Hunters from all over the country - and sometimes from even farther away - make the trek to Magnolia and a few other Arkansas towns to hunt feral hogs.
They spend thousands of dollars per year using bows, dogs and rifles to hunt the animals, which prove to be formidable foes because of how well they adapt to their surroundings. The hogs can smell subtle changes in the environment from a long distance, and the sharp tusks that adult hogs grow can be dangerous weapons.
What makes hogs a good subject to test hunting skills also makes the animals a difficult nuisance to eradicate from protected lands and environmentally sensitive watersheds. Females can have three litters a year, and they multiply quickly with the right food and water sources, experts said.
An adapted anatomy, including flat, elongated snouts, allow the once-tame porkers to quickly destroy fields of freshly planted crops or uproot otherwise sturdy trees on riverbanks. They travel in herds called sounders, wallowing and rutting near water sources, adding fecal matter to water sources and muddying them with silt after eroding shorelines.
New regulations being designed by the Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission aim to contain the animals to their current breeding grounds by restricting who can transport the animals to other areas of the state, along with when and how.
The proposed regulations come at the demand of Act 1104, passed during the 2013 session of the Arkansas General Assembly, and would require permanently tagging each animal’s ear with a plastic identifier. They could be transported only during daytime hours to a handful of hunting establishments grandfathered into the rules - meaning no new hog hunting facilities could open in Arkansas.
The regulations also set requirements for the fences at the hunting ranches, called “terminal facilities” because once a hog enters, it can leave only if it’s dead.
“What the act did was tell us to work with those hunting operations across the state to come up with a set of rules and regulations to get a handle on what is becoming a big problem across the state,” said Preston Scroggin, executive director of the Livestock and Poultry Commission.
“What it comes down to is there will be no transporting these live feral hogs in the state unless you are a registered hunter or trapper at one of those operations. There are fence requirements to make sure they don’t get out and tagging requirements to track them.”
But not everyone feels that the rules are beneficial or achieve the goal of limiting the hog population. During a handful of public hearings on the proposed regulations throughout 2013, the ranch and hunting facility owners have provided pages of recorded protest.
Ranchers said the requirement to tag animals creates an unnecessary danger to the ranchers. They said their fences already meet the industry standard to withstand animals as large as a buffalo and that the rules prohibiting transporting the beasts at night wouldn’t stop illegal hog transports.
A joint meeting last week of the Senate and House Agriculture, Forestry and Economic Development meant to review the public comments was postponed because of the Legislature’s fiscal session. The meetings likely won’t happen until after the session ends next month.
State Rep. Homer Lenderman, D-Brookland, a former agriculture teacher, sponsored a nonappropriation bill that would have allowed trappers to label the hogs with a sticker instead of an ear tag and would have eased some of the proposed restrictions on transporting the hogs. The bill was tabled in the House Rules Committee in an effort to keep only fiscal or emergency considerations before the Legislature’s fiscal session.
Lenderman said last week that he plans on introducing the bill during the 2015 regular session.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been face to face with a hog, especially in the middle of a sounder, but they’re fiercely protective of each other, and having to put an ear tag on each of them creates an unnecessary danger,” he said. “What I would like to see happen is being able to use these back stickers, the same kind that kids use when they show an animal.”
George Dixon Sr., owner of Choctaw Hog Hunting Ranch in Magnolia, said his business brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Arkansas economy while killing roughly a thousand hogs a year.
“That doesn’t count the number of hogs we’re preventing from being born,” he said. “If a sow can have three litters a year of about 10 each, then if we kill 500 sows a year, that’s 15,000 or so that aren’t born.But that first litter she has that year would be ready to have a litter of their own when they’re six months old, so it’s really even more that we’re preventing every year.”
Dixon said he originally fenced in a 300-acre ranch his wife owned outside of Magnolia to have a place to raise some deer for her to hunt. His son suggested that they bring in hogs and offer hunts as way to recoup some of the money the older Dixon was spending on feeding the deer.
Within two years, the ranch was attracting tourists with guaranteed hunts, meaning come hell or high water, the hunter will get a hog, Dixon said.
Dixon, his son and his grandson, all named George, work at the ranch and have become experts at all aspects of the hunt, including processing the pigs.
“I promise you, my son makes breakfast sausage out of the feral hogs that would put Jimmy Dean to shame,” the older Dixon said. “People love it. It’s a total experience. And a lot of times on weekends with warmer weather, they’ll kill one hog and love it so much they’ll stay and get another.”
Even on slow weekends, Dixon said, the ranch will hunt out about 20 hogs. The price to dog-hunt a hog is $375, or $450 to knife-hunt a hog that’s trapped by the ranch-owned dogs. That price doesn’t include the money the tourists spend on gas, transportation, restaurants and other boons to the Arkansas economy, Dixon said.
While some of the hog population at Choctaw is replenished by the animals’ aggressive breeding cycle, the ranch also traps and buys hogs from all over the state. Federal regulation prohibits live feral hogs from being moved across state lines - which prevents Arkansans from trapping them and taking them to an exotic meat processing facility in Texas.
State regulations now allow for hogs to be hunted and trapped on private property. There is no hog-hunting season, however, making the regulations for land regulated by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission more confusing.
“Hunters can take a hog incidentally, as long as there is an open season and they take the hog using the method allowed in that season,” said David Goad, a wildlife biologist with the Game and Fish Commission.
For example, bow hunting for deer is now allowed on Game and Fish Commission property. So a hunter in a deer stand who sees a hog could legally shoot the hog with a bow.
The commission has also started working with traps that are designed to catch entire sounders. Goad said the traps resemble portable dog kennels sold at home stores, only with tensile fences. They measure about 30 feet across and can be triggered remotely.
“The reason these traps are working for us is hogs get smarter every time you miss them,” he said. “If I set a trap that only catches a few of the piglets, the next time I set that same trap, the other hogs know that it’s a trap. They learn and adapt so quickly that if we can wipe out a whole sounder, it puts a kink in that adaptation.”
The commission’s main goal is to reduce the hog population.The incidental hunting regulation helps, but Goad said for the most part the commission does better eradicating the animals when hunters or other stimulus don’t alert the hogs to their traps.
“Every county has reports of feral hogs. South Arkansas is fairly heavy, and they’ve been spotted up in the Arkansas River Valley. They’re everywhere and they’re invasive,” Goad said.
“The name of the game is getting rid of them, and if you allow them to be transported somewhere else, then they become someone else’s problem.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/18/2014