Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless,
Speaker 1: severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. Okay, we're gonna be diving way deep
Speaker 1: into into wild pigs um and we get tons of
Speaker 1: questions about wild pigs, and I'm gonna give like sort
Speaker 1: of the ends of the you know, I'm gonna give
Speaker 1: two ends in the middle and sort of the sorts
Speaker 1: of questions we get about wild pigs. A question about
Speaker 1: wild pigs might be where someone would right in and
Speaker 1: send a link to an article, and it would be
Speaker 1: how somewhere somewhere wild pigs have turned up and they
Speaker 1: are causing their wreaking ecological havoc and what does one
Speaker 1: make of That'd be like a type of thing people
Speaker 1: always winding about wild pigs. A lot of people might
Speaker 1: be like, hey, what's up? Or wild pigs good to eat?
Speaker 1: Can you get sick from them? Or what? That's another
Speaker 1: that's the middle part that people want to hear about
Speaker 1: wild pigs. And another common question we get about wild
Speaker 1: pigs would be if wild pigs are so bad and
Speaker 1: they're everywhere and they're gonna kill everyone and destroy the
Speaker 1: whole universe. And everyone's overrun with wild pigs. How come
Speaker 1: no one will let me go hunt wild pigs on
Speaker 1: their property? Like, wouldn't you think that if pigs are
Speaker 1: that bad, it wouldn't be so bad to have a
Speaker 1: stranger on your land hunting. But it seems that they're
Speaker 1: not quite that bad. So that's another question. And who's
Speaker 1: gonna walk us through all of this? Not your honest
Speaker 1: it will be in part the portions that he's comfortable
Speaker 1: with would be our guest, Parker Hall. Now, Parker Hall,
Speaker 1: h can two things and you can do it. However,
Speaker 1: three things you can do whatever or do you want? Um?
Speaker 1: What do you do at work? Who do you work for?
Speaker 1: And then I would like to get a little bit
Speaker 1: into how did that happen? Okay, what do I do
Speaker 1: at work? I'm a professional email doer and meeting goer.
Speaker 1: To get out I know, I work for the U.
Speaker 1: S Department of Agriculture APHIST Wildlife Services UM. So our
Speaker 1: mission is to provide federal leadership with human wildlife conflict.
Speaker 1: So that can range from ferrell swine or wild pigs.
Speaker 1: I have to call them ferrell swine, UM call him.
Speaker 1: That's what they told me. Wild pigs, Ferrell swine, hogs, whatever. UM.
Speaker 1: It can range from that to protecting airports from collisions
Speaker 1: with birds, to UH beaver control in the Deep South,
Speaker 1: flooding roads and bridges, to coyote and predator control in
Speaker 1: the West. So it really depends on where you are
Speaker 1: in the in in the country is as to what
Speaker 1: that the different states do. UM. So Wildlife Services is
Speaker 1: non regulatory. That means we don't make any rules, UM,
Speaker 1: which is kind of a good good position to be in.
Speaker 1: So anywhere we are, we're there by by invitation. We're
Speaker 1: oftentimes invited to help whatever land management agency bit, a
Speaker 1: state agency, UM, another federal agency on evasive species, and
Speaker 1: Farrell swine is one that that UH that we deal
Speaker 1: with all over the country. So two thousand and fourteen
Speaker 1: there was an initiative and APHIST initiative that provided some
Speaker 1: funding set up a national program. Said all right, there's
Speaker 1: enough damage being going on with Farrell swine, we're getting on,
Speaker 1: We're getting enough people that are having some trouble with them,
Speaker 1: be at the agg industry, being at landowners, be at
Speaker 1: the natural resources people, that we need to do something
Speaker 1: about it. So that's kind of how UH this program
Speaker 1: got got set up. So um, now that's that's too right.
Speaker 1: What's the third one? How I got here? How you
Speaker 1: got here? Just as a person to be here? But
Speaker 1: I'm already we we put that on hold for a minute, sure,
Speaker 1: because I already got a problem. All right, It okay.
Speaker 1: Wild pigs were introduced here in the by the Spanish. Right,
Speaker 1: so they took off across the ocean. Needed something to eat, right,
Speaker 1: guys were going out, Uh, we don't know where we're
Speaker 1: going across the ocean. It's far. We better bring something
Speaker 1: to eat. So they float, float, float, float float. They
Speaker 1: hit some land to go, oh man, that was good.
Speaker 1: We're still alive. Hey, we're still going. We don't know
Speaker 1: where we are. Let's put some pigs on because when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're gonna be hungry again. And so
Speaker 1: those repetitive introductions from those explorers all through the South
Speaker 1: and the Islands, going all the way down through you know,
Speaker 1: down to the South America and lesser antillities and the
Speaker 1: Caribbean all through there. You know, those repetitive introductions finally
Speaker 1: finally took hold. Native Americans figured out that hey, this
Speaker 1: is better than eating some of the stuff we're eating
Speaker 1: right now. So they fostered that and and those those
Speaker 1: pigs grew and they kept them around and they established population.
Speaker 1: So since the fifteen hundreds, they've been all up and down.
Speaker 1: So what happened during those hundreds of years when it
Speaker 1: didn't like there was a shift, right, because we had
Speaker 1: hundreds of years of it just being that there's some
Speaker 1: that there's wild pigs around, there, wild pigs around and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden in my lifetime in it's like,
Speaker 1: holy shit, wild pigs, Like like what what was that? So? Um,
Speaker 1: is it perception or is it reality? Or is it
Speaker 1: it's reality. So if you look at a natural expansion
Speaker 1: of any population, be it be it wild pigs or
Speaker 1: or anything, it's kind of like a balloon blowing up, right,
Speaker 1: you're blowing the balloon. It gets bigger, bigger, bigger, and
Speaker 1: the population spreads. Well, that's not been the case of
Speaker 1: feral pigs. I mean you guys from Michigan, right, there's
Speaker 1: feral pigs in Michigan. They didn't get there from Florida
Speaker 1: by chance. They got there in the back of pickup truck. Um,
Speaker 1: So it became you know, uh, I grew up in Georgia,
Speaker 1: hunting hogs. It was fun. It's a it's a cultural
Speaker 1: thing in the Deep South. A lot of people do it,
Speaker 1: and you know, but it's been maintained, particularly in the
Speaker 1: Deep South. Uh, Texas, California. Oh yeah, my whole family,
Speaker 1: and they still do. Um, of course they do. Um.
Speaker 1: But I think it got um cool or whatever for
Speaker 1: lack of a better term, cool too, Uh hunt pigs
Speaker 1: by television shows. It got put on TV, and people
Speaker 1: think that killing the two hundred pound hog is awesome.
Speaker 1: They're very few laws regulating hogs. Um. You know, it
Speaker 1: differs by state, but they're all they're all a little
Speaker 1: bit confusing. Um. You know, it's easy to catch pigs, uh.
Speaker 1: As one of my good friends says, it's it takes
Speaker 1: a very very little energy to put pigs in the
Speaker 1: back of a truck and move them, but it takes
Speaker 1: tremendous energy to get them back from the wild and
Speaker 1: put them back into that pickup truck. And that's a fact. So, UM,
Speaker 1: I think there's a there's a there's probably a lot
Speaker 1: of ways for people to begin to understand that. And
Speaker 1: if you're not familiar with wild pigs, would be just
Speaker 1: the But you know what, we often called bucket biology
Speaker 1: with fisheries, where you can have you can trace back
Speaker 1: to sort of like a single inner doctory effort of
Speaker 1: a fish species into some lake and river system, and
Speaker 1: then pretty soon it becomes literally impossible to undo, like
Speaker 1: literally impossible to undo the damage. Correct. Yeah, So with
Speaker 1: the pigs, I remember, well, you know, but but you're
Speaker 1: assigned to a specific like does your expertise extend beyond
Speaker 1: where you're Oh, sure, yeah, we we do. We do
Speaker 1: a lot of different different things in the state, in
Speaker 1: the two states, because that would I want to ask
Speaker 1: about was I remember in Michigan It wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 1: Michigan was putting up some trying to create some legislation
Speaker 1: around Obviously, you can't block people from transporting pigs because
Speaker 1: it's all the same species, right, Sue scraffa is the
Speaker 1: same thing you buy in a grocery store. Is it's
Speaker 1: all the same species. But they were trying to put
Speaker 1: some language around what types of pigs could be moved
Speaker 1: into the state. Can you explain that a little bit
Speaker 1: when when you talk about that people are moving pigs, right,
Speaker 1: They're not moving barnyard varieties of pigs are well they're doing,
Speaker 1: they're doing all all of the above. Um, like you mentioned,
Speaker 1: it's all the same species. They can all interbreed. So. UM.
Speaker 1: Spanish pigs like we talked about before, are the ones
Speaker 1: that were introduced in the fifteen hundreds in the South. Um,
Speaker 1: those have there's been introductions from the Eurasian wild wild bore,
Speaker 1: big Harry wooly ones that everybody thinks about, you know
Speaker 1: that that came over from Europe and those were introduced
Speaker 1: into New Hampshire Vermont area and in some in in
Speaker 1: California moved around. Um, people like them for sport. I
Speaker 1: know the New Hampshire Vermont ones were for brought in
Speaker 1: for hunting purposes, right right, But it's just hard to
Speaker 1: hard to contain them. Yeah, yeah, it's hard to contain them.
Speaker 1: And you know there's there's been sales. Hey you have
Speaker 1: some of those. You know, a guy comes in and goes,
Speaker 1: what's it cost, you know, sell me some of those.
Speaker 1: Well nobody cares. He loads them up ears on her
Speaker 1: bucks or whatever it is, and and and moves them
Speaker 1: to Idaho. In terms of blue you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: incredibly hardy, they're incredibly fucooned. You know, a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifteen days or so. Um, they have a litter. Uh,
Speaker 1: go go a few weeks, get pregnant again. You know,
Speaker 1: they can have a couple of litters a year. So, um,
Speaker 1: they're super hardy. You know, they're they're they're the ultimate
Speaker 1: invasive species. Compare that to a deer who puts off
Speaker 1: between you know, yeah, yeah, no, I want I want
Speaker 1: to get back into the into the long term story.
Speaker 1: But first I want to ask that this is true.
Speaker 1: People like to say they like to put this timeline around.
Speaker 1: If you take a domestic like a domesticated domestic variety pig,
Speaker 1: and you turn it out, that the minute you turn
Speaker 1: it out, all of a sudden, it girls big, gigantic
Speaker 1: tossing gets a wooly coat. You know that that's not
Speaker 1: It depends on the species, not the species, but the
Speaker 1: uh I don't know if it's a subspecies or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, a pink pig that's that's grown for in
Speaker 1: a in a pig parlor is a little different than
Speaker 1: you know, some of these heritage pigs or whatever. So
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of different flavors, if you will. But um,
Speaker 1: if turned loose over time, they do revert back pretty quick.
Speaker 1: It's not overnight. You know, we a lot of times
Speaker 1: when when hogs get loose, Um, we'll get reports there's
Speaker 1: some there's some feral swine over there, and they get
Speaker 1: hungry and go back to the feed bucket in two days. Uh,
Speaker 1: all of those in between, you know, sometimes they go
Speaker 1: off and if they have a litter, then then those
Speaker 1: pigs are generally pretty wary. Um, they're dealing with predators,
Speaker 1: dealing with those first wild born generation. Yeah, that's right. Now.
Speaker 1: You take a farrellhawk and put him in the pen,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't take long for them to tame right down. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, in a couple of weeks, you
Speaker 1: start shaking the food bucket, you know, it starts approaching
Speaker 1: a little bit, and over time they'll tame right down
Speaker 1: as well. So you can you can read domesticate them,
Speaker 1: you can. Yeah, all right now, I'm ready to go
Speaker 1: back and do what we're gonna do A minute ago
Speaker 1: is uh you kind of alluded to it. Now, So
Speaker 1: you grew up hunting pigs? I did. Yeah, I grew
Speaker 1: up hunting and fishing. My dad was U. S. T.
Speaker 1: A Aphist wildlife services employee for his career yeah, so
Speaker 1: you grew up that's how it's kind of wondering. So
Speaker 1: you grew up kind of knowing that this is the
Speaker 1: thing a person could do. Yeah, of course, yeah, I did, um,
Speaker 1: but but I didn't have the aspirations to be a
Speaker 1: state director. I remember thinking as I was going through school.
Speaker 1: I graduated from the University of Georgia Bareley. Um, I
Speaker 1: think I had a stellar two point two or three
Speaker 1: uh mostly hog hunting at night and crappie fishing. But
Speaker 1: I did get a I did get a degree in
Speaker 1: in UH in wildlife. So UM. I remember thinking, if
Speaker 1: I can ever make about thirty five or forty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year trapping beavers, I will have reached the pinnacle.
Speaker 1: So I started off as a beaver trapper in Alabama
Speaker 1: and I went through, um several years of that, and
Speaker 1: I didn't just do a private nuisance. I was working
Speaker 1: as a as a as a specialist for U s
Speaker 1: d A. Yeah, so a entry level and and that
Speaker 1: went on for several years, and I got into doing
Speaker 1: some invasive species work. When I was I was down
Speaker 1: in the US Virgin Islands doing work down there, and
Speaker 1: met my wife down there, and how are you catching
Speaker 1: the beavers? And and when I was now con embarrassing
Speaker 1: their foothold, So the whole game and the whole thing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, I know those handcock wife treats you guys
Speaker 1: were you guys were getting after him for real? Yeah
Speaker 1: that's yeah, that's dudes from Michigan use those. Yeah, never touched.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I did some work in the in in
Speaker 1: the islands, and then um uh I went to Florida.
Speaker 1: Didn't kind of work in the islands offshore eradication kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, and we did uh rat eradications, goat eradications
Speaker 1: to protect threatening dangerous species small offshore islands. It's really neat. Actually,
Speaker 1: when you remove um, a species like a rat or
Speaker 1: a goat, what the island does? You know? The smaller islands, man,
Speaker 1: they they blew like a flower you right back, you
Speaker 1: know when you remove those invasives. Did you ever use
Speaker 1: the Judas strategy? Yes, and I still do. Can you
Speaker 1: explain that? Yeah, So if you remember your your your
Speaker 1: Bible stories, Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus and
Speaker 1: and so that's where the term Judas animal comes from.
Speaker 1: So you take that animal capture. So in Ferrell swine
Speaker 1: will take one and put a radio transmitter on on
Speaker 1: its necker in its ear um, capture it, turn it
Speaker 1: back loose, and it'll run back to the other you know,
Speaker 1: the sounders which call a group of hawks. It'll go
Speaker 1: back to a sounder or um, you know, other other
Speaker 1: pigs and it all lleg you to those. So it's
Speaker 1: real effective. It's really really effective, particularly in low densities. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know where we are right now. Yeah, yeah, it
Speaker 1: does good. Yeah, we use it a lot. So you
Speaker 1: you studied up on wildlife, wanted doing beaver work, and
Speaker 1: then your career kind of took off, it did, and
Speaker 1: then one day, um, someone springs on you that your
Speaker 1: jurisdiction is going to be this is so, this is
Speaker 1: how I was a state I was a district supervisor
Speaker 1: in in South Florida and doing evasive species. I really python. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we did work on the burnme's python a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you hit all the big news story animals. Yeah, they're um,
Speaker 1: you know, they're they're difficult. That's a difficult problem. The snakes,
Speaker 1: is it. Yeah? Do you think that they'll that there
Speaker 1: will ever be a solution. There's just too hard to
Speaker 1: protect you know. Uh, they sent a man to the moon,
Speaker 1: so I don't know, but they you know, the thing
Speaker 1: about the invasive reptiles is, let's face it, they're not
Speaker 1: gonna go past the freeze line for the most part.
Speaker 1: So you know, they're they're confined to those habitats in
Speaker 1: those areas that that are akinada to how they evolved.
Speaker 1: You know that. So we won't some day be talking
Speaker 1: about Burmese pythons in Michigan like we're talking about so,
Speaker 1: I don't think so until wintertime. I've been in Michigan
Speaker 1: in the wintertime and pythons won't do too well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So South Florida and what other You probably worked on
Speaker 1: pigs in South Florida. I did. We did a lot
Speaker 1: of pig working Florida. Did iguanas, yeah, sure did. In
Speaker 1: Florida I did. We did some more rat eradications actually
Speaker 1: to protect next nesting Uh shoreboards. UM, predator control on
Speaker 1: beaches for for sea turtles was was a big one. Um.
Speaker 1: What's something that gets after sea turtle legs? Man? Everything
Speaker 1: likes an egg, right, U. Raccoons are bad Farrell swine
Speaker 1: or or terrible on them. There's places where Farrell swine
Speaker 1: are on on the beach, saltwater beach. There are guys
Speaker 1: who their job is to stay on the beach all
Speaker 1: night long to make sure farrell swine don't come out
Speaker 1: there and dig up sea turtle nests. And they're seeing something.
Speaker 1: Oh man, they're doing they're doing effective control and they're
Speaker 1: saving thousands and thousands and thousands of sea turtles. I
Speaker 1: mean one nest is wrecked by a hog. And we've
Speaker 1: been on beaches down in in South America. We've been
Speaker 1: on beaches where all the turtle eggs have been dug
Speaker 1: up by jaguars. Everything looks a turtle legg ghost, crabs, raccoons, armadillas, possums, foxes.
Speaker 1: So you'll you'll select a you guys would select a
Speaker 1: beach and just be like hands off. No. Remember now,
Speaker 1: remember we're um, we're non regulatory. So we're there by
Speaker 1: the invitation of what ever entity is responsible for that
Speaker 1: that's right, that's right, whatever entity has jurisdiction over that
Speaker 1: beach asks us to do that work. I understand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's always coming from it's a it's a it's
Speaker 1: a local ask, and you guys provide the expertise to
Speaker 1: to execute what they're hoping to correct accomplish. So from
Speaker 1: South Florida, then what happens to you? So from South Florida, UM,
Speaker 1: a position came open as a state director and New
Speaker 1: Hampshire and Vermont. Now, like I said, I grew up
Speaker 1: in Georgia. I've never been north of Tennessee hardly. Um.
Speaker 1: I was in South Florida and that position came open,
Speaker 1: and I talked to my wife about and said, here's
Speaker 1: an opportunity, you know. Uh so we said, yeah, that
Speaker 1: that'll be fine. She's from Missouri and I'll get to
Speaker 1: that in a man and you can deduce. But went
Speaker 1: up to UM, got selected for that position and had
Speaker 1: a wonderful experience in New Hampshire Vermont UM working on
Speaker 1: all all sorts of different creat A lot of black
Speaker 1: bear stuff was going up. Non natives, right, a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of natives there. Yeah, yeah, did some
Speaker 1: moose work. You know, it's it was uh for for Georgia. Boy,
Speaker 1: it was a really neat experience. And then the black
Speaker 1: bears are getting trouble with orchards and oh yeah, the
Speaker 1: whole thing ride down in the you know, it's a
Speaker 1: it's a big tourist economy in the summertime, it's gorgeous
Speaker 1: in New Hampshire and Vermont and uh, you know the
Speaker 1: black bears down there, falling tourist arounding doughnuts and you
Speaker 1: know the whole You guys do a lot of relocations. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of relocations there. Yeah, okay, yeah. What did
Speaker 1: you get involved with any fish anywhere? No? No, not
Speaker 1: a fish guy. There's other than are the wildlife services
Speaker 1: people who mess with fish. There are wildlife services people that, um, yes,
Speaker 1: that do invasive fish work. I think there's one state
Speaker 1: out west that does. I'm not quite sure, but as
Speaker 1: a general rule, we don't do That's that's left to
Speaker 1: the fisheries. Bottle just fish are a whole different thing,
Speaker 1: you know, under the water, and those guys can do
Speaker 1: math good. Yeah, yeah, the fisheries. Gyah. What was the
Speaker 1: common moose conflict? The common moose conflict was, uh, the
Speaker 1: moose walking through where they you know, they make the
Speaker 1: maple syrup and those guys have great big taps right
Speaker 1: when these tubes coming way down to their tap house.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they have thousands these tubes coming on and the
Speaker 1: moose just walk right through, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're like, you know, it's the middle of the
Speaker 1: middle of SAPs running and those guys are freaking out. Man,
Speaker 1: all their taps just got yanked off. So um, you
Speaker 1: know it was interesting, particularly for me. It doesn't know
Speaker 1: anything about moose, you know, so it was educational experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can imagine. It was a good time. So then
Speaker 1: from there, from there, uh, the Missouri State Director Missouri
Speaker 1: Iowa state director position um came available and my wife said,
Speaker 1: guess what, big boy, I like the Royals, So yeah,
Speaker 1: we I put in for that position. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think it was a good move for me and
Speaker 1: as much that uh, I was not from the northeast.
Speaker 1: But it was a great experience. And but to get
Speaker 1: to uh sometimes a little bit more familiar with different
Speaker 1: but a little more familiar. Sure. Sure. And so you
Speaker 1: as the state state coordinary, state director, state director, state
Speaker 1: director everything again here everything falls under your purview, so
Speaker 1: to speak. But you guys are particularly focused. They're paying
Speaker 1: a lot of attention on wild pigs or is that
Speaker 1: just a small part of the It's just it's it's
Speaker 1: more than a small part. In Missouri. So we have
Speaker 1: what's called the Missouri Aero Swine Partnership and that is
Speaker 1: eleven different land management agencies who were committed to UM
Speaker 1: suppressing or eliminating ferrell swine from from the state of Missouri.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a it's a pretty good chunk of
Speaker 1: our of our program. UM we do UH Iowa does
Speaker 1: a lot of work at um UH dairy farms for
Speaker 1: starling's invasive like like those UH starlings, pigeons, sparrows, those things,
Speaker 1: you know, the milk and you know, the whole the
Speaker 1: whole deal. Airport stuff. If a deer runs out on
Speaker 1: the airport and you know at three in the morning
Speaker 1: and the planes trying to land, you know, we have
Speaker 1: we have people there to help assister move that. You know.
Speaker 1: UM a lot of airport working in Missouri. UM Avian influenza,
Speaker 1: so a disease component UM of our program sampling for
Speaker 1: different diseases, which goes hand in hand with the ferrell
Speaker 1: swine stuff. UM stamp on there. So a little bit
Speaker 1: of everything. Now, UM the Missouri Department of Conservation UM
Speaker 1: has has pretty much driven this this program. So we're
Speaker 1: doing feral swine work by you know, their invitation in
Speaker 1: their direction. Now you mentioned suppression or eradication. Doesn't that
Speaker 1: cause a little mission confusion? Can't you just pick one? Yeah,
Speaker 1: well we use the word elimination, you know, so there's
Speaker 1: no mission confusion. No, there's no mission confusion. Lay the
Speaker 1: um lay the wild pig situation. Like, give me a
Speaker 1: little bit of history on the wild pig situation here
Speaker 1: in Missouri. Yeah, because it's different than Florida, right because
Speaker 1: in Florida they've been underground for centuries? Is it too
Speaker 1: early in the timing might be off, but I'd like
Speaker 1: to definitely know at some point if it's legal to
Speaker 1: hunt pigs in the state, and I want timing is off,
Speaker 1: but you can ask should have waited? So you weren't
Speaker 1: you weren't detecting the flow. I was gone. It's not
Speaker 1: very clearly defined. Has it my flow? Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: little it's a little herky jerky. I don't see why
Speaker 1: we can't get into that right now. It's yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's completely legal to hunt ferrell swine in Missouri.
Speaker 1: Where it is illegal to hunt ferrell swine is on
Speaker 1: the Missouri Department of Conservation lands. It's it's illegal on
Speaker 1: uh Fort Leonard Wood. It's illegal on Army Corps of
Speaker 1: Engineers UM land, but on private land. UM. Right now
Speaker 1: on the Mark Twain National Forest, it's legal to hunt
Speaker 1: ferrell swine. What is the the obvious question comes up, Uh,
Speaker 1: why if you want to get rid of them? Yeah, so, UM,
Speaker 1: let's go back to the first part of of when
Speaker 1: we started talking. In in Georgia when I grew up,
Speaker 1: there's no season, there's no limit, there's really no restriction
Speaker 1: on how you can hunt them with what you can use.
Speaker 1: You can use guns, bows, bazookas, whatever, and has been
Speaker 1: that way and they only grow. So hunting does not
Speaker 1: work to eliminate. We use hunting as a as a
Speaker 1: tool to manage our our native species. UM not eliminate
Speaker 1: or that's that's what that's why we have UM limits
Speaker 1: and particularly uh if you can or can't shoot female
Speaker 1: of any of any animal, because that that you know,
Speaker 1: the result of removal of those is population control. And
Speaker 1: so that's something that UM Missouri Department of Conservations say, Look,
Speaker 1: we're not going to reinvent the wheel. I mean, these
Speaker 1: guys all over the South has chased them for millennia
Speaker 1: and it's the stronghold of feral swine. They're there. Like
Speaker 1: recreational hunting because of the because of like the fecundity
Speaker 1: and all these other factis recreational hunting, even when it's unrestricted,
Speaker 1: isn't doesn't do it right. Right. So you know, a
Speaker 1: recreational hunter goes out and he has a good time
Speaker 1: and and he he harvests a hog, and he comes
Speaker 1: back and they clean it up and they have a meal.
Speaker 1: But it did absolutely nothing for the population. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: it's fun, it's great, it's good recreation, but it's an exotic,
Speaker 1: invasive species that should be removed if they're competing with
Speaker 1: our natives. Yeah, so the thinking so extend that out
Speaker 1: and and uh explain the thinking on on restricting hunting. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know that it's a I mean, it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: It's been proven that hunting does not eliminate a species
Speaker 1: of of any species. Um, recreational sport hunting doesn't. Um,
Speaker 1: So you know, I don't know that. Go ah, Brandon Butler.
Speaker 1: Brandon Butler wants the button. Another big issue is creating
Speaker 1: the demand. So if there's a demand for Farrell hogs,
Speaker 1: then there's going to be a desired supply, and by
Speaker 1: eliminating the opportunity to hunt them. You're hopefully eliminating that instead. Right,
Speaker 1: So if the Department of Conservation, you know, even though
Speaker 1: they're they're setting these traps up, that's another problem. They're
Speaker 1: setting up these traps, putting a lot of man hours
Speaker 1: into it. Parker and his teams doing the same thing.
Speaker 1: They work really hard to train these sounders to come
Speaker 1: to these traps so they can catch a mass of
Speaker 1: these pigs at one time. People will find those traps
Speaker 1: and they'll set up on them like hunting spots, and
Speaker 1: when the sounder comes in, they'll shoot one or maybe two,
Speaker 1: and then they scatter the rest and they'll run way
Speaker 1: off and they'll they'll set up new ranges. So you
Speaker 1: blow the whole plan. You waste all that money that's
Speaker 1: been spent, not only on the staff that's out working,
Speaker 1: but on the the corn there sour and all the
Speaker 1: other bait, the materials it takes to make the traps.
Speaker 1: But as he said, had hog hunting is fun and
Speaker 1: a lot of people down in this part of the country,
Speaker 1: I mean, they have dogs, they're you know, they're really
Speaker 1: into it. So they're expecting there to be a supply
Speaker 1: of hogs on the landscape. Well, I'll throw this in
Speaker 1: from I mean, this is something like this aspect of
Speaker 1: it is something I'm familiar with and in j honest
Speaker 1: and I UH have had discussions with an individual who
Speaker 1: was a hog trapper and at a time in the
Speaker 1: past had even gone so far as to sell wild
Speaker 1: hogs to people who he later learned, we're using the
Speaker 1: wild hogs to establish populations of wild hogs and areas
Speaker 1: that did not have them in order to be able
Speaker 1: to hunt for them. That's going on down here. There's
Speaker 1: there all over the country. There's this othery're spreading as
Speaker 1: they were ever getting prosecuted for this. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: case going on in the county north of US right
Speaker 1: now where somebody is is a known UH violator who propagator, Yeah,
Speaker 1: who actually raises these hogs and then releases them, trailers
Speaker 1: them in from other states, keeps them in a pen.
Speaker 1: When people are ready to go hunting, those people will
Speaker 1: pay this guy. He'll release those hogs and they'll go
Speaker 1: chase him down on open lands, not pen lands, on
Speaker 1: open lands. Yeah, so he'll keep him in a pen
Speaker 1: until he has clients. Once he has clients willing to
Speaker 1: pay they'll release those hounds, or they'll release those hogs,
Speaker 1: and they'll release the hounds, the hounds will chase him down.
Speaker 1: The one dog goes out and finds them, the rest
Speaker 1: of the dogs come in and hold them. That person
Speaker 1: goes in and likely stabs the hog or or may
Speaker 1: shoot it. But a lot of them are killing them
Speaker 1: with big booie knives and chasing them down that way.
Speaker 1: So they're they're not only creating a demand for the
Speaker 1: recreation of it, but there's a small group of people
Speaker 1: that are creating uh an industry around it. And you're
Speaker 1: talking about doing so in a very economically depressed part
Speaker 1: of the country. So when these guys can get cash
Speaker 1: on hand for letting you go out and kill some hogs,
Speaker 1: you know, it's hard to convince them that that's not
Speaker 1: a good deal. Do you mind? Do you mind real
Speaker 1: quick laying out Brandon, you mind real quick laying out
Speaker 1: your affiliations? Yeah? So, I'm the executive director of the
Speaker 1: Conservation Federation of Missouri. We work with hunting, angling, all
Speaker 1: conservation wildlife groups across the state. I've known Parker for
Speaker 1: a few years. There was a Feral Hogs symposium where
Speaker 1: state wildlife leaders came from kind of all over the Midwest,
Speaker 1: and we did a tour of a state park and
Speaker 1: then we went on some private property. And that was
Speaker 1: the first time I was ever really exposed to the
Speaker 1: real destruction that these hogs do to agg lands and
Speaker 1: why there's so much money being spent to eradicate them,
Speaker 1: because so much money is being lost by farmers down
Speaker 1: here as their pastures are destroyed and crop fields can
Speaker 1: be decimated. It was it was really eye opening to me,
Speaker 1: and I've kind of been studying it with Parker ever since. No, Parker,
Speaker 1: when you look at the like the voices that most
Speaker 1: want to so I I kind of understand the voices
Speaker 1: that are interested in having pigs is like isolated groups
Speaker 1: of people who want to have and they want to
Speaker 1: have a hunting out, some hunting opportunity. What are the
Speaker 1: voices of the people here, um that sort of have
Speaker 1: the best argument against the pigs being here. Well, I
Speaker 1: understand those people too, because, like I said, I grew
Speaker 1: up doing it in its phone And you know, right
Speaker 1: or wrong, they've they've uh in senitized and sanitizes the incentivized,
Speaker 1: incentivized two chase or chase lounge earlier. Right, So UM,
Speaker 1: so I understand that. And but we're land managers right
Speaker 1: or or we're stewarts of atlantis. An exotic invasive species.
Speaker 1: It's no different than bush honeysuckle UM shouldn't be here.
Speaker 1: It competes with their natives. UM. And I think it's
Speaker 1: it's difficult for for US wildlife people to go. I
Speaker 1: was competing with our natives and they're still dere in
Speaker 1: turkeys around and you know, and that thing I think
Speaker 1: people have a hard time with because they look and
Speaker 1: be like, Okay, but Texas is known for its white
Speaker 1: tail hunt. Texas has wild picks. That's right, Texas has
Speaker 1: the most wild picks. UM. But you know, you look
Speaker 1: at the things that deer in Turkey aren't the only
Speaker 1: things on the landscape, UM. Agricultural damage, UM, threatening an
Speaker 1: endangered species, water quality. You know, all of these things
Speaker 1: UM are being caused from an exotic invasive species that
Speaker 1: shouldn't be here. So, I mean, you know, we're wildlife
Speaker 1: biologists in some In some instances you just want to
Speaker 1: be like, jeez, that's what we're supposed to do. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're supposed to protect our our native species. It's not
Speaker 1: it's just not falling us flora as well. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know in Hawaii they talk about uh, you know,
Speaker 1: an unknown quantity, but perhaps dozens of species of wildlife
Speaker 1: we're lost with the introduction of pigs and rats unto
Speaker 1: the Hawaiian Islands because they had a whole suite of
Speaker 1: you know, because of a lack of certain types of predation,
Speaker 1: they had whole suites of ground nesting birds that vanished.
Speaker 1: Going you look at the disease issues too with the
Speaker 1: domestic um uh uh uh industry we have here. You know,
Speaker 1: the potential for a disease to get in the domestic
Speaker 1: industry could be catastrophic to the state. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: we're one state south of of the biggest pork producing
Speaker 1: state in the country. It's just Iowa. UM. So you know,
Speaker 1: there's a fear there that wild pigs would would sure
Speaker 1: they have they have those diseases. They carry those diseases
Speaker 1: that the um agg industry has done such a wonderful
Speaker 1: job of getting rid of. And it's taken them a
Speaker 1: long time. Um and and now they're out. You know,
Speaker 1: they've they've got those uh domestic populations for lack of
Speaker 1: a better word, clean and um, you know, reintroducing some
Speaker 1: of those diseases could be a real setback financially, as
Speaker 1: you know, for for consumers as well as producers. Well,
Speaker 1: it's funny there, and I don't I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: expect you to comment on this unless you want to.
Speaker 1: But what's funny there is to have this idea of
Speaker 1: you know, you know, you call ferrell swine, but like
Speaker 1: common vernacular where you have this idea of a wild
Speaker 1: pig introducing disease to a domestic counterpart. It's sort of
Speaker 1: the opposite of the fear around domestic deer introducing disease
Speaker 1: to their wild counterpart. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's off
Speaker 1: that's off topic. Yeah, Well, we've kind of breathed over
Speaker 1: like the problems you know that the pigs do and
Speaker 1: how and why. But can we just get in that
Speaker 1: a little bit more? Like you talk like you're like
Speaker 1: water water quality, but what exactly do they do to
Speaker 1: diminish water quality? And what are they doing to you know,
Speaker 1: kill all these uh crops for all these farmers exactly. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the creeks that we were hunting around down here, Um,
Speaker 1: it looked better this year, Steve and I walked past it.
Speaker 1: But last year this real lush, little spring creek and
Speaker 1: the spring was really pumping. Yesterday when we were down there,
Speaker 1: it was just absolutely decimated with rooting. I mean, you
Speaker 1: go down there and you're expecting to be in this
Speaker 1: real serene, natural valley, and it looked like a monster
Speaker 1: truck had been ripping up and down this spring creek.
Speaker 1: Now this is way back in a wilderness, so very
Speaker 1: few people are laying their eyes on that. But if
Speaker 1: that was your private property, that would be infuriating to you.
Speaker 1: So you would call the government or whoever your representative
Speaker 1: is and say something has to be done about this
Speaker 1: invasive species that's destroying you know, my an sky that
Speaker 1: would be there in their feeding and it's rooting it
Speaker 1: all up and it just turns into a mud. They're
Speaker 1: just wallowing and rooting. And now all that that mud
Speaker 1: and sediment is running in to that stream, which runs
Speaker 1: into a larger stream which runs into a river, so
Speaker 1: it's sending all that that sediment down river. Um, the
Speaker 1: crap damage is just hard to explain. It's unbelievable. It
Speaker 1: looks like somebody went in with a brush hog. Sure, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they can, they can do a lot of damage in
Speaker 1: in a very short amount of time. And that's something
Speaker 1: that is more common maybe in in in the South
Speaker 1: than it is in Missouri. Missouri is more uh, they're
Speaker 1: more in the ozarks. We do have some damage UM
Speaker 1: and the guys that have it wouldn't don't take it lightly.
Speaker 1: But you know, we have UH state and federalistic species
Speaker 1: that are stored Hines emerald dragonfly, they have a um
Speaker 1: they lave their larva in in a specialized little I
Speaker 1: forget the name of it. Uh, I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: an eco term, you know. But the hogs go through
Speaker 1: and and rude up and and eat the larva and
Speaker 1: and they don't reproduce UM. Meads milkweed is another UM
Speaker 1: Species of Concern listed species that hogs go through and
Speaker 1: trample and and and eat and and destroy and they
Speaker 1: don't come back. So you know, you look at it's
Speaker 1: it's not just we still have deer and we still
Speaker 1: have turkeys, and you know they ate some of my corn.
Speaker 1: But we're talking about you know, threatened and endangered species.
Speaker 1: That's you know, there's only very few of these left
Speaker 1: in the world. They're being consumed or destroyed by an exotic,
Speaker 1: invasive that shouldn't be here. You know, I don't know
Speaker 1: if the you know, if hin zem will dragonfi flying
Speaker 1: around this room, I don't know if I could identify it,
Speaker 1: but I know that you know, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: species that once they're gone, they're gone. Um and and
Speaker 1: that's being and that's uh happened to because of because
Speaker 1: of these Ferrell swine. And that's an example you use.
Speaker 1: It's you know, whether sea turtles or shore birds or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, we haven't exotic doing damage and removing federally
Speaker 1: and stay listed listed species. So how many how many
Speaker 1: Ferrell pigs? Well, let's let's take it this way. How
Speaker 1: far back in time would you need to go to
Speaker 1: when there were probably no Ferrell pigs and in Missouri?
Speaker 1: So um, I wasn't here then. But they're relatively new.
Speaker 1: You know, if you went back fifteen years, I don't
Speaker 1: know that you could find too many people. You guys
Speaker 1: might know this better than me, but but you couldn't
Speaker 1: find too many people that knew where where a Farrell
Speaker 1: hog was. You go back twenty years, they're very very rare.
Speaker 1: You know, they were brought in and it's like I said,
Speaker 1: they're incredibly for coon. And you gotta see the terrain
Speaker 1: we're in. Man, you turned some pigs back here they
Speaker 1: go undetected for forever. So this is a pretty this
Speaker 1: is like a fairly new issue here. Absolutely. And how
Speaker 1: many is there an estimate on how many there are? No,
Speaker 1: we're doing some work on on that now, but there
Speaker 1: is not an estimate. Well, how about you put it
Speaker 1: this way, how many of you guys caught and killed?
Speaker 1: So the last year, um, we caught and killed just
Speaker 1: over six thousand, five hundred in this state. In the state, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just in Missouri. Now the other states to take you know,
Speaker 1: numbers many many, many more than that, Texas, Oklahoma. You
Speaker 1: know those guys, Um, they take a lot, a lot
Speaker 1: of pigs and multiple thousands of hawks. And in that
Speaker 1: time when you've taken them, have you guys gotten a
Speaker 1: sense of where exactly they're coming from? Well, we know,
Speaker 1: we know where they are. Um. And as much as
Speaker 1: it's it's a relatively new when you say fifteen years,
Speaker 1: it's a relatively new problem. Uh, the Missouri Department of
Speaker 1: Conservation has really rolled up as sleeves and out to
Speaker 1: work and ask their ball just and their people in
Speaker 1: the field and done a lot of work, and we
Speaker 1: know or we feel like we have a pretty good
Speaker 1: handle on on where those populations are. And it's it
Speaker 1: looks like uh, it's it's not a blob, of course,
Speaker 1: like natural sip. It looks like a zebra or a checkerboard,
Speaker 1: or it's it's patchwork um. And so across the entire state,
Speaker 1: across the entire state, mostly in the southern half and
Speaker 1: mostly in the ozarks, and mostly on public land. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, why do you think that is? I have
Speaker 1: no idea what because people can hunt it, really And
Speaker 1: so if you were to turn if you had a
Speaker 1: truck a little pigs and your neighbor is a guy
Speaker 1: you don't get along with, and you know he's not
Speaker 1: gonna let you hunt those pigs in the back of
Speaker 1: your truck on his place. You're gonna turn the loose
Speaker 1: on his place, of course. Not, You're gonna go yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, You're gonna go where you can hunt them.
Speaker 1: So if you lay, if you lay the map of
Speaker 1: where Ferrell swine um are in Missouri over public ground,
Speaker 1: it almost marries up perfectly, No kid, Yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: it was really interesting when I was showing Parker yesterday
Speaker 1: pictures of the feral hogs I got on my property.
Speaker 1: He's like, well, that's a Springfield hog. And I mean
Speaker 1: they've they've got it drilled down with your property is
Speaker 1: like up against the large chunk of public property, one
Speaker 1: of the one of the largest contiguous pieces of public
Speaker 1: property in Missouri. So they're definitely getting released back in there.
Speaker 1: But he's able to tell you, like distinctly where this
Speaker 1: hog has been shipped in from and where this hog
Speaker 1: has been Well, I gotta I know, they look a
Speaker 1: little different in different parts of the state, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know that I would go as far as
Speaker 1: into I know exactly where they're from, but yeah, but
Speaker 1: they are. They differ, um, depending on where you're grab
Speaker 1: them from from, you know, different parts of the state
Speaker 1: and different parts of the country. They look completely different.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's so so they're not homogenized me
Speaker 1: and there's like different ones that have different backgrounds, got
Speaker 1: them from different places. And and something that um people
Speaker 1: do a lot of times is they introduced domestics into
Speaker 1: those wild or feral populations to increase the size body size. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, so Zilla came around, well, some of those.
Speaker 1: I remember one of those giant pigs. It turns up
Speaker 1: like a hog Zilla. I don't know, like the it was, like,
Speaker 1: not the original one, but one of these giant pigs.
Speaker 1: It turns up where a guy exupposed to killed some
Speaker 1: stomp or wild pig. A few days later, a guy
Speaker 1: comes out with photographs of the thing standing in the
Speaker 1: back of the truck. Is he sold it to the guy?
Speaker 1: Of course, Yeah, that's not a wild pig, that's ostella
Speaker 1: and provides photo documentation on it. You get it. If
Speaker 1: you get two hundred fifty three hundred pounds, that's a
Speaker 1: serious wild hog. That's a big one, you know. And
Speaker 1: they're all born right yeah, I mean they're they're not
Speaker 1: eating their nat eating corn from from the bucket, you know,
Speaker 1: They're they're eating akrons and and whatever else they can
Speaker 1: get down in and out in the woods. So you know,
Speaker 1: two hundor fifty three hundre pounds is a great big
Speaker 1: and now they get bigger. But you know that's that's
Speaker 1: a great big adult. So I want to get into
Speaker 1: talking about the process of um how it all works.
Speaker 1: Meaning you identify a here, here's a new blip on
Speaker 1: the map, Okay, you identify a population of these things,
Speaker 1: how does it come to your attention? Okay, how do
Speaker 1: you verify the presence? And then what are the steps
Speaker 1: that take as as you sort of walk through, Like, wow,
Speaker 1: now we got a new gang of pigs we gotta
Speaker 1: deal with all right, that's kind of a that's a
Speaker 1: that's kind of a two part question. Number one, Um,
Speaker 1: how do we deal with the new populations? What do
Speaker 1: we do? So? Um, like I said, the Missouri Department
Speaker 1: of Conservation, Mark Twain, National Force, Army Corps, engineers. We
Speaker 1: have a group of eleven land management agencies that are
Speaker 1: all out on this. On these public public lands, now
Speaker 1: public lands and private lands, we differentiate. We do not
Speaker 1: go on anybody's land that does not invite us. So people,
Speaker 1: so farmers are people who who have fero swine or
Speaker 1: wild hogs. They want help, they give us a shout, right. So,
Speaker 1: so you can't go even you can't go on someone
Speaker 1: land the same way you'd be able to go onto
Speaker 1: their land for you know, emergency purposes or anything like
Speaker 1: no way, no way, no, no, we can't trespass. We
Speaker 1: have a we have a form that we have to
Speaker 1: get them to sign. That lets us be on their property. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that that's good. Obviously, it's not surprising
Speaker 1: me by me. I know that there are certain things
Speaker 1: like you're cooking up some meth on your land, for instance,
Speaker 1: people can go on there and get that, while services
Speaker 1: can because we're non regulatory. Yeah. So, um so we
Speaker 1: have got it at times we have not that I'm
Speaker 1: not I know that you don't set the positive, but
Speaker 1: that that at times has the really problematic and it
Speaker 1: always will be. So if you're trying to do an eradication,
Speaker 1: there's three things that have to happen. Right. You have
Speaker 1: to have a uh control that works right, you're you
Speaker 1: have to have something that gets rid of whatever you're
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of. If you're doing rats, you
Speaker 1: have to have a toxic that kills them, right, and
Speaker 1: it has to be effective. Number two, every individual has
Speaker 1: to be exposed to said control measure, right. And number three,
Speaker 1: you have to have one per cent uh that was
Speaker 1: number two. Number two, everybody's got to get exposed, which
Speaker 1: is the problem. And and number three, you can't have
Speaker 1: any immigration in from from outside sources. So if we
Speaker 1: get rid of all all the all the pigs in
Speaker 1: southern Missouri and somebody brings them back in. Well, by god,
Speaker 1: we start over. So those three things, that's why it
Speaker 1: seems like eradication can happen on small islands right successfully,
Speaker 1: it doesn't happen on large land masses. It happens in
Speaker 1: large land masses when everybody gets united and and recognizes
Speaker 1: these are bad. But you were right, and it's a
Speaker 1: it's a fact. It's going to be very problematic in
Speaker 1: the future. Yeah, there's a fight going on right now
Speaker 1: legislatively over Farrell hawks. You actually have legislators down in
Speaker 1: this part of the state in support of Ferrell hawk hunting,
Speaker 1: very upset with the Department of Conservation for trying to
Speaker 1: do the right thing and eliminate not only the desire
Speaker 1: to hunt them, but the entire population. So it's a
Speaker 1: it's a political bat there's an actual political conversation about
Speaker 1: whether or not you want wild pigs or not. The
Speaker 1: only reason you can hunt wild pigs on uh Mark
Speaker 1: Twain National Force right now is because a certain politician
Speaker 1: has threatened, you know, retribution if it were to be stopped.
Speaker 1: All right, So back to how does a problem become like,
Speaker 1: how does the new population become identified and then what
Speaker 1: steps are taken to to just to go address the issue.
Speaker 1: All right, So we have a strategic elimination plan within
Speaker 1: Missouri with within our patchwork. We know where they are,
Speaker 1: we know the terrain, the habitat, the accessibility, um, and
Speaker 1: then we put those resources in that area. Elimination areas
Speaker 1: one one is our lowest population UM. We have the
Speaker 1: most accessibility to it. The terrain is most conducive for elimination,
Speaker 1: and we're being very very successful. UM. We are repetitively
Speaker 1: successful on If you think about a fire and a
Speaker 1: little ember goes out in your yard and starts that
Speaker 1: those are popping up, that's what you're talking about. When
Speaker 1: those pop up, we drop what we're doing and we
Speaker 1: make sure those populations do not become established. So we have,
Speaker 1: like I said, eleven partner agencies and all their people
Speaker 1: are out there all the time on all of these
Speaker 1: public lands, and when new sign or sightings happen, it
Speaker 1: gets to us pretty quick, um, and we've been very
Speaker 1: successful at at suppressing those those new population. You look
Speaker 1: in there's a new blip on the map that takes
Speaker 1: priority over some established population that you've been struggling. It
Speaker 1: does yeah, and and what you guys do, like how
Speaker 1: do you going and even begin Well, it's and it's
Speaker 1: a it's a once we get land access, it's it's
Speaker 1: no different than than any other the control worker do.
Speaker 1: We set up cameras, look at the sign, put out bait,
Speaker 1: get them on bait, and trap them and remove them
Speaker 1: as quick as we can. So you use trail cameras
Speaker 1: to try to verify the presence. Yeah, we use trail cameras.
Speaker 1: And you know, the thing about pigs is you kind
Speaker 1: of know when they're there. You know, that makes such
Speaker 1: a mess, and in our they're rooting and tracks and
Speaker 1: rubbing on trees. That's it's not hard to figure out
Speaker 1: when there and something identify a population of like one,
Speaker 1: oh yeah all the time. Oh yeah, And you can
Speaker 1: come in. Someone could be like, hey, I saw a
Speaker 1: wild pig and you can go in and usually you're
Speaker 1: like a good enough tracker or whatever that someone could
Speaker 1: go in there and be like, yeah, it's true, No
Speaker 1: I'm not that good there. It's a big You dump
Speaker 1: out corn and they come to it. That's like you
Speaker 1: verify or that's a way to do it right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And then what are the ways in which you guys
Speaker 1: catch them and kill them. Um. We do mostly. Probably
Speaker 1: nine of ar take is is trapping, a smaller percent
Speaker 1: is night shooting, and then another percent is aerial gunning.
Speaker 1: So talk about the night shooting. How's that work? Um.
Speaker 1: Night shooting is used in in specific situations. UM. A
Speaker 1: lot of times when we have single uh bowl wurs. Uh.
Speaker 1: We don't spend a lot of time trapping boars. Uh.
Speaker 1: We target females because that's our population control, the sounders,
Speaker 1: the big groups. UM. So we're targeting them. If we
Speaker 1: have some some boards that are hanging around, sometimes we'll
Speaker 1: do that. If we're having crop damage. UM. So if
Speaker 1: you have a field of corn, right, if you have
Speaker 1: a hundred acres of corn, it's hard to go pull
Speaker 1: pour out a bucket of corn and get them to
Speaker 1: come in your trap. Uh. And every night you know
Speaker 1: that corns in the dough stage and the hogs are
Speaker 1: wrecking it. You know, in the landowner the farmers just
Speaker 1: beside himself pulling his hair out. We use a lot
Speaker 1: of night shooting then to keep them, um, keep them
Speaker 1: out of the out of the corn. UM. When we
Speaker 1: get down to the last few animals, that is generally
Speaker 1: how we remove them through night shooting. So I was
Speaker 1: able to go out on one of these night shooting
Speaker 1: excursions with some of Parker's people, and uh, not to
Speaker 1: diminish the noble work, but man, that was pretty fun.
Speaker 1: Like we actually were in the bed of pickup truck
Speaker 1: and I was the guy with a thermal imaging scope
Speaker 1: and we're cruising the corn fields on the outside of
Speaker 1: Fort Leonard Wood Army Base and you're just on farms
Speaker 1: that you have permission to be on, driving their farms
Speaker 1: in the winter, using thermal imaging to locate these hogs.
Speaker 1: And the driver's driving. We're sitting in the back scoping.
Speaker 1: When you see him, you tap on the top of
Speaker 1: the truck. They stopped, the shooter gets out. Pile pile,
Speaker 1: just one field had thirty in it. Probably that was
Speaker 1: the biggest one we saw. And then working to assist
Speaker 1: a farmer who's trying to protect the crop. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: general rule we on those big groups, we really try
Speaker 1: not to night shoot, and we try not to shoot
Speaker 1: where we're trapping because it really messes up our whole system,
Speaker 1: makes them much more difficult to trap. These situations are
Speaker 1: like we said, when a farmer's just beside himself in
Speaker 1: a and you know he's just getting so much damage
Speaker 1: that that's really one of our only options is to
Speaker 1: do night night work like that. Okay, So talk about
Speaker 1: trapping so um sort of like the high of it
Speaker 1: right right. Well, like I said, there's a process, UM,
Speaker 1: and it varies how successful we are by by common year,
Speaker 1: by location, UM, a lot of variables. It can be
Speaker 1: very frustrating or very very UM efficient. We had a
Speaker 1: guy last year that works with us, Jameson, He caught
Speaker 1: sixty two pigs in one trap, and then I think
Speaker 1: he had over a hundred just that week. UM. So
Speaker 1: when you when they're coming to your corn where they're
Speaker 1: not being pressured from outside sources, UM, without being run
Speaker 1: with dogs, people shooting at them, their pigs, they're they're
Speaker 1: pretty easy to catch UM. And so you gotta train
Speaker 1: them up on the corn. UM. With the system that
Speaker 1: we're using right now, whenever they get on the corn,
Speaker 1: we set the trap in in a matter of two
Speaker 1: or three nights. We generally have you're not like prebating
Speaker 1: them for weeks together. Sometimes we do. And it depends
Speaker 1: on the type of trap, and it depends on the
Speaker 1: time of year. UM. So you know it varies. It's
Speaker 1: it's a it's a wild animal. You know, it doesn't
Speaker 1: read the same books that we do. So you know,
Speaker 1: you can get them all the first night, um or
Speaker 1: it could take a month. So you're kind of going
Speaker 1: by You're you're going by how many you know to
Speaker 1: be in the area and how many you figure are
Speaker 1: hitting the baby. And we use cameras a lot for that. UM.
Speaker 1: So what we want to do is catch up. You know,
Speaker 1: we're we're working for elimination, so we don't want to
Speaker 1: catch the first two pigs that run run in the trap.
Speaker 1: You know, we don't catch the twenty eight others that
Speaker 1: are outside. So UM, we take steps to make sure
Speaker 1: that we get all of those uh animals in there
Speaker 1: to remove the whole group. You know, you know one
Speaker 1: of one or two animals doesn't do us any good.
Speaker 1: It educates the other ones that UM. You know, it's
Speaker 1: a lot of investment for a very little return. So,
Speaker 1: so describe the trap and how it sort of relates
Speaker 1: to the bait pile. Well, I'm gonna get in trouble
Speaker 1: for this because each trapper is very specific about how
Speaker 1: he likes it. As you can imagine. But the long
Speaker 1: and short of it, um is we use around corral trap.
Speaker 1: Um with a with a drop door in the front.
Speaker 1: We use around corral trap that's elevated off the ground. Um,
Speaker 1: we use the whole crawl is the whole corral? What's
Speaker 1: the diameter on that thing? Uh? Five sixteen foot panels?
Speaker 1: Four or sixteen foot panels. So whatever the math works
Speaker 1: out of that, it's pretty big. Um. You know there's
Speaker 1: a sixteen by sixteen krawl. Yeah, yeah, Um. We use
Speaker 1: some commercially made ones spending it on what Uh it's
Speaker 1: a it's a it's real hard to explain with us.
Speaker 1: There's there's a cardinal pole that goes in the in
Speaker 1: the middle and some arms will go out in the
Speaker 1: slide that goes up and down. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: reverse yeah umbrella type mechanism there walking under the bar
Speaker 1: of the suspended trap. It's really neat. You know. The
Speaker 1: Noble Foundation developed a trap uh called the board buster,
Speaker 1: and we use it a lot and it's, um, it's
Speaker 1: really effective and I don't know, but somebody needs to
Speaker 1: do with study. It's not that hogs don't look up,
Speaker 1: but they if they can see through something I think, Uh,
Speaker 1: they they go in, they go in a lot faster
Speaker 1: than they do like a regular door, uh six eight
Speaker 1: foot wide door. I don't know if they don't like
Speaker 1: going through it or what. But the thing this the
Speaker 1: guys that came up with the with that uh technology,
Speaker 1: many they revolutionized UM. Hog trapping as far as getting
Speaker 1: hogs to go underneath started out years ago. I think
Speaker 1: with the drop nets. You remember those same concept. Um,
Speaker 1: this is just just just a hog trap and a
Speaker 1: metal hog trap that drops down and and so you know,
Speaker 1: it just varies. You know times a regular door they'll
Speaker 1: run right in. You just it's variable. So so the
Speaker 1: drop trap are they monitoring it through some kind of camera? Right? So? Um,
Speaker 1: the commercial ones are monitored through some kind of camera
Speaker 1: RS or not, because as you can tell this week
Speaker 1: by your cell phone they're absolutely useless. You might as
Speaker 1: well throw it in the river out here, no cell
Speaker 1: service whatsoever. So RS are triggered uh, manually by by
Speaker 1: a hog. And you know it's as interesting. We we
Speaker 1: came up with all different um sort of trigger mechanisms
Speaker 1: and in different ways of doing it to try to
Speaker 1: maximize our our catching. And one of the guys that
Speaker 1: that worked work with us now and said, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: let's let's put them the trigger the height of the
Speaker 1: biggest pig that we have on camera instead of right
Speaker 1: down on the ground. Yeah, and you know, we kind
Speaker 1: of looked at each other like, well, we haven't been
Speaker 1: doing that for ten years, you know. So the first
Speaker 1: ones in, just like any thing, you know, the young
Speaker 1: dumb ones run right in, you know, the smaller animals,
Speaker 1: and generally the last animal to go into the most
Speaker 1: the biggest, most mature, and so the goal is to
Speaker 1: have that animal inside, and generally when that animals inside,
Speaker 1: then all the rest of them are caught. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: how many did someone get in one trap? Sixty two?
Speaker 1: Sixty two inside of a sixteen by sixteen they were
Speaker 1: packed in? Yeah? Yeah, did it get them all? Every
Speaker 1: one of them? It was Yeah, it was super neat
Speaker 1: and that was it. And it might have been sixty eight,
Speaker 1: but I think it was sixty two. Yeah, that was it. Gone.
Speaker 1: I mean sixty two pigs gone, you know, in three nights.
Speaker 1: One guy, what does what does what would it take
Speaker 1: to do that? With dogs, with stand hunting, with sport hunting,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's that's how you get there, You're
Speaker 1: not never Yeah, that's what you're saying. Now, explain the
Speaker 1: other kind of trap. The corral trap is not suspended
Speaker 1: got trap doors? Sure, just trap doors. And there's all
Speaker 1: different uh different styles and and they and they all work,
Speaker 1: you know, their own in their own uh uh way.
Speaker 1: And you know, some are very effective and and some
Speaker 1: of them not so much that you know, there's a
Speaker 1: whole another other discussion on the trap doors. Some some
Speaker 1: guys are super you know, it's trappers, man. They're all
Speaker 1: got their own thing and and uh so, but they're
Speaker 1: all effective. You know, once you train that animal to
Speaker 1: go inside. Um, they're effective. There's multi catch doors and
Speaker 1: then the ones you can um trigger from your cell
Speaker 1: phone or ones that are manually triggered, and you know,
Speaker 1: all variations in in through there. When does aerial gunning
Speaker 1: come into place? That's gonna be expensive. Well, aerial gunning
Speaker 1: comes into play, um in Missouri. In in other areas
Speaker 1: they do a lot more of it, but the terrain
Speaker 1: is a lot better for it than than in the ozarks.
Speaker 1: You know. Um, aerial gunning comes into play when we're
Speaker 1: trying to protect a very remote area. UM. You know,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine getting some traps way back in
Speaker 1: some of these areas. We also use aerial gunning for
Speaker 1: the last few animals UM, particularly of trap showl ones
Speaker 1: are ones we can't find, we'll use that helicopter UM
Speaker 1: to do that. We we did it most recently UM
Speaker 1: down in southeast Missouri when the when the water came up,
Speaker 1: and when the water comes up and the river floods
Speaker 1: and all of the UM pigs get on the levee systems,
Speaker 1: you can be very very effective. UM. So you pick it, yeah,
Speaker 1: you pick and choosing. And we also use aerial gunning,
Speaker 1: not just aerial gunning, but aerial surveillance. So when you're
Speaker 1: thinking about elimination, you have to detect everybody. So we
Speaker 1: know we may have some pigs in this area, We're
Speaker 1: not sure, So you can go up and look down
Speaker 1: in the wintertime and see if there's fresh rooting and
Speaker 1: or not. Like, hey, we we flew this whole area
Speaker 1: and there's no fresh rooting and we're taking us months
Speaker 1: to scout it out by by ground, you know, or
Speaker 1: by foot. So it's used for other things other than
Speaker 1: just aerial control. So we're like take a place like
Speaker 1: where we're sitting right now. Right, there's pigs up there.
Speaker 1: I think we uh, we took a picture of a
Speaker 1: track today, So where is it on the list right? Like, like,
Speaker 1: where is this spot? How do you got how would
Speaker 1: you typify this location? We are We're in a big
Speaker 1: chunk of public land right in the Ozarks, is pretty
Speaker 1: heavily rolled it up. There's a lot of recreation goes on. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's bordered by small farms and recreational properties. And
Speaker 1: there's some number of wild pigs out there. All right,
Speaker 1: So is this spot like on hold or is it
Speaker 1: like on monitoring or is it active control? It's active control.
Speaker 1: So this is Elimination Area Zone four, I think. So
Speaker 1: Elimination Area Zone four calls for X number of people.
Speaker 1: I'd have to look in the in the plan, but um,
Speaker 1: there's guys in this zone that that are working this
Speaker 1: area NonStop. This is one of our areas where we
Speaker 1: take the most iron and Reynolds County. You have trappers
Speaker 1: that are working here now Oh yeah, yeah, I'll see
Speaker 1: I'll through this area sure, okay, yeah, And they're using
Speaker 1: all these different things that you've created where we where
Speaker 1: we were talking about that creek there's a trap down there,
Speaker 1: oh government trap. Yeah. Okay, when you talk about someone trapping,
Speaker 1: I thought when you mentioned that, I pictured that someone
Speaker 1: wanted to catch that pig, to bring it up, to
Speaker 1: eat it or move it somewhere or whatever. I got you.
Speaker 1: So that was like a removal plan because it's clean. Now. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: you mentioned to me some work on some some work
Speaker 1: has been done on the disease vector issue and how
Speaker 1: it might apply to people. All right, can you sketch
Speaker 1: out some of the because because it's the thing people say, right, Oh,
Speaker 1: pigs and full diseases. Sure? Um, like what uh trichinosis
Speaker 1: you mentioned you got a dose of that, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: they have trickin nosis. Um, they have pseudorabies. People can't
Speaker 1: get pseudoabies, but your your dog can get cedarabies. And
Speaker 1: you hear about that happening a lot. Brucellosis. People can
Speaker 1: get brucellosis, cattle can get cattle can get bruce brucellosis
Speaker 1: moved from a pig to a coward. You know. Um,
Speaker 1: I think there's brucels brucellosis uh siuus and brucellosis um
Speaker 1: for the bovines. And I'm not sure the veterinarian guys
Speaker 1: explain it to me and and UM, I don't follow
Speaker 1: it so much, but I know UM that you that
Speaker 1: I don't know if the sious maybe the sewers can
Speaker 1: go to the cantals, but it can be passed on
Speaker 1: or something like it could definitely go to the domestic pigs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's probably one of the words they would not get
Speaker 1: into the right, right. And so those guys are all
Speaker 1: the egg industry is always testing their their heard right,
Speaker 1: and they're always clean, clean, clean clean, And if they
Speaker 1: get a positive that that whole thing gets quarantined and
Speaker 1: and transport, you know, stops, whether it's in state, out
Speaker 1: of state, whatever the rags are, you know, transport stops.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So so for listeners, if you if you
Speaker 1: follow her every year, you'll hear a big story about
Speaker 1: um people fighting over whether bison they're leaving yellowsto National Park. Um.
Speaker 1: The issue there comes down to the scene we're talking
Speaker 1: about with brucellosis, depending on who you ask. And I'll
Speaker 1: actually lay this whole thing out real quick as much
Speaker 1: as I can, so when the snow's pile up in
Speaker 1: the late winter, you'll have buffalo migrate out of Yelosto
Speaker 1: National Park, and they'll come out into various private lands,
Speaker 1: national forest lands and and go about their business. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a fear that these animals will re will will
Speaker 1: reintroduce a Eurasian cattle disease back to cattle. So cattle
Speaker 1: that were brought here to the US had a disease
Speaker 1: called brucellosis. Brucellosis was passed two buffalo and there's infections
Speaker 1: in the park. But then in the meantime they eradicated
Speaker 1: it from domestic house So now the cattle producers in
Speaker 1: Wyoming and Montana enjoy what's called brucellosis free status. They
Speaker 1: don't need to do the constant, rigorous testing because there's
Speaker 1: no cases and they haven't had a case in a while.
Speaker 1: What they're very afraid of is the minute one of
Speaker 1: these buffalo comes out rubs noses or no it's actually passed,
Speaker 1: they'll drop a fetus and animals, we'll lick and eat
Speaker 1: each other's uh after birth. One of these things is
Speaker 1: gonna pick the disease up, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the cattlemen of these states will no longer enjoy brucellois
Speaker 1: free status. And I think that it actually this is
Speaker 1: something that should be fixed. Really, it actually goes state level.
Speaker 1: So a guy in the south, you know, the the
Speaker 1: guy in the extreme south of Montana or the extreme
Speaker 1: north of Whealming could get brucellosis and his cattle herd,
Speaker 1: and it affects the guy four miles away open some
Speaker 1: other corner of the state. Some people say that the
Speaker 1: brucellosis thing in terms of buffalo some people say it's
Speaker 1: all bullshit, And what it really comes down to is
Speaker 1: a conversation about grazing rights. So that's just and they
Speaker 1: say that this brucelloisis thing is sort of a proxy
Speaker 1: in place of this other argument about is this grass
Speaker 1: belong to cattle or does this grass belonging to these
Speaker 1: wild ass animals? And so people fight that out all
Speaker 1: the time. But until sitting here with you right now,
Speaker 1: I had no idea that there's with and and so
Speaker 1: they're as they're a reservoir, right. We can get it
Speaker 1: out of domestics, but you cannot get it out of
Speaker 1: the wild population. So it's always there. It's always a
Speaker 1: threaten it's not always innitie. Can you explain, Uh, you
Speaker 1: mentioned something yesterday that there's like a closed system with
Speaker 1: domestic pork. Sure, yeah, so, um, you know, back in
Speaker 1: back in the day, everybody raised uh their hogs out
Speaker 1: in the pasture or woven wire fence, you know, hog wire,
Speaker 1: we called it lecture fencer, the whole thing. And you
Speaker 1: you heard as a kid a cookier cookie pork, cook
Speaker 1: cooking pork or whatever, cook a cook a cook it. Well,
Speaker 1: you don't hear that so much anymore because in order
Speaker 1: to meet that demand, those pigs have been brought in
Speaker 1: inside and in raised in confinement. Um. There, there, it's
Speaker 1: it's much it's much easier. You don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about the disease. You don't have to you know, you
Speaker 1: could monitor it and measure it and and move your
Speaker 1: animals of course, yeah, the whole thing. Um. So, so
Speaker 1: when they're in there, they they're not you know, rubbing
Speaker 1: noses or whatever with Ferrell swine, you know, transmitting disease
Speaker 1: out there on the ground or picking up those different
Speaker 1: nematodes or whatever it is. Um, we can get it
Speaker 1: out now. Um. There's kind of a movement to go
Speaker 1: back to more of a free range, pasture fed type
Speaker 1: of of pork, which is you know, kind of a
Speaker 1: kind of a neat thing, I think. But but those
Speaker 1: you know, those diseases are gonna start popping back up.
Speaker 1: You know, we're gonna you're gonna get trick nosis. Um,
Speaker 1: people are gonna get those different things because they're not
Speaker 1: cooking their pork. Um. So that probably incentivizes people, especially
Speaker 1: well to control the wild, to control the Ferrell swine. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it increased chance of exposure. Yes, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: you know the US not uh right now, I can't
Speaker 1: remember what nineties some percent of trick noosis cases are
Speaker 1: transmitted through black bear meat. Yeah, yeah, let's way to
Speaker 1: get it out of black bears. No. No, So that's that,
Speaker 1: you know, those disease issues or a reason that we
Speaker 1: we often get the get the question why don't you
Speaker 1: guys donate the meat? Um. You know, there's a number
Speaker 1: of reasons we don't donate donate the meat of the
Speaker 1: of the hogs that that we capture. Um. Number one
Speaker 1: is a disease issue. You know, we worked for the
Speaker 1: federal government. Could you imagine if we donated uh sure
Speaker 1: to to somebody and they eat up trickon nosis. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's a nightmare. Plus you don't want to
Speaker 1: be giving people trickon nosis. She whiz. What are the
Speaker 1: handling risks, you know, the each each state game and
Speaker 1: fish puts out handling risks. You know, wear gloves, you know,
Speaker 1: if you have cuts on your hands, and you know,
Speaker 1: wear gloves, don't clean it, wash your hands good afterwards,
Speaker 1: cook your cook your pork thorough if it's if it's
Speaker 1: a wild hog, you know, cooking. I'll kill most all
Speaker 1: this stuff. But a hundred percent of the people are
Speaker 1: not going a hundred percent cook uh cooked at pork.
Speaker 1: Another reason we don't like to to donate them, so
Speaker 1: to speak, is it gives them value. And and once
Speaker 1: someone starts receiving free pork, what's the incentive to get
Speaker 1: rid of that pork or want it gone? You know, No,
Speaker 1: I could see that it would create like earlier talking
Speaker 1: about Mischian confusion, and create Mischian confusion. Yeah. So do
Speaker 1: you feel that you know, I know this is like
Speaker 1: that this is going on all around the country. Um,
Speaker 1: but do you feel that it's plausible that that in
Speaker 1: ten years will be like wow, Uh turns out you know, Missouri,
Speaker 1: for instance, no longer has wild picks. Yeah, so in
Speaker 1: in ten years, I don't know if we'll have wild
Speaker 1: pigs or not, but I will say, um, it's relatively
Speaker 1: new and as you know, ten fifteen years, so they're
Speaker 1: the populations are not as dense as they are in
Speaker 1: other parts of the country. Uh. Once again, the Missouri
Speaker 1: Department of Conservation rolled up their sleeves and said we're
Speaker 1: gonna fix this, and they've put the resources in into
Speaker 1: fixing that. And I believe our population, even within this
Speaker 1: short infancy of the program is starting to shrink. So
Speaker 1: what's gonna happen in ten years, I can't tell you,
Speaker 1: but I know that we're doing good in the areas
Speaker 1: that we're working. They're getting harder to find. Um, we're
Speaker 1: we're getting more opposition from the people who want them,
Speaker 1: which is in my mind a good thing because they're going,
Speaker 1: oh oh, you know, it's it's harder for them to
Speaker 1: hunt them. They're not able to do what they have
Speaker 1: and move them and transport them and and all those
Speaker 1: things they've done for uh, you know, untouched for the
Speaker 1: last ten years. So um, yeah, I think I think
Speaker 1: in ten years are our six elimination areas are gonna
Speaker 1: or maybe four elimination areas. Yeah, how much is all
Speaker 1: this costing everybody. I mean, like these decisions by people
Speaker 1: to take these you know, decisions by people to break
Speaker 1: the law and cut loose Ferrell swine right winds up
Speaker 1: being sort of an enormous burden on people. So, um,
Speaker 1: the starter say that the starter money was from the
Speaker 1: aphis uh Ferrell Swine Initiative, and it was to the
Speaker 1: tune of twenty million dollars. And so that has been
Speaker 1: like I said, uh, seed money or starter money. Each
Speaker 1: each state runs a little bit of different program depending
Speaker 1: on on how how the state wants it handles or
Speaker 1: what they do. But so starter money was twenty million.
Speaker 1: Now people have to heloped cooperative relationships like we have
Speaker 1: in Missouri. Um, you know, the Mark Twain National Force
Speaker 1: puts in a lot of money. Um, Missouri State Parks, Um,
Speaker 1: like I said, the Missouri Department of Conservation, Army, Corps
Speaker 1: of Engineers. They're all throwing money into a pot for
Speaker 1: uh the U s d A APHIST wildlife services to
Speaker 1: higher trappers and and do that work. So you know,
Speaker 1: all across the state, just you know, just governmental agencies.
Speaker 1: There's no talents to the multi multi multimillions of dollars
Speaker 1: not to mention the private um people who are doing
Speaker 1: those types of things. You know. So I remember years
Speaker 1: ago looking at a map of the US and it
Speaker 1: showed where you could raise cattle without supplemental feeding. And
Speaker 1: it was surprising, surprisingly the places you can't raise cattle
Speaker 1: about supplemental feeding. Have you ever seen a map? Has
Speaker 1: they one drawn up a map of where is it
Speaker 1: possible that wild pigs could get established when you factor
Speaker 1: in climate issues. I have a hard time picturing that
Speaker 1: Northern Wyoming wouldn't phase them, the brutality of that when
Speaker 1: they're in Quebec, you know, they they're they're all in Canada.
Speaker 1: It doesn't phase in their toughest nails. That's why there's
Speaker 1: such a bad invasive. Yeah, wouldn't phase them because I've
Speaker 1: seen pictures of them in in you know, in Siberia,
Speaker 1: in the running around the snow, which looks crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you feel like the Wyomings I remember, I remember that
Speaker 1: Colorado feels it's plausible. I think they've already had it
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, But there's there's a difference, and maybe
Speaker 1: you can speak to this, maybe Parker speak this, because
Speaker 1: there's a difference like the Michigan ones, the Michigan cases
Speaker 1: might not be in these like isolated cases where some
Speaker 1: guys running some little fake hunting place where you go
Speaker 1: and pretend that you're hunting a pig and he gets
Speaker 1: some escape, like he doesn't get away. So I was like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, Michigan's got wild pigs. But it's kind
Speaker 1: of like very isolated gets mopped up pretty quickly, you know.
Speaker 1: It's not sort of this where you just have these
Speaker 1: populations that are naturally reproducing going on for many generations,
Speaker 1: spreading around. You just get these like isolated blips. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, I have I don't know, I'm not like
Speaker 1: a pig wild pig guy. I'm not. I've enjoyed hunting
Speaker 1: them in quite a number of locations, but yeah, it's
Speaker 1: hard for me to picture that. In Wyoming, it's open country,
Speaker 1: tons of snow, extremely cold. Uh, it's just hard for
Speaker 1: me to picture that you would that that it's possible
Speaker 1: that a that a sounder would get a foothold and
Speaker 1: start naturally reproducing and not just be well it was
Speaker 1: wiped out. What's the question, can you wipe him out?
Speaker 1: Or could they live there? Yeah? You're right, I could.
Speaker 1: I did. I asked two different things. Sure, sure, you know.
Speaker 1: So the northern Wyoming I have never been there. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm guessing it's open, a lot of rolling prairie. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Aerial gunning would be extremely extremely effective and
Speaker 1: and yeah, it would be so easy to eliminate. But
Speaker 1: I could live there, I perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah, as
Speaker 1: evidence by the fact, like I said, they come from Siberia, right,
Speaker 1: you know, I I know they uh, my counterpart in
Speaker 1: North Dakota. Um, they do Farrell swine work coming in
Speaker 1: from Canada. Yeah, it's coming from the north, yeah, coming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the influx is from the north. North Dakota gets Farrell
Speaker 1: pigs coming from the Yeah, yeah really yeah. What are
Speaker 1: they doing up there? Some money put them there? What
Speaker 1: are they eating? They're pigs only anything, you know, roots, tubers, eggs,
Speaker 1: you know whatever, wild pigs, international borders. Sure, yeah, huh,
Speaker 1: all right. That answers that question regularly. So that's how
Speaker 1: we're gonna give him in Montana too, right next door.
Speaker 1: So you keep tabs on kind of what's going on
Speaker 1: in the whole country, Well, no, I don't care. I
Speaker 1: I know what's going on, you know, just by my
Speaker 1: counterparts in the projects they're do when Yeah, So in
Speaker 1: the States, I only know one for sure, I think
Speaker 1: on top of my head. But like Indiana has outlawed
Speaker 1: the hunting of the pigs. Do they feel over there
Speaker 1: like that's working for him? They do? And it states
Speaker 1: that outlaw hunting have recognized that hunting is and I
Speaker 1: wish there was a different word than hunting. I don't
Speaker 1: even like to say hunting, but it's pursuit of barnyard
Speaker 1: animals eyes, I don't know. Yeah, they've recognized as that
Speaker 1: is what exacerbates the problem. That's why they're there, that's
Speaker 1: why people move them, that's what they want to do. Now,
Speaker 1: those states that don't have that culture, they can go
Speaker 1: we've banned wild hog hunt. Everybody goes, all right, whatever,
Speaker 1: we don't know what you're talking about, you know. So
Speaker 1: it's it's a very effective way to um get some
Speaker 1: really important legislation introduced. Everyone I know that used to
Speaker 1: move fish around from lake to lake and river the river,
Speaker 1: if you told them it was illegal to fish that species,
Speaker 1: to fish in that lake, even though it didn't have
Speaker 1: it yet, they would have been completely de incentivized. Of course,
Speaker 1: to dump them in there. What would you do it? Sure?
Speaker 1: Unless someone's like, I'm just a rule breaker anyway, man,
Speaker 1: and a rule breaker. I'll break the rule of putting
Speaker 1: them there, and then I'll break the rule of hunting them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It goes back to the public land saying if you
Speaker 1: got a bucket full of whatever fish and that guy's like,
Speaker 1: don't ever come to my pond. And this neighbor over
Speaker 1: here says, everybody can fish right in pond. Man, you
Speaker 1: know same thing. Where are you gonna go next? Where
Speaker 1: am I gonna go next? I'm going home to finish
Speaker 1: my turkey season. No, but I mean what's your next?
Speaker 1: Like what like in a career, Like, here's what happens next?
Speaker 1: You did New Hampshire, Florida. Yeah, yeah, No, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: digging Missouri. I'm I'm I'm pretty mad at the pigs
Speaker 1: right now. So um, we'll stick it out here while
Speaker 1: and see what happens. And how many guys do you
Speaker 1: have out right now? Not right now, but I mean
Speaker 1: how many guys are working the pig problem? So like
Speaker 1: we go back to the partnership we and it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's being looked at nationally as a as a good
Speaker 1: model on on how to eliminate Ferrell swine and uh,
Speaker 1: those different agencies, about half of them actively have people
Speaker 1: out on the ground doing doing a hog trapping and
Speaker 1: we work together seamlessly. M d C, UH Jury Partment, Conservation,
Speaker 1: U S, d eph IS, Wildlife Service, Mark Twain, National
Speaker 1: Forest Army Corps engineers. All those trappers know each other,
Speaker 1: they're all communication. They're working around. So I, you know,
Speaker 1: I have twenty five or so going in in MDC.
Speaker 1: Has however many they have in Mark Twain. So you
Speaker 1: know as far as people doing actual trapping in the state,
Speaker 1: there's quite a few. So you have twenty five trappers
Speaker 1: right now. What's a good year for those guys? Uh? Good?
Speaker 1: I guess to get bad the higher the numbers to
Speaker 1: be the worst year. But let me so you got
Speaker 1: one guy, you got one guy. If they kill three pigs,
Speaker 1: they're they're high five and going to get beers because hey,
Speaker 1: they killed three pigs out of ten and thirty percent
Speaker 1: of the population. The other guy and they cross the
Speaker 1: state kill six hundred. Uh, he has no idea, you know,
Speaker 1: he's just he's just working as hard as you can. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it depends on where you are. Man. You know, hey,
Speaker 1: there's there's legendary pigs. Hey, we finally got her, We
Speaker 1: finally did and the word spreads, you know, like some
Speaker 1: female y like like how long has she been a legend?
Speaker 1: You know, cople years you know, and and um, you
Speaker 1: know you you you'd kill her offspring and she'd still
Speaker 1: be knocking around, you know, and you can't shoot or
Speaker 1: can't tramp her. Yeah, yeah, super super smart. And then
Speaker 1: finally you get her, you know, and it's yeah, and
Speaker 1: once you get them, you know, you got them. And
Speaker 1: and that's that's why it's so important not to just
Speaker 1: remove a few, because of the fecundity of hawks. Man,
Speaker 1: you gotta get them all, and you've gotta be relentless,
Speaker 1: and you gotta stay on them. And you know, of
Speaker 1: our effort goes into five percent of the population, it's
Speaker 1: not last five percent. That's the same thing. Remember when
Speaker 1: Steve Kendron was talking about getting rid of those nutrients. Yeah,
Speaker 1: same things, Like, man, it was easy to get the
Speaker 1: first ninety five p cent, but man, the last five percent. Man,
Speaker 1: they had to come up with all kinds of different techniques. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people are talking about off the wall stuff, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna try it, try it, yeah, Yeah, we gotta get her.
Speaker 1: What's like one of the most off the wall strategies
Speaker 1: you can think of that someone used to get a pig.
Speaker 1: I don't. There's been all sort of bait, lure, a
Speaker 1: tracting concoctions made up. Um, they're generally they're killed by
Speaker 1: night shooting and and generally it's the guys that make
Speaker 1: the decision I'm going nocturnal and I'm not. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to see the light of day. And until I do,
Speaker 1: and they stay up all night and they just become
Speaker 1: the night predators, you know, and those guys are the
Speaker 1: it becomes personal with them. You know, it's like I've
Speaker 1: been after this animal for you know, and wanting to
Speaker 1: do a good job. And and some of our people
Speaker 1: are so super dedicated and generally that's generally that's what
Speaker 1: gets in the nocturnal you know, guys being able to
Speaker 1: scratch area off the map, scratch it off the map.
Speaker 1: There's something to be said for that. You know, Hey,
Speaker 1: that that dot's gone. Now are that blobs gone? And
Speaker 1: the blobs are shrinking and we're doing uh, we're doing
Speaker 1: stuff statewide and and and the feedback you get from
Speaker 1: the from the landowners. Man, it's just it's awesome be
Speaker 1: able to help them with that problem. Can I see
Speaker 1: something has nothing to do with pigs. Yeah, you're saying
Speaker 1: that you grew up along a segue into it because
Speaker 1: you grew up with pig dogs. Oh yeah, yeah, I did.
Speaker 1: I but that's not that's not a tool. That's not
Speaker 1: an effective tool to even use in these situations. I
Speaker 1: say this, Uh, hogdogs are the most efficient way to
Speaker 1: wake up in the morning and say I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: catch one pig. Now. If you show me a pig
Speaker 1: dog that can catch sixty two, it once by guy,
Speaker 1: I'm singing the singing the song of the dog dogs.
Speaker 1: But but no, but even when you got it down
Speaker 1: to that one, that's if you were looking at it like,
Speaker 1: that's not really the way to go about it in Missouri.
Speaker 1: That's that's something that that we've decided not to do.
Speaker 1: In in other areas, they do utilize that too, And
Speaker 1: it can be effective when you got one. You can
Speaker 1: when you're down to the last one, right, you can
Speaker 1: use it. So but you al said you grew up
Speaker 1: with squirrel dogs. Yeah, and then you imported squirrel dog technology.
Speaker 1: I did and do a place that isn't using it
Speaker 1: right and and it is. Um, I'm did you bring
Speaker 1: your squirrel dogs in New Hampshire? No, I call them
Speaker 1: by surprise. They have those you probably know about the
Speaker 1: red squirrels. Man, like, those things are no good. They're
Speaker 1: red squirrels, and yeah, pine squirrels. You wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: take a good Southern squirrel dog on a red squirrel.
Speaker 1: So we stayed. Wife. You know, they you can eat them.
Speaker 1: People say they, you know, tastes like turpentine or whatnot
Speaker 1: because they eats a lot of pine. It's just it's
Speaker 1: just it's basically it's a squirrel that just happens to
Speaker 1: be very small. Yeah, it's just a small squirrel are Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there are guys in Alaska that will go out
Speaker 1: in the winter and hunt pine squirrels to eat. Pine
Speaker 1: squirrels have at times had fir market value. So there's
Speaker 1: been times when um for paintbrush and other usages when
Speaker 1: you could get like a buck for a pine squirrel.
Speaker 1: And there'll be guys, you know in the old days,
Speaker 1: not the old old days, but you know during the night,
Speaker 1: you know period during the ninet hundreds when they're worth
Speaker 1: a buck of peace and people go stack up hundreds
Speaker 1: of them. That's good money and make money on buck
Speaker 1: of peace pine squirrels. But food wise, even where I
Speaker 1: grew up, when you if you were out hunting squirrels,
Speaker 1: we hunted gray squirrels and fox squirrels. You would when
Speaker 1: you saw a pine squre you wouldn't go after it.
Speaker 1: But they'd be intermixed, you know. Yeah, Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know the out would differentiate between. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they'd respond to it. I don't know either. But you
Speaker 1: know the pine squirrels are feisty. Yeah, like they prey
Speaker 1: on snowshoot hair leveretts. Yeah, they did a mortality study
Speaker 1: on snowshoet hairs and I think they found that uh
Speaker 1: of the twenty like they of the ones they lost,
Speaker 1: they found twenty seven of them or some. I'm sorry
Speaker 1: they did this mortality start. You know, the ones they
Speaker 1: were able to put tracking devices on, percent of them
Speaker 1: turned up in snow in uh, squirrel middens, pine squirrel middens.
Speaker 1: They hammer them. I did not know that. Yeah, bird eggs,
Speaker 1: snowshoet hair, babies, all kinds of stuff. They're Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: they're kind of like a c. I think them as
Speaker 1: a cross almost between like a mink and a squirrel,
Speaker 1: like in their sort of ferocity and then the beep
Speaker 1: and chirping they do. Yeah, yeah, they'll come get right
Speaker 1: in your face. Yea they do. Yeah, they'll come right
Speaker 1: down and get in your face and get in your house. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a whole They a different temperament man. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: not kind of they're kind of like electric with energy,
Speaker 1: you know, not as majestic as a gray squirrel. Well, no,
Speaker 1: not as majestic. But tell me about bringing so you
Speaker 1: in Georgia. M hmm. Everybody has a squirrel dog, you're saying, Yeah, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: you know, East Tennessee. There's a lot, you know, a
Speaker 1: lot more squirrel hunting with dogs that goes on there.
Speaker 1: I think squirrel hunt is probably pretty common, um, all
Speaker 1: up and down the east coast, you know where the
Speaker 1: gray squirrels are, But not with dogs, not with dogs
Speaker 1: so much. Bring squirrel dogs. Yeah, so you make a
Speaker 1: lot of friends, man when you bring squirrel dogs in
Speaker 1: Missouri because people want to go hunt with you. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's great fun. But are the squirrel is not used
Speaker 1: to it? Like, did you find a difference, Like, Man,
Speaker 1: these squirrels are just not expecting this. So the squirrels
Speaker 1: are responding to the dogs the same here than they
Speaker 1: do where they've had many, many years exposure to dogs.
Speaker 1: I don't know that they know it's a dog or
Speaker 1: a fox or a kaya. They just know that it's
Speaker 1: something that could eat them and they want to get
Speaker 1: away from it. So it wasn't like the It wasn't
Speaker 1: like the Land of Milk and honey when you first
Speaker 1: showed up with your dogs. Well, it's the land and
Speaker 1: milk of milk and honey. And as much as there's
Speaker 1: a lot more fox squirrels in Missouri than than in
Speaker 1: Alabama or or or Georgia, eastern grays mostly yeah, some
Speaker 1: of those big southern fox squirrels. We call them cat squirrels,
Speaker 1: you know, those great big ones. You know, all varied colors. Uh. Well,
Speaker 1: the fox girls here mostly red, and they seem to
Speaker 1: be I don't know if they're not as intelligent as
Speaker 1: the gray squirrels. And they sit out where the dogs
Speaker 1: can can see them. Man, And they hang their tail
Speaker 1: down like a flag and it and it drives the
Speaker 1: dogs nuts. Yeah, yeah, they can see them, so I man,
Speaker 1: and never thought, have you ever thought that like a
Speaker 1: like a sort of like this difference between grays and
Speaker 1: fox squirrels was delicate on that there's a difference. There's
Speaker 1: a distinct difference of cagness, of cag nous. Now it
Speaker 1: I know that, like the micro habitats they like are
Speaker 1: different for sure. Then there's areas I've hunted where it's
Speaker 1: all one. There's areas of hunter where it's all the other.
Speaker 1: But where I grew up there was intermixed. And it
Speaker 1: might be that down in the ravine bottom or whatever.
Speaker 1: You get down there and it would be a lot
Speaker 1: of grays down in there. Then an up top, you know,
Speaker 1: open the beach trees up top, you see a lot
Speaker 1: of fox squirrels, But you wouldn't think anything of looking
Speaker 1: up tree and seeing one to each. And I've never
Speaker 1: detected like that one was. I used to think we
Speaker 1: like the fox girls better because they're huge, and the
Speaker 1: gray squirrels at times we like them better because they're
Speaker 1: more of a novelty. But over my life gray squirrels
Speaker 1: became far more prevalent. You could, I don't I have
Speaker 1: no idea what that's attributed to why you just watch
Speaker 1: that shift t happened to become in that area where
Speaker 1: I grew up to become like not nearly the fox squirrels,
Speaker 1: as we had great squirrels. And I don't think it's
Speaker 1: just because people were selective pressure from hunting something that
Speaker 1: has no I don't think it's very very negligible on
Speaker 1: squirrel populations if any. But up here you're hunting where
Speaker 1: people aren't hitting them hard though, right yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I Um, I hunt and have never seen another squirrel
Speaker 1: hunter in there. I don't know that. I think parts
Speaker 1: of the state people people hunt them a little bit.
Speaker 1: But where I am in central Missouri, I've never seen
Speaker 1: another squirrel hunter, let alone a dog squirrel hunter. Now
Speaker 1: you have got you public on public land, both public
Speaker 1: and private. You know what's a good day? Um, a
Speaker 1: good day. I think our best day this year was
Speaker 1: maybe eighteen or so. How do you guys cook them? Well?
Speaker 1: I killed two hundred and eleven this year and so
Speaker 1: I've cooked them every way I can. My wife has
Speaker 1: had it with me and squirrel meat. Um, she's done.
Speaker 1: And you know, my my my children, Grace and Brodie,
Speaker 1: they got the twenty gauges and they following around to
Speaker 1: do a great job. But like I told you, guys,
Speaker 1: I've eaten a lot of lead shot this year, a lot. Uh.
Speaker 1: You're waiting for the kids to get old enough to
Speaker 1: be I am. I am. And when your wife bites
Speaker 1: down into the into the number six, it's not kind.
Speaker 1: When you do, you buy, then spit it out and
Speaker 1: go shot. You know she looks at you. You got
Speaker 1: to kiss the Yeah, yeah, mama gives you the evil look.
Speaker 1: So yeah, but unlead, it's not bad. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I know half people I know have lost teeth busts
Speaker 1: of teeth on steel shot. Lead. You know you don't
Speaker 1: want to be eating it, but it's not It's not
Speaker 1: as horrible for your teeth as it is eating waterfowl. Right,
Speaker 1: but what you guys fry it? Yeah, we fry it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we cook it down and pick it. Um man, you
Speaker 1: name it. Make gumbo, uh, jambalaya. We make everything barbecue. Oh,
Speaker 1: sure of course you have barbecue. Yeah, you have two
Speaker 1: hundred squirrels in the freezer. You're coming up with different
Speaker 1: ways to cook them. And it's what are your kids
Speaker 1: feelings about it? As far as eating it? The Scarford
Speaker 1: down taking my little girl Grace. She she knocks it down.
Speaker 1: They love it. I think it's one of the most
Speaker 1: underrated meats. Dude in the woods. It's delicious and no,
Speaker 1: there's no one who eats it. When it's properly prepared delicious,
Speaker 1: people are blown away by it. Sure have you, suevi
Speaker 1: et any No, might be honest something maybe, So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna send Parker on airy membership to the Rocky Mountain
Speaker 1: Squirrel Foundation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you gotta start. You have
Speaker 1: to start the Eastern branch of the Rocky Mountain Squirrel Foundation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you do you like the fox squirrels or when
Speaker 1: you go out and hunt them if you shoot a
Speaker 1: couple of each, like stoke that you got a few
Speaker 1: fox squirrels. I want the gray squirrel. No, I like
Speaker 1: the gray squirrels eating the dogs. The dogs like the
Speaker 1: fox squirrels. If you think a gray squirrel eats better
Speaker 1: than fox squirrel? Oh yeah, oh for sure. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: guys don't because you can't enough. You can't argue the size, man,
Speaker 1: what what are I know? But the flavor and the
Speaker 1: toughness issue. I think, huh, that's another question for you
Speaker 1: because what I've been starting to do, uh is I'll
Speaker 1: try to grade them, which I think from what I
Speaker 1: think are young squirrels. And if I have a pile,
Speaker 1: I mean I only have three, then whatever, they're all
Speaker 1: going the same bag. But if I've got ten, I'll
Speaker 1: be like, all right, those are like the four old
Speaker 1: tough bastards with you know, nuts as big as your thumb.
Speaker 1: Those are going into the crock pot. And then I'll
Speaker 1: try to be like, all right, those are looking younger,
Speaker 1: and I'll cook them hole on the grill and they
Speaker 1: can be eating that way. I'd almost trade you a
Speaker 1: man of head shot young gray squirrels for almost anything
Speaker 1: else in the woods. I mean it's those are the
Speaker 1: primo those other stuff to receive those sure, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: what you here a turkey breast? Um? Yeah, probably a
Speaker 1: turkey breast. I checked a turkey breast furl for a
Speaker 1: limit of head shot gray. I'm just saying with the chef,
Speaker 1: uh are you with the chef? Jamie Oliver English kid,
Speaker 1: I'm not kid. I don't know how old he is. Well,
Speaker 1: he just got this marinade some recipe book I had
Speaker 1: of his. He's got this marinade where it's like lemon
Speaker 1: and thyme and pulped up time and lemon juice and
Speaker 1: olive oil and whatnot. But I started it was taking
Speaker 1: the squirrels and taking a fork, so so skin and
Speaker 1: squirrel right, piece it out, and then take a fork
Speaker 1: in that back leg. I would jab that fork, yeah,
Speaker 1: times in that back leg, just completely perforate because once
Speaker 1: you're eating you never know that. Like it's not like
Speaker 1: it's full of holes, right, it comes back together perforated
Speaker 1: a bunch of times. And then take the back the
Speaker 1: backstraps and prick them a ton of times, and then
Speaker 1: marinate them and just cook them on a grill. It's unbeatable,
Speaker 1: so nothing like slow cooking. Just cook him on a
Speaker 1: grill and then and then eat the meat off. That
Speaker 1: was I've never done a fox squirrel like that though.
Speaker 1: You need to and then report back. Yeah, because once
Speaker 1: I got onto doing that recipe, I was only in
Speaker 1: gray squirrel areas. Yeah, because I was doing that when
Speaker 1: I was hunting in New York State. In New York State,
Speaker 1: a lot of Eastern grays. Yeah, you have no Western grays?
Speaker 1: Are you a step on the tail and uh, yank
Speaker 1: them off? Skinning tail skin No, I don't any from
Speaker 1: the American South. I am. I know a lot of
Speaker 1: guys who do. I um do the pants and shirt
Speaker 1: you yetta do the passing shirt. But I think as
Speaker 1: I get older and my strength goes, I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to tail skin. But I pass and shirt him. I can.
Speaker 1: I can go right there them pretty good. And you
Speaker 1: use a fights to a cur dog. Um, I use
Speaker 1: a cur dog. It's a smaller cur um. Just one dog.
Speaker 1: I just have one dog. Now. I have some friends
Speaker 1: who I've introduced into it that we hunt together. So
Speaker 1: they're getting dogs too. Oh yeah, there, it's it's total.
Speaker 1: And I was telling my friends at the Department of
Speaker 1: Conservation that there's the three squirrel dog man. Now I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's others. I just don't know him, you know,
Speaker 1: in Missouri. And I'm coming for him to extend the season, yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit longer. So do you think you're gonna
Speaker 1: grow to regret introducing that piece of technology and not
Speaker 1: just keeping quiet about it? Of course not. And you
Speaker 1: know why? It's the kids. It's great grea eight kid hunt.
Speaker 1: I mean you don't have to be quiet. You can
Speaker 1: walk around, you can teach them, uh gun control, walking
Speaker 1: through the woods, crossing fences, um, safety, all of those things.
Speaker 1: It's enjoyable. They're not freezing. Their pet is there so
Speaker 1: they get to pet their dog. Um. I got my
Speaker 1: squirrel dog. I grew up doing it and and I
Speaker 1: got it for the children, and it is. I won't
Speaker 1: regret that as a house dog or outside dog. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm ashamed to say. And the people that know me
Speaker 1: are gonna are gonna it. It gets in my wife's bed.
Speaker 1: It follows her around. Now not my bed. We sleep
Speaker 1: in the same bed, but I don't claim it as
Speaker 1: our bed. She Uh, I get that dog out of
Speaker 1: my bed. I've got it. You know. When I am
Speaker 1: going to get a squirrel dog, I went and picked
Speaker 1: it up from a buddy and Alabama that grows them.
Speaker 1: Uh has some nice squirrel dogs. Had a pen built,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole thing ready, nice kennel I thought
Speaker 1: was good. Even put it up off the ground so
Speaker 1: the dog wouldn't be on the gravels. Had a hay bale.
Speaker 1: I was gonna pitts. And that's not been in the
Speaker 1: pen once. Our friend Kevin Murphy is telling me that
Speaker 1: he recently heard of a squirrel dog selling for twenty dollars.
Speaker 1: Al must be a good squirrel doll, you'd like to think. You, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know that I've seen one that good. So
Speaker 1: you just got yours. When you have a squirrel dog,
Speaker 1: what's the minimum out you can hunt it and still
Speaker 1: have it know what's up. I still haven't know how
Speaker 1: to do it. And it depends on the dog. But
Speaker 1: you know, the more you hunt any dog, the better
Speaker 1: it is, for sure. But when you let's say you
Speaker 1: live in a state where you can't hunt squirrels for
Speaker 1: for five months out of the year, you can still
Speaker 1: put them up. Can't you just not shoot him? The
Speaker 1: dog get tired of that? No, it's in I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like a retriever. If that that dog went on
Speaker 1: the floor there, if you took a tennis ball, probably
Speaker 1: you throw till bring it back to you till he died.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know why, He just likes. He just wants
Speaker 1: to do it. So so you can train, you can run,
Speaker 1: You can run squirrels, and if you don't shoot the
Speaker 1: squirrell out of the tree, the dog doesn't get mad.
Speaker 1: He still thinks he had a good time. Oh, loving it. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: My dog particularly doesn't care to. Some of the dogs
Speaker 1: really want to get the squirrel my dog. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: once the squirrels dead, you could care less it the
Speaker 1: drive is the tree another squirrel. Yeah, I can tell
Speaker 1: you something graphic right now. Okay, our friend Kevin Murphy, uh,
Speaker 1: his squirrel dog. One of them ate the head. That's
Speaker 1: very common. I had a dog Jack that only wanted
Speaker 1: with golden head juice. They only wanted to eat the head.
Speaker 1: I don't know what what that is. They just want
Speaker 1: to crunch their head, all right. Yeah, I thought that
Speaker 1: dog was sick. Now I think it's just a normal dog.
Speaker 1: And then did it just come out of the box
Speaker 1: wanting to hunt squirrels or did you have to try
Speaker 1: to teach it something. No, they Um, you don't have
Speaker 1: to teach it much. Now you mess with it and
Speaker 1: and show a squirrels and and bring it along and
Speaker 1: and but yeah, it's in them, you know. It's like
Speaker 1: a retriever or a pointer whatever. You know, they're they're
Speaker 1: bred to want to be tree dogs, and so that's
Speaker 1: what they do. The hard thing for me is to
Speaker 1: differentiate between yards squirrels and woods squirrels. So, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: mom and the kids, like seeing the squirrels in the yard.
Speaker 1: I gotta wait for for him to leave to then
Speaker 1: those then those down you know, the dogs looking out
Speaker 1: you know, looking out the window, just quivering, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, going crazy and you know so but it's fun.
Speaker 1: And then do you keep a dog for hunting ducks too?
Speaker 1: I don't know, just the squirrel dogs. And let's go
Speaker 1: over and pick up dogs yourself. Yeah, if I'm if
Speaker 1: I'm lucky enough to hit one. You know, do you
Speaker 1: view you're because you grew up hunting and grew up
Speaker 1: around that. Do you view year work now as like
Speaker 1: an extension of that or is it just feel like
Speaker 1: completely different. It's like it's just there's work and then
Speaker 1: there's what you do for fun. It's completely different. But
Speaker 1: the reason I have this job is because of my
Speaker 1: love for the outdoors and hunting and fishing and and
Speaker 1: so what what I do now, Um, the enjoyment I
Speaker 1: get is seeing that my work is going to the
Speaker 1: benefit of of the outdoors or benefit of native washer,
Speaker 1: the ecosystems and those those. Yeah, so this's just just
Speaker 1: an extension of of liking to do that. Do good trappers?
Speaker 1: When do you have a trapper working for you. Do
Speaker 1: all the good trappers have a hunting and fishing background
Speaker 1: or can you just or do you find people can
Speaker 1: just get it and figured out even though it didn't
Speaker 1: grow up doing that kind of stuff? Both? Yeah, yep, yep,
Speaker 1: there's no um uh lot of times the guys who
Speaker 1: grew up and gals grew up doing it are a
Speaker 1: little bit more familiar with it. But you know, we've
Speaker 1: had some people with no background whatsoever and we introduced
Speaker 1: them and trained them and if turned out really top notch.
Speaker 1: And then you mentioned that, so you found that, Um,
Speaker 1: you have men and women that work on the trapping teams, right, yeah?
Speaker 1: And then uh, do the people that trapped do they
Speaker 1: want to stand with it for years? Or is it
Speaker 1: like summer technician kind of jobs? Both? It's uh, it's um,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like you love it or you've you
Speaker 1: after you get a belly full, you kind of want
Speaker 1: to do something else. There's people who have have done
Speaker 1: it their entire career and that's all they want to
Speaker 1: talk about, and it's it's it totally consumes them. There's
Speaker 1: people who do a good job and say, Okay, you
Speaker 1: know I've I've caught enough hogs or or whatever. Okay
Speaker 1: it's or whatever where it is, and they move on
Speaker 1: or they move up into you know, in a more
Speaker 1: of a biologist role, you know, and they work on
Speaker 1: on different things, and you know, it's just natural progression.
Speaker 1: Is it hard to fill the positions? The reason I'm
Speaker 1: asking all these questions that I could picture a lot
Speaker 1: of people that listen to this would be like, man,
Speaker 1: that's the job for me. Yeah, it's it's not hard
Speaker 1: to fill the position at all, um, but it's very
Speaker 1: hard people want that work. It's very hard to get
Speaker 1: people to stay. Everything turns into a job, right, um.
Speaker 1: And so so they think they're gonna be all just yeah,
Speaker 1: a good times. And if you hunt it, if you
Speaker 1: hunt it, if you hunted and then we don't hunt them,
Speaker 1: we we do control work. If you hunted pigs every day,
Speaker 1: you got up and you went to work at eight
Speaker 1: o'clock and came home at five o'clock, and you hunt
Speaker 1: pigs all day long, you're gonna get real tired of
Speaker 1: that real quick. Yeah, not nearly as fun. Yeah you
Speaker 1: got any more questions? Yeah? I did have one. Just now, Um, shucks,
Speaker 1: can't come back to me because I'll tell you one. Uh.
Speaker 1: I started trapping muskrats and my brothers. We were young.
Speaker 1: I was ten when I called my first muskrat, and
Speaker 1: I that I got an all manner. You know. I
Speaker 1: trapped everything for trapping and stuck with it till I
Speaker 1: was twenty two. I set my last you know, when
Speaker 1: I set my last trap with the intent and making
Speaker 1: money on it now and then I'll go catch something
Speaker 1: for making you know, for half mere my wife or whatever.
Speaker 1: But when I found out about that there was such
Speaker 1: a thing as like animal damage control work, for a while,
Speaker 1: I thought that that was the job I was going for.
Speaker 1: Like I would have been would have been some other
Speaker 1: version of events. I would have been one of the
Speaker 1: people sending it an application to check pigs trap pigs.
Speaker 1: It would have been like immensely appealing to me with
Speaker 1: the with the I was a private guy working in
Speaker 1: Colorado and we started just chatting. I was working in retail.
Speaker 1: He's like, you know, we want to you know, have
Speaker 1: pizza or something that there's a pizza point right next door.
Speaker 1: So I then it for lunch a few days later,
Speaker 1: and I was jacked up. I was like, yeah, dude,
Speaker 1: this sounds great, you know, I'll learned all about this.
Speaker 1: And he's like, yeah, it's you know, most of it's
Speaker 1: during like September, October, November, and I was like, hold on,
Speaker 1: that's on the season. I can't be doing that. You know.
Speaker 1: After it was probably mostly a lot of beaver work,
Speaker 1: you know, beaver's messing up, you know, chopping down people's
Speaker 1: pretty aspens in their backyards along all the creeks in Colorado.
Speaker 1: A lot of that, probably some coons. What kind of
Speaker 1: retail are you doing? Selling retail? Closed outdoor cloten shop?
Speaker 1: But I remember my question. Kyletes are kind of a
Speaker 1: new animal here in Missouri, right, No, they've been around
Speaker 1: for quite a while, like more than a couple of decades.
Speaker 1: The new the nude tons of other places. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that. So they've been they've had a foothold here
Speaker 1: for a long time. Yeah, yeah, they've been here for
Speaker 1: quite a while. So people there were kids here in
Speaker 1: the uh sixties, seventies, they were they had coyotes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've been here a long time. Kind of figures as
Speaker 1: part of the what the Eastern migration. But I can
Speaker 1: still follow that up with do you have many conflicts
Speaker 1: with coyotes that you guys deal with. We do have,
Speaker 1: um some some conflicts, not as not as many as
Speaker 1: some of the um Western states, the sheep growers and
Speaker 1: and some of the cattle places. A lot of ours
Speaker 1: or urban conflicts. UM couple get cats getting namt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, um seeing them running around and and you know,
Speaker 1: coyotes can live anywhere, and they do pretty pretty good
Speaker 1: every anywhere they are, so um So yeah, most of
Speaker 1: ours would probably urban. You know, they like to for
Speaker 1: wildlife services anyway. They like that the airport environment. So
Speaker 1: we take some off of airports and those type of things.
Speaker 1: But not as big of an issue in Missouri, UM
Speaker 1: as it is in other states. The Missouri Department Conservation
Speaker 1: does some kay at work. Um, it's not really our arena. Yeah, Brandon,
Speaker 1: you must have been hanging out. But do you have
Speaker 1: any concluders? Any final things you wanted to ask about?
Speaker 1: Nothing to ask about. I think just as a concluder,
Speaker 1: I wanted to just kind of emphasize how complicated conservation is,
Speaker 1: and people always attribute hunting to conservation, but I think
Speaker 1: in the case of the feral hog, that's the opposite.
Speaker 1: And encourage people, especially here in Missouri too, to not
Speaker 1: embrace that culture, because it puts in jeopardy the cultures
Speaker 1: that we truly should embrace, like deer hunting and turkey
Speaker 1: hunting and squirrel hunting, our native species that belong here
Speaker 1: on the landscape, and these hogs don't. And if you
Speaker 1: participate in that um, you're abiding by something that is,
Speaker 1: you know, having a negative reaction on those heritages that
Speaker 1: we hold so dear, you're throwing away or jeopardizing like
Speaker 1: some deep traditions. Yeah, and a functioning landscape. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to manage these forests, you know, we don't
Speaker 1: we don't just let the forest go anymore. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of work that goes into keeping these habitats healthy.
Speaker 1: And when these hogs come in and you know, root
Speaker 1: up spring creeks and and destroy uh species like the
Speaker 1: dragonfly you were talking about, Parker, and ruined habitat for
Speaker 1: other game species that we you know, have such immense
Speaker 1: value on not only recreationally in this area, but economically,
Speaker 1: it's a bad thing all the way around. I wish
Speaker 1: it was possibly to get a better sense of what
Speaker 1: kind of dent they put into turkeys, you know, as
Speaker 1: a ground nesting bird. You know, we hear, we hear.
Speaker 1: People are hard to look at that making the claim
Speaker 1: that you know that they eat a lot of the eggs. Um.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if there's parkers have been a
Speaker 1: study done on that the year where I'm sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's probably uh several studies. But it's let's face it,
Speaker 1: it's it's a hog. It's an invasive species that doesn't
Speaker 1: belong here. So if it eats one turkey nest, it's
Speaker 1: it's too many. Yeah. Sure they're a negative impact on
Speaker 1: on all of our ground nesting birds. I mean they
Speaker 1: root on the ground and you know they take those
Speaker 1: They totally not only you know, you think about it,
Speaker 1: not only turkeys or or quail for instance, or or
Speaker 1: some of those other small you know birds that that
Speaker 1: nest low in the lands, you know, in the forest understore, understore,
Speaker 1: you know, hogs are having an impact on those as well. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, it's an exotic invasive so ones too
Speaker 1: many doesn't belong here. It's not it's not from here,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. What's funny is that the people that
Speaker 1: are trying to bring pigs in and promote pigs as
Speaker 1: a hunting thing. Usually sell it as how they're helping
Speaker 1: with the pig problem, right, and you see all the time. Man,
Speaker 1: you can go online and they'll be like, you know,
Speaker 1: places advertising Texas is overrun with hogs down, Come down.
Speaker 1: Then he realized it's a fenced operation and they're actually
Speaker 1: buying pigs. But but people like that narrative. I think
Speaker 1: it's well, I think I got a bunch of theories
Speaker 1: on it. The thing I found is that this is
Speaker 1: my precluding thought. The thing I found with people people
Speaker 1: who become curious about hunting, not people who grew up
Speaker 1: in hunting culture and hunting community, with people who didn't
Speaker 1: grow up around it, and they become curious about hunting
Speaker 1: and they want to find a way to know it's okay,
Speaker 1: Like they desperately want to go, but they need to
Speaker 1: be told it's okay. Those people are drawn to pig
Speaker 1: hunting because they feel like, oh, you mean I can
Speaker 1: do this, and no absolutely certain that I'm doing the
Speaker 1: right thing, because they're not. They're not already educated on
Speaker 1: the fact that by participating in licensed hunting you're contributing
Speaker 1: immense amounts of resource into wildlife habitat management enforcement. You know,
Speaker 1: disease control. They don't. They don't get that right. They
Speaker 1: need to know that like that they're gonna go like
Speaker 1: by taking a life, they're helping everyone out. And so
Speaker 1: again and again when I've spoken with people who are like, man,
Speaker 1: come on, go hunt and think about doing a hog
Speaker 1: hunt because I understand how they're like a non native.
Speaker 1: You just hear all the time. Man, it's really gotten
Speaker 1: out there in my lifetime as this like as a thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the first time I ever stepped foot, the first
Speaker 1: time I've ever hunted into place that had the possibility
Speaker 1: of having a pig. We're hunting deer. But I sat
Speaker 1: up on my tree, staying the whole time, praying a
Speaker 1: pig came by. Sure, Sure, I was way more interested
Speaker 1: in that than I wasn't a deer. I was like,
Speaker 1: my god, a pig running around in the woods, How
Speaker 1: wonderful that would be. Having no idea about the bigger picture,
Speaker 1: right issue? Right, And you know, you know we're helping,
Speaker 1: we're helping, we're helping. But you know it's I go
Speaker 1: back to the tv UM deal, and you know, they
Speaker 1: passed up three styles and in fourteen little little shows
Speaker 1: to shoot one mature bore, which does absolutely nothing as
Speaker 1: far as population control goes. You know, it's it's just
Speaker 1: it's it's uh, it's in some instance it's just uh,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's far as you know. In some instances,
Speaker 1: I think. I have a friend whose family runs cattle
Speaker 1: in northern California, and uh, one day I was asking
Speaker 1: her father, who lets me hunt wild pigs out there,
Speaker 1: and he complains about them. But one day I was
Speaker 1: asking her father. I said, if you could wave a
Speaker 1: magic wand and have them all be gone, would you
Speaker 1: wave it? He thought about it for a minute, and
Speaker 1: he's like, no, not all of them. He wants He
Speaker 1: wants it his way. He wants just not quite so many,
Speaker 1: but not all of them. Right. So, as much as
Speaker 1: he curses them and shows you where they're all hanging
Speaker 1: out and shows you what they did bad here and
Speaker 1: what they did bad there, there's some part of them
Speaker 1: that just you know, well, I think for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, he just comes down to a natural empathy
Speaker 1: to animals, right, Like you just can't look at it
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, yeah, even though I know all
Speaker 1: this about how bad they are, wipe them out. It
Speaker 1: would be great if they weren't on this continent anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's maybe something, Maybe there's some little nugget of goodness
Speaker 1: residual like like some kind of nugget of goodness, and
Speaker 1: people that just a thing we've learned is that wiping
Speaker 1: things out isn't generally like and it's true, generally speaking,
Speaker 1: not a good idea, you know, And I think people
Speaker 1: carry that in and they don't and they're not interesting
Speaker 1: the nuance of it. But it was funny to watch
Speaker 1: and wrestle with it for a minute. You know. He's like,
Speaker 1: you can't be greedy. Ye, But in Missouri, the goal
Speaker 1: is clear, it is, it is gone. And then what's
Speaker 1: the what's the most likely source. Let's say no one
Speaker 1: brought one in. That's my last question. No one's trucking
Speaker 1: them in. No one's trucking in. They're still walking from
Speaker 1: somewhere from where. Um, we have them in Oklahoma, so
Speaker 1: they can we have them in Arkansas. They can walk
Speaker 1: in from Arkansas in Tennessee. Um, Illinois done a good job,
Speaker 1: so our southern Southern brethren. Before I was born, my
Speaker 1: old man was hunting wild pigs in Arkansas. Mine too,
Speaker 1: So it's never gonna be that this is not a problem.
Speaker 1: It's just gonna be something that could requires constant monitoring.
Speaker 1: And you know, and and some states there they're a
Speaker 1: game animal and they even embrace that. So you know,
Speaker 1: it varies all over, that's right, That's right. So I
Speaker 1: don't even say there's a limited Hony tags, but you
Speaker 1: gotta buy a tag. Limited. Chances are they're not ever
Speaker 1: going to be all the way going from California. But
Speaker 1: you know, may I'll tell you what. People there love
Speaker 1: them hunters, and it's kind of like a it's been
Speaker 1: going on a long time cooping hunting pigs there a
Speaker 1: long time. There's people that that's kind of their main
Speaker 1: thing they hunt. And so one of the funnest pig hunting,
Speaker 1: I hate say this to you, but some of the
Speaker 1: funnest pig hunt I've done, it's been in California because
Speaker 1: you can spot in stalk wild pigs. Yeah, you glass
Speaker 1: them off. It's it's fun. Yeah, it's it's there's no
Speaker 1: arguing that, you know. All right, Well, thank you very
Speaker 1: much for joining us. Good look, Steve, Steve Jones is
Speaker 1: all here the whole time, concluder because he hadn't said anything,
Speaker 1: I know, because he never need were introduced him, but
Speaker 1: I think he's a game chef. Steve Jones has been
Speaker 1: joining us listening in. Well, I had not by plugging you.
Speaker 1: You you post materials about wild Game. Yeah, I got
Speaker 1: killer nams dot com. It's just kind of a small, little,
Speaker 1: uh hobby website. Nothing, nothing monetized or professional. But I
Speaker 1: just started kind of recording the things that I was
Speaker 1: learning about cooking wild game and I just enjoy I
Speaker 1: checked it out. It's good. I'll vouch for it. There's
Speaker 1: some good information on their killer Killer stock. Uh, thank
Speaker 1: you very much. Food. Well, you've got an opportunity to
Speaker 1: come and sing karaoke for Pavaratti here, so I couldn't
Speaker 1: pass that up. So okay, you gotta did you have
Speaker 1: Did you have a thought or question for our guests? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't know as much about the hog
Speaker 1: problem is as Parker and Brandon, but I have been
Speaker 1: reading about it, and I write about it. I'm an
Speaker 1: outdoor writer also, uh, And I would say even though
Speaker 1: I've enjoyed a few hog hunts, I've had some of
Speaker 1: my actually best hunts I've had my life have been
Speaker 1: hog hunts. But there is no doubt in my mind
Speaker 1: that this is absolutely the only, uh correct way to
Speaker 1: deal with a serious conservation problem. If you approach it
Speaker 1: from a concert conservation or land ethic perspective, there is
Speaker 1: no other choice but eradication. And you're able to look
Speaker 1: at it and and hold both ideas in your head
Speaker 1: at once. Absolutely, it's nice to hunt them, just just
Speaker 1: nice to eat them. But they gotta go. Absolutely, they
Speaker 1: got to go go hunt them where they're natural. You
Speaker 1: know where they're where. They're not an introduced exotic. But
Speaker 1: if I could change one thing, because I talked to
Speaker 1: a lot of hunters, the the the everything that the U.
Speaker 1: S d. A aphis is doing is great. Everything that
Speaker 1: the Missouri Department of Conservation is doing is great, except
Speaker 1: they haven't sold or explained the idea about why they
Speaker 1: have banned hog hunting on their own MDC lands Missouri
Speaker 1: Department of Conservation, and that people that that aren't fully
Speaker 1: coached up on all the details, it is counterintuitive. They
Speaker 1: do not get it. Brandon and I talked to a
Speaker 1: pilot a couple of weeks ago who was coming in
Speaker 1: for a landing there with a couple of Farrell hogs
Speaker 1: on the runway and he was railing at us about
Speaker 1: why would the Department of Conservations say you can't shoot
Speaker 1: the pigs. You know, that's just counterintuitive, he was, It's
Speaker 1: the right thing. I just wish they were doing a
Speaker 1: better job of explaining and selling it to the public,
Speaker 1: because well, you know, they've had several of these podcasts
Speaker 1: and webcasts and and call in I put things and
Speaker 1: and I think getting the word out. I disagree with
Speaker 1: you and as much as they they're trying, but to
Speaker 1: get everybody educated, people have to educate themselves to some extent,
Speaker 1: you know. And and you're right, it is counterintuitive, and
Speaker 1: it's difficult, um thing to sell. But you know, I
Speaker 1: think we're the programs in its infancy if you think
Speaker 1: about it. You know, we've been trying to to eliminate
Speaker 1: for US swine for really three years, you know, hardcore.
Speaker 1: And I think as time goes on, it'll I think
Speaker 1: the word will get out. Everything takes time, and that
Speaker 1: messaging and you guys know this probably more more than
Speaker 1: I do that the messaging you just hammered over and
Speaker 1: over and finally it takes hold. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: putting your seatbelt on the kind of thing put your
Speaker 1: seatbelt onto. Your kids, put your seat belt and put
Speaker 1: your seatbelt. Finally they're putting their seatbelt on, and and
Speaker 1: you didn't tell them. They're telling you they put your
Speaker 1: seat belt on. Hey, hogs are bad. Hogs are bad.
Speaker 1: Hogs are bad. Yeah, I think it probably would eventually
Speaker 1: lead to a certain amount of kind of like public shaming.
Speaker 1: Like the more it gets out, the more guys that
Speaker 1: are engaged in their bodies might be like, you know, many,
Speaker 1: we've probably cut it out. That's that's that's working both ways. Though.
Speaker 1: There was just a propaganda meeting down here led by
Speaker 1: a local state representative bringing together people, you know, talking
Speaker 1: about the arrogance of the Department of Conservation and the
Speaker 1: fact that they would ban hunting. Look at our Department
Speaker 1: of Conservation is now siding with anti hunters. I mean,
Speaker 1: the propaganda machine is another huge roadblock to making this happen.
Speaker 1: And now, of course everybody with social media can spread
Speaker 1: just complete half truths and mistruths, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's fighting two battles. It's fighting the ecological battle and
Speaker 1: it's fighting the social battle and trying to get people
Speaker 1: to buy into what needs to be done to protect
Speaker 1: the resources. Good job, Steve. Thank you stirred up a
Speaker 1: whole them. You're like a like a big wall stirred
Speaker 1: off silt mud. All right, man, thank you very much
Speaker 1: for coming on. I know it's probably uh taking away
Speaker 1: from your main thing you'd like to be doing. Not
Speaker 1: too much. Not right now. We can't turkey hunt afterwards.
Speaker 1: We gotta get that change. Yeah, after one o'clock and
Speaker 1: squirrel season should go on after February fift for how
Speaker 1: long until the day before turkey season. Well that would
Speaker 1: mean it's only closed for a month, right, correct, Let's
Speaker 1: just go all your squirrels. Yeah, alright, so joining me. Thanks,