Repairing hog damage to fields

[4get gto]

Thanks Eddie. You said it all. Sure do sound like a pita.

 

[Redbug]

USDA is experimenting with Sodium Nitrite as a poison. It kills fast and does not affect other animals that eat the remains. It is used in food preservation such as sausage, etc. The problem is...figuring out a way to make a container with the bait pig accessable but not coon, bear, etc., accessable. We have had the biologists here where I live discussing it with us. It is being worked on in Alabama and Texas as we speak. Sodium Nitrite is being used in Australia and works well. It does not take much, is inexpensive, and does the job. Australia was using Warfarin but it was too cruel and the poisoned meat killed other critters eating it. Where I live there are scads of pigs. My hunt club borders a National Park and pigs are a real problem. Even using traps, dogs, shooting, and even poison will not get rid of all of them since they reproduce rapidly and they come back. You need to eliminate 70 percent of the population each year to keep hogs at a level state. We have USDA shooters and trappers on the National Park trying to keep the population down now.

 

[airbiscuit]

Back to your original question about having something to drag the pig damaged area, if you have a friend with a torch, you could try this ....

 

[kittyhawk]

Thanks for all the replying. I have the place leased right now to a rancher, he is running around 25 cows with about 16 calves right now. I talked to him last night and he is going to come run a disc over the torn up areas in a few weeks and later on reseed it. We only get up there on weekends till we sell our house in Houston this summer. I hope to be setting a few traps in the wooded area soon. Hopefully the more we are out and moving around and killing/trapping them they will move on.
I tell you having a tractor will really help out with fixing the fields. I am going to contact the agg extension office and state biologists next week to get some information from them. Lots of good ideas comming from you guys and we appreciate it, so keep it coming.

 

[lostcreekranch]

Thanks for all the reply痴, I致e got the place leased right now to a rancher, he痴 running around 25 cows with about 16 calves right now. I talked to him last night and he痴 going to come run a disc over the torn up areas in a few weeks and later on reseed it. We only get up there on weekends till we sell our house in Houston this summer. I hope to be setting a few traps in the wooded area soon. Hopefully the more we are out and moving around and killing/trapping them they値l move on.

Activity won’t move them on.

The first thing we did, after we bought our place in Colorado County, was install hog wire on all our perimeter fence. Majority is cedar posts and 5 strand barb wire. Pipe fence along front.

Now, only damage we get is the roughly 50’ between front fence and the road. And rarely even there.

 

[two_bit_score]

Thanks for all the replying. I have the place leased right now to a rancher, he is running around 25 cows with about 16 calves right now. I talked to him last night and he is going to come run a disc over the torn up areas in a few weeks and later on reseed it. We only get up there on weekends till we sell our house in Houston this summer. I hope to be setting a few traps in the wooded area soon. Hopefully the more we are out and moving around and killing/trapping them they will move on.
I tell you having a tractor will really help out with fixing the fields. I am going to contact the agg extension office and state biologists next week to get some information from them. Lots of good ideas comming from you guys and we appreciate it, so keep it coming.

Activity won’t move them on.

The first thing we did, after we bought our place in Colorado County, was install hog wire on all our perimeter fence. Majority is cedar posts and 5 strand barb wire. Pipe fence along front.

Now, only damage we get is the roughly 50’ between front fence and the road. And rarely even there.

Getting educated on the right way to deal with feral hogs is best done through the county agent and Texas agrilife. Hogs are very interesting animals. Our small traps have caught as many as 19 at one time. Several were pigs but the traps were still crowded.

You can’t shoot enough hogs individually to get rid of them. You have to trap them. Shooting them wil scare that bunch away for a short time but they or another bunch will be back that night or the next week until they move on to another area. Hogs travel in ‘sounders’ that might run up to 100 hogs. They may travel over an area as large as several counties before they get back to your place, if they ever do. But by then another ‘sounder’ has come and gone.

We could eliminate the feral hog problem in a Texas in short order, a few years max. But it would require poison. That makes too many people too squimesh and they don’t like the looks of it. So landowners just have to cope.

Fencing them out is really the best alternative. Just have to keep the fences in good condition. They can and will root under.


TBS