Feral pigs creating problems for farmers, other wildlife

• Wild boars were originally found in North Africa and much of Europe and Asia
• Spanish explorers brought them to North America in the 1500s%3B some feral swine are escaped domestic pigs
• The big problem is that they damage the land%2C consume farmers%27 crops

OWEGO, N.Y. — They mow down young corn stalks, uproot small trees and compete with other wildlife for food.

Now wild boars are breeding in at least six New York counties: Tioga, Cortland and Onodaga, which make their way northward from the Pennsylvania border; Delaware and Sullivan along the Pennsylvania border; and Clinton, at the northeast tip of the state abutting Lake Champlain and the province of Quebec.

"You get complaints of them rooting up lawns, golf courses, big patches of earth dug up. They also root in the woods. We've had hikers go through sections of land and say it looked like a bulldozer went through," said Kelly Stang, chairwoman of New York's Eurasian Boar Task Force and a state Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife biologist. "We've had complaints from farmers in problem areas where corn is up 2 inches above the ground, and overnight half of the crop is gone."

In the forests, "boars really like acorns and hazelnuts and a lot of mast crop that deer and turkeys and squirrels rely on in the fall," she said.

The wild pigs, likely introduced to North America from Europe in the 1500s either intentionally or by escaping from farms, have been rooting around in Southern states for years. Some are recent escapees from hog pens. But only in the past seven years have the animals been detected in New York.

"It's really hard to determine populations. It is an elusive animal," said Justin Gansowski, U.S. Department of Agriculture wildlife disease biologist. They feed mostly in early morning, late afternoon or at night.

Wide swaths of Arkansas, California, Florida, Oklahoma and Texas are affected, according to the National Feral Swine Mapping System, coordinated out of the University of Georgia. But Northern states, including Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, also have pockets of feral swine.

The wild hogs can carry disease, like swine brucellosis and pseudorabies, that can transmit to domestic pigs and cattle.

"We have concerns any time there are feral swine on the landscape," Gansowski said. Adults can weigh 100 to more than 500 pounds. Sows breed as young as 6 months old and produce a litter of four to eight piglets — but sometimes as many as 13 — in a little more than 3 months.

While many states allow hunters using guns and dogs to take as many wild boar as they want, biologists encourage using a baited-cage trap. Feral pigs who hear the gunshots and barking dogs tend to scatter, compounding the problem.

New York officials believe most of the hogs on the loose this state escaped from enclosed shooting facilities, and legislation passed this year will make it illegal to breed wild boar, import them into New York or release them to the wild.

Domestic hogs or Vietnamese pot-bellied pet pigs can do the same damage and multiply as rapidly as Eurasian boars when they're on the loose, Stang said.

"We're not trying to manage it," she said. "We're trying to eradicate them. We're trying to get them out of New York."