“I think people expect this to be a rural problem,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said Thursday in Irving, where the city has captured nearly 250 feral hogs since October when they first were discovered roaming around. “This shows that in rural and urban Texas … the lines that divide us are fewer and fewer.”

For years wild hogs have been a menace in rural areas by shredding crop fields, eating calves and damaging fruit trees – even breaking through barbed-wire fences, said Texas Farm Bureau spokesman Gene Hall. They also wreck ecosystems by wallowing in riverbeds and streams. “They can do more damage than a bulldozer,” Hall said.

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“U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering allowing hunters in helicopters to shoot wild pigs at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge.”

On Monday, Deborah Holle, the refuge manager, told the Austin American Statesman claiming that feral hogs have been trapped and killed during autumn hunts, but the pig population is still thriving and destroying habitat.

According to the Houston Chronicle, “the refuge, with about 23,000 acres in Burnet, Travis and Williamson counties, was formed to protect the habitat for two endangered songbirds.”

Efforts to slow the population growth

, such as by hunting and trapping the hogs, have been unsuccessful.

“We are not able to take enough to affect the breeding population,” explained Michael Bodenchuk with Texas Wildlife Services.

However, Bodenchuck said they may have found a solution – feed them “HogGone,” a poisonous bait that is fatal within minutes.

“The most important part for us is that it be humane and that it only be delivered to hogs,” he said.

This is why Wildlife Services started testing out a specialized hog hopper this month. The hopper is designed so that only feral hogs can access the bait.

“There’s a bar that has to be lifted with a hog’s nose in order to gain access to that,” Bodenchuk said. “It’s very natural for a hog to do that, very unnatural for any other animal. A raccoon couldn’t do it if it wanted to.”

Bodenchuk said the hoppers will be tested with non-lethal bait for several months before Wildlife Services seeks approval to use poisonous bait.

“There will always be feral hogs in Texas. We have passed the point of no return,” Bodenchuck said. “But we believe that we will be able to reduce the population and reduce the damage that they cause significantly with this.”

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According to Texas AgriLife Extension, the Texas Legislature provided $1 million for feral hog abatement to the Texas Department of Agriculture for the 2008-09 Biennium. That money was provided through a grant to Texas AgriLife Extension Services-Wildlife Services program to conduct statewide abatement projects for a 2-year period, from March 1, 2008 through Feb. 28, 2010.

The AgriLife Website states, “The overall damage from feral hogs has been variously estimated anywhere from $50 to $500 per hog per year.”

It also states that during the first year of the grant, Texas AgriLife Extension Services-Wildlife Services removed 24,350 feral hogs. During the second year of the project, they removed 23,057 feral hogs for a total of 47,407 feral hogs during the grant period. The average cost per hog removal during the 2-year project was $19.69 per hog.

According to Texas AgriLife Extension Publication L-1925 “Managing Feral Hog Damage,” control methods used to manage a feral hog problem include using snares, live traps, hunting with dogs and shooting them are all effective methods used to control hogs. It states that through various research demonstrations, live traps have shown to be one of the most effective ways to capture wild hogs. Residents are encouraged to consult with an experienced professional or County Extension Agent for the most practical trap designs when necessary. Additional information is available at the Grimes County Extension Office.

“This is an ongoing problem throughout the State. We’re so close to the Navasota River, we just want people to know they (wild hogs) are dangerous, and to call the police department or animal control (if a wild boar is spotted),” said Stribling who is leaving the trap at the pantry for a few extra weeks as a precaution.

Officials say the damage exceeds $400 million a year statewide–from an animal with no natural predator. They travel in gangs, leaving their marks on the landscape of San Antonio. Yards near Bulverde, Texas, and golf courses along the north and north east sides of San Antonio aren’t immune to the attacks, either.

Neighbors are left wondering: Should they repair the damage, only to be visited again by these unwanted animals?

Bryan Davis, the Texas AgriLife Extension Service county agent said, “Feral hogs can be very destructive, cause several hundreds, even thousands of dollars worth of damage in a very short time.”

State officials are trying to get a handle on the glut of these gluttonous guests. Half the feral hogs in the United States live here in Texas. That equates to more than 2 million of them.

And the numbers keep hog trapper Robert Goins busy. He continuously monitors and tinkers with his traps to keep the hogs coming into a 4’ enclosure for food.

Added Goins, “A hog is smart. People think they’re dumb. They’re not. Matter of fact, you catch so many of them, they change their routine, so you have to change your routine.”

Before springing the traps, Goins uses infrared cameras to watch the hogs’ behavior over several days… to learn. And the video, he says, yields more than just clues to catching them.

Sometimes, he says, it is downright entertaining, as was the case when he witnessed more than a dozen feral hogs enter the trap.

Goins said, “It looks like I marched them in there. They went in a line around the trap and in the door. All 15 of them.”

On one property alone, Goins snared more than 2-tons of hogs, like the sow now pacing his trailer’s cage. And this little piggy is going to market.

Goins said, “They ship the meat overseas, Japan, things like that. And the guy told me the bigger and stinkier the hog is, the more they like it. I thought, whoa! Okay!”

Feral hogs are running out of control all overTexas, and according to the state agriculture department, they cause nearly half a billion dollars in damage, damages that homeowners like you have to pay for. And now on neighborhood is taking new measure to keep the hogs out.

With as many as two million feral hogs in the state of Texas, the state’s agriculture department declared October as “Hog Out” month, challenging counties like Fort Bend to curve the ongoing problem. At Riverstone, residents say it’s a problem that’s only getting worse.

Among the pretty pictures you’ll find inside Fort Bend County’s Riverstone, there’s one that’s not so pretty.

“It’s very frustrating,” Ricky Stephens said.

Stephens has experienced it firsthand.

For the second time in a week, feral hogs have hit his yard. They’ve torn up his flower beds, uprooted his grass and even rolled away this big rock in the process.

“They’re very large,” Stephens said. “They’re bigger than my dog there.”

And Stephens is sick of them.

“I’m tired of paying to have it fixed,” he said.

Like most of Texas, feral hogs have become a big and costly nuisance here. A resident trapped one. Another took a photo of two piglets.

There are more damaged yards and in March, SkyEye recorded video of a sow with her piglets walking and feasting.

“When you’re a homeowner and you get hit, obviously it hits home,” Tom Wilcox with the Riverstone Homeowners Association said.

Riverstone’s Homeowners Association says it’s doing everything it can to keep the unwanted wildlife out.

“To date we’ve put up 3,000 linear feet of fence around this one particular subdivision in the gaps and areas where hogs are coming in, and they kind of move from one another to another area so we fence one area and all of a sudden we move to another area,” Wilcox said.

Stephens thinks they should do more.

“They need a wrought iron fence,” he said.

But for now, he’ll forgo sleep.

“I come out here with my spotlight and shine it around,” Stephens said.

And maintain the measures he’s taken.

“I’ve got an electric fence put up here,” Stephens said. “I’ve got a motion detector up in my tree.”

And it’s all to prevent one more of the feral hogs.

Stephens says he recognizes that near the Brazos River is the hogs’ natural habitat. The HOA says it can’t regulate wild animals and suggests that homeowners constantly treat their yards.

There are any dark shadows falling on this pretty fall picture, it would be feral hogs, said Wes Utley, AgriLife Extension agent in Haskell County, north of Abilene.

Peanuts are an important crop in his area, representing a big investment with a potentially big payoff of $800 or more per acre at harvest. But feral hogs are increasingly putting the crop at risk, he said.

“They can be very, very expensive for peanut growers,” Utley said.

The trouble with wild hogs begins with spring planting.

“The hogs will smell the seed in the ground and they’ll come right to it, and root those seeds right out the ground,” he said.

Count about 90 to 100 days later, and it’s harvest time. Rows are turned up so the peanuts can dry out before being combined. During drying time peanuts are again at high risk.

“That’s just easy pickings for the hogs to come right down the row and demolish them,” Utley said. “Two or three hogs will go down a row, and if you get a herd of 20 out there, they can wipe out two or three acres in a night.”

Hogs are nocturnal so farmers often hire farm hands or high school students to watch their fields.

“But of course, whatever fields they are sitting on, that’s the one the hogs won’t come to that night.”

East Texas AgriLife Extension agents in Shelby, Titus, Trinity, Nacogdoches and Henderson counties also reported increased feral hog damage to crops and pastures.

Every year, wild hogs do tens of thousands of dollars to area golf courses. They emerge at night to search for water and food in the soft soil the courses provide. In the morning, course superintendents are charged with repairing the damage they leave behind.

“I’ll send four people out and they may spend six hours just repairing hog damage,” said Dean Gleason, superintendent of Briggs Ranch Golf Course. “If you include labor costs and materials, if we have to go and buy sod … you’re looking at anywhere over $10,000 to $15,000 extra a year.”

The Briggs Ranch Course goes to great lengths to try to control the population. They have set traps around the course, and they have a hunter who hunts the grounds year-round and takes as many hogs as he can off the property.

“We’ve even gone to the extremes of getting a guy with a helicopter and shooting them out of a helicopter, ” Gleason said.

Despite the efforts of the staff at Briggs Ranch, the course is under constant attack from the hogs.

“There are times when we had 11 … in one trap, ” Gleason said.

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