible if you massacre 1000 of them. So unless some technology is developed for automating this testing procedure, you can't safely eat the meat of a wild boar mass slaughter.
dgb23 4y ago
I'm pretty sure I've eaten feral pigs before. I remember it as being good quality. It's common to eat game in autumn where I live. Especially in rural areas. I think this might be one of these cases where meat consumption might be ethically sound and good for the environment. Feral pigs are hard to contain. They are smart, greedy, dangerous. They seem to be very similar to us humans in many regards, just less dominant overall, but the pigs we are talking about here also multiply very fast. There are very few animals who can fight large feral pigs, and even fewer who have good chances of not getting severely injured. Pigs come in packs and they can assess situations much better than typical prey. They can fight off wolves or scare them away, especially when they have a numbers advantage. So the typical wolf strategy often doesn't work. Wolves might have the stamina and composure, but the risk/reward isn't there. I don't think the article mentions it, but pigs track the schedule of human hunters. They know roughly at which times they will show up, so they carefully try to pick up the hunter's sent and track where they go in order to plan safer paths through the wild. So even if you hunt them actively, it's not an easy task at all.
is_true 4y ago
I've eaten wild board and it's gamey but tasty, a relative often does salami from a mix of wild board and axis deer. But I understand that feral and wild boards are different.
- samstave 4y ago
  I've had Wild Boar in Borneo with the tribe that was many years ago the "head hunter" and "poison blow dart" tribes we know of from yore... Super fatty, greasy and gamey. Washed down with the alcohol they drink in thee Borneo Jungles, which is a certain leaf fermented in human spit. An experience, yes. Not one I'd seek out again, but a great memory.
  - is_true 4y ago
    That sounds awesome. Wild boars here don't have almost any fat, neither does deer.
    - samstave 4y ago
      I think "greasy" is a better word for it..
karaterobot 4y ago
This is true. You don't kill feral pigs for meat, you kill them for the same reason you kill rats. It's not the kind of meat you'd eat if you had any other choice.
- cityofdelusion 4y ago
  Wild pig meat tastes fine if the animal is young, fit, and healthy. It is very lean and tough, I did an 18 hour slow cook and it as pretty good.
collegeburner 4y ago
well some stuff might but that's why you cook pork more than beef. it's not that gamey (depends on what it eats) but if you don't care for it, makes a good sausage with rabbit or squirrel.

13of40 4y ago

> Maybe the middle ground is to make it a military privilege to hunt feral hogs where you need to be a reservist, and if you join you get a lifetime rural open carry and hunting permit. I can't make out whether you're in the US or Canada, but where I live (Washington State) if you're out in the sticks, not only can you open carry but if you're hiking, fishing, hunting, etc. you can have a concealed weapon without a permit. Are you telling me there are states out east where you're no longer allowed to even *open* carry a gun in the woods? (Also the reservist tie-in is a little bit weird. I'm 50, I ain't drawing no TA-50. That makes me ineligible?)

bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
Seems like a suggestion by someone that isn’t aware of the classes and education that are needed to get a hunting license or concealed weapon permit.
tra3 4y ago
There’s no concealed carry in Canada. In fact handgun acquisition has been banned last year. Hunting requires a license and then additional per species license. Except for species like wolves and coyotes, I think.
- doubled112 4y ago
  https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/firearms/authorization-carry https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/firearms/authorization-carry There is, but it's not very common at all, and not in the sense that you can just grab a gun and wander wherever you want. I've always wondered if they process the application without any of the work check boxes checked. I assume the answer is "no".

cryptonector 4y ago

Just hunt them. You can't eat them all without going to huge expense having all-terrain refrigerator trucks to pick them up with. Vultures and other animals and just nature will take care of the carcasses. That's what people do here in Texas, where we have the largest wild pig population in the U.S., and it's a big big deal. There are hog hunting festivals. I've only ever seen videos of this, but this is one of those cases where an AR-15 is one of the most excellent firearms for hunting.

anigbrowl 4y ago
It's not as simple as 'just hunt them'. For one thing, if you don't pick the right ammunition, that will damage the vulture population, as well as other scavenger animals. https://projectvulture.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lead-Poisoning-in-Vultures.pdf https://projectvulture.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lea...
swalling 4y ago
The open hunting season in states like California and Texas actually creates a perverse incentive among hunting guides and private land owners to deliberately introduce and maintain feral pig populations, in order to act as supply for their business. It’s widely accepted among wildlife ecologists that hunting has minimal control effect and might actually be causing more spread. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/reports/Wildlife%20Damage%20Management%20Technical%20Series/Feral%20Swine_WDM%20Technical%20Series_August%202020.pdf https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/reports/Wildlife%...
- cryptonector 4y ago
  That shows how little you know about this. In Texas you can hunt feral hogs all day every day of the year and you don't even need a license. That's how much of a pest they are. There are more than enough feral hogs in Texas to last a lifetime of hunting and then some. No one releases hogs into the wild in Texas so there's more to hunt.
  - swalling 4y ago

Tade0 4y ago

> The solution is to eat them. To quote a certain president: sounds good, doesn't work. Over here in Poland despite having open season for boars all year round and eliminating 185k specimens due to ASF a few years ago there are still a lot of them. The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork. I mean, they disrupt ecosystems with their omnivoracity and propensity to multiply at a high rate so their population should be regulated, but you can't really compete on price with factory farming.

Scoundreller 4y ago
> The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork. Is it actually wild boar? We have butchers and farms selling “wild boar” products in Canada, but it’s actually farmed from descendants of recent “adoptions” of wild specimens. It’s wild in terms of genetics; which might still be better; but isn’t accomplishing much in terms of culling.
- Tade0 4y ago
  > Is it actually wild boar? There isn't much of a market for farmed boar, because it's still expensive. We have a strong hunting lobby (many members of parliament are active hunters) so there's actually more bureaucracy with maintaining a farm of them than hunting. Farms probably exist(never heard of any), but it's not a particularly profitable business. Becoming a hunter is actually one of the two most popular ways of acquiring a firearm permit(the other being sport). During the ASF epidemic there was controversy regarding the origin of some of the meat on the market because, according to the law, boars culled due to ASF can, ahem, only be eaten by the one who hunted them, so the spike in supply was suspicious.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Ah gotcha. In Canada, it's basically prohibited to let game meat enter commercial trade. Still happens informally, but nobody is going to be able to walk into a butcher and buy it.
4y ago

michaelmrose 4y ago

You have what is believed for instance to be hundreds of thousands of wild pigs in Saskatchewan Alberta and Manitoba. Sows are capable of producing up to 12 piglets per year. Meanwhile those 3 have a combined population of 7.3M around 18% living in rural areas or about 1.3M. You can already legally own some rifles in Canada and hunt pigs in accordance with the law however you need to kill around 70% of the population each year just to keep the population the same size due to fast breeding and the survivors being about as smart as dogs do learn and become harder to kill. It's not obvious that either gun control nor well earned disdain for the rural population are a meaningful contributor to the problem whatsoever. Nor is it obvious why any sane person who isn't already inclined to join the reserves would do so for the purpose of obtaining essentially a hunting license nor why tossing in rural open carry would improve the bargain. Instead such a license ought to be free since you are in effect doing the government a favor. It seems more likely that people just aren't sufficiently inclined to kill enough of them because its a lot of work that wouldn't be sufficiently rewarded. Establishing a demand for harvesting and marketing them is something you would have to do the ground work on BEFORE people are inclined to put in the effort and furthermore it seems incredibly unlikely that the market should demand enough at a price that would support the amount of harvesting at a high unit cost required to even stabilize the population. I would suggest government pay employees directly to shoot a shit ton of pigs. It is far cheaper than trying to store and process them and avoid incentivizing breeding them by not paying independent agents per kill.