“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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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!”

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