Hill County Conservation District holds feral hog workshop in Havre

Representatives from the Montana Department of Livestock, and the United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Service gave a presentation on concerns surrounding feral swine potentially entering Montana to members of the public at the Eagles Club Tuesday.

"We'd like to thank everyone for coming out here today. We know a lot of you missed some work to be here," Hill County Conservation District Administrator Kat Whitaker told the people attending. "It just shows what kind of a community we have."

Montana Invasive Species Council Coordinator Stephanie Criswell talked about the purpose of her organization's partnership with the Department of Livestock regarding feral pigs.

"The council partnered with the Department of Livestock, probably about two years ago, when this issue became more and more elevated, and we could see it was more and more of an emerging threat," she said.

She said the council launched the "Squeal on Pigs" campaign in Montana to raise awareness about the issue after it worked well in Idaho, Washington State and Oregon.

"We all share a campaign, so the message across the west is consistent and people are getting accurate information," she said.

Assistant State Veterinarian Tahnee Szymanski of the Department of Livestock explained the situation with the feral swine across the border.

"Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba all have populations of feral swine in them," Szymanski said. "In particular, Saskatchewan has reported really dramatically expanding range and numbers with swine."

She said that while the usual concern with feral swine is their capacity for agriculture destruction, the Department of Livestock is concerned primarily with their ability to spread disease.

Feral pigs have developed resistances to many diseases which they can spread to commercial livestock and some diseases they carry can be spread to humans, she said.

She also said reports from Texas have come in of feral pigs preying upon newborn cows even while their mothers are in the calving process.

"I heard a great quote in Billing last fall, 'If it has carbon or calories in it they will consume it,'" Szymanski said.

Then she talked about the regulations surrounding how members of the public deal with feral swine. While people usually picture European or Russian boar when thinking about feral swine, Montana law defines them as any pig that appears to be living in a feral state, she said.

This is because domestic pigs can quickly revert to a feral state and can cross breed with the before mentioned boar species.

"After just a couple generations on the landscape, which can be a year, or a year and a half, you can have animals that have really reverted back to a feral state," she said.

Szymanski said the definition would also apply to caged pigs that are evidently intended for release into the wild to be hunted.

A member of the audience raised the concern that this definition may overlap with domestic animals, but Szymanski said she is confident in the department's ability to discern the difference on a case-by-case basis.

"I think that we can probably parse out the intent there. I agree that there might be a bit of a grey area," she said.

According to Montana state law, members of the public are required to report any sightings of feral swine within 24 hours and are not allowed to shoot at them, she said.

Private landowners are allowed to kill pigs that pose an immediate threat to their land or livestock, but she strongly encouraged members of the audience to contact the department instead.

"I think that, in hindsight, if we knew then what we know now, we wouldn't have included this provision," Szymanski said.

She said that shooting at pigs makes the problem worse, because even if someone successfully killed every pig they can see, there are almost certainly more in the area, and they will scatter, potentially increasing their range even further.

John Steuber state director of wildlife services and a supervisory wildlife biologist from USDA, later added that because pigs are adaptable and intelligent, the ones that survive will be much better at avoiding hunters. He encouraged the audience to let professionals from the USDA handle pig eradication.

After the presentation, Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson said he still struggled to understand the prohibition against hunting feral swine for population control.

"There's a difference in skill set with a lot of these people," Steuber said, "I'm not saying there's not some really good hunters, but it's what our guys do for a living, that's all they do for a living. We've had experience in lots and lots of states and we've seen what happens and when hunting is allowed. ... It scatters them, it educates them it creates that incentive to bring more pigs in."

Steuber also talked during his presentation about the sheer amount of damage pigs can do.

"The one thing that I guess is good about feral pigs is that they don't have nearly as big a (fan) constituency that some of these other animals do," he said, "most people hate, hate feral pigs because they affect everything."

He said they can damage cemeteries, state and national parks, urban and suburban areas, pastures, roads and croplands.

"They'll go down a row of crops, suck every seed out, then turn around and get the next row, just go up and down," he said.

Steuber added that many crops, including peanuts, are virtually ungrowable in Texas because of their feral swine problem.

"I can't think of a crop they don't damage," he said.

While Steuber does not grow crops, he said, he has personal experience with the destruction brought by pigs.

"While my wife and I were in town one night, one of our pigs, and he was a little guy, like 30 or 40 pounds, he got loose, and because my dog and him were buddies he didn't do anything. When I came home, he had the whole yard torn up, it was unbelievable, and the dog is just laying there watching. I'm like, 'Come on.' That's just one little pig," he said.

Steuber wasn't the only person at the presentation that had personal experience with this kind of damage. During a question-and-answer session with Szymanski, a member of the audience told his own story.

"When I was young, back in the late '60s, we had two sows escape, they were pregnant, we had to kill the two sows, just about devastated my brother," he said, "... By the time we found where they (the piglets) were at, we were using horses to find them. Boy, they made a mess they ruined the spring and the trees, just unbelievable the amount of damage they did. But those first-generation (wild) piglets were so different from the ones at the same age in the pens, it was shocking."

He said the piglets born to the escaped sows were extremely aggressive and wild, and it took the entire fall to find all of them.

Steuber said despite the potential destruction, feral pigs do have one group of potential human allies.

"The only constituency, I guess, that feral pigs have is hunters, and that's where a lot of the problems come from," he said.

Steuber said less-scrupulous hunters will deliberately introduce pigs to an area, and then years later they will go back and ask landowners if they can hunt them after the population has grown to be problematic for them.

He said this is another reason hunting is ineffective at eradicating the species from an area.

"Why would you want to get rid of something that you want to hunt?" he said.

This concern about hunters deliberately introducing pigs to landscapes also was brought up by Szymanski.

"If anybody has ever hunted feral pigs or been to an area of the country where they are hunted, it's an extremely popular activity. And sometimes those hunters want to create additional opportunities to hunt feral pigs," she said.

Szymanski said this the reason the laws against hunting feral pigs are so strict in Montana and can extend to transporting and feeding. She said they want to make sure that there is no incentive for introducing these animals to the state.

"There has to be some stiff penalties to make rules stick," she said.

Steuber said research is being done to find a toxicant, a toxic substance introduced into the environment, that could help in the event of a feral pig problem, but that such toxicants are time-consuming to develop because the they have to be specific to pigs and cannot be allowed to poison anything else in the ecosystem, including animals that might feed on a pig's carcass.

Szymanski said that virtually anywhere along the Hi-Line is a potential entry point for the pigs.

Stueber said helicopters are being used for surveillance of the northern border when possible, adding that the goal is for feral swine to never gain a foothold, but he also said that their arrival may be an inevitability.

"Most people now think that it's a when, not if. They are coming," he said.