In the midst of a pandemic and all the social distancing that involves, life still goes on out in the boonies, where game wardens ply their trade among the hunters and fishers of Texas.
And since I get their press release reports, I like to pass them on, since you never know what’s going to turn up next in our great state.
One of the current occupations, designed to rid our countryside of marauders, is the hunting of feral hogs, which is not only legal, but encouraged, everywhere.
I have a friend who shoots them and burns their carcasses in a pit on his farm. But that’s sort of a waste, don’t you think? Rumor has it that those big old pigs make great pork roasts.
A game warden in Freestone County was called by a landowner who said he allowed a man to hunt hogs on his land, but the man also killed a deer, which isn’t legal except during the proper season.
The guy said he had shot it by accident. Questionable?
So, he got charged with a bunch of stuff.
In the same county, there were people hunting hogs from a helicopter. And that’s allowed, with proper credentials.
A man and wife were working cattle on their land when the helicopter began to hover and shoot feral hogs. They waved their arms and the helicopter flew away, but the warden found it and filed charges.
If the copter pilot had gotten permission, he probably could’ve bagged all the hogs he managed to shoot.
Somebody needs to get rid of them all because they’re not only tearing up pastures and woodlands but destroying people’s lawns and flower gardens.
One report that I liked said meat from hogs killed by hunters had been given to needy people. That also happens with deer killed illegally.
“Nambia’s health-care system is increasingly self-sufficient,” said President Trump last September, during a meeting with African leaders at the United Nations. No singular slip of the tongue, Trump repeated the gaffe again in a speech whose audience included the presidents of both Namibia and Zambia. Hilarity ensued in the Twitterverse: “Can’t wait for Trump to visit Nambia and their technologically advanced neighbors in Wakanda,” quipped Stephen Colbert. (Wakanda is the fictional home of the Marvel Comics’ character Black Panther.)
Yes, it is funny in the abstract, this malapropism of the dear leader. But whether Trump is ignorant, blind, or demented, he consistently confuses individuals for races, races for nations, nations for continents, continents for contagion, and contagion for individual irresponsibility. That’s why all this is ultimately so unfunny in practice: The Trump administration has cut global development aid, reduced funds for UN peacekeeping in war-torn countries, and urged a “merit-based” system of US immigration policy where “merit” excludes “people from high crime countries which are doing badly” and whose preemptive breadth apparently finds no merit in anyone from “hut”-dwelling Nigerians or from any African country, real or (mostly) imagined.
At the same time, Trump, ever the tone-deaf imperial entrepreneur, just loves Africa’s “tremendous business potential…”: “I have so many friends going to your countries, trying to get rich. I congratulate you. They’re spending a lot of money.”
Sometimes it’s just so hard to know where to begin, but let me follow one small thread—to wit, the entrenched narrative of the Great White Hunter and erstwhile Deliverer of Little Brown Brothers. Indeed, there’s a literal manifestation of this mindset within the extended Trump clan: After a 2011 safari to Zimbabwe where he killed an elephant, a leopard, a crocodile, a Cape buffalo, and oh-so-much-more, our president’s son Donald Trump Jr. wrote of his beneficence: “Bottom line with out [sic] hunters’ $ there wouldn’t be much left of africa [sic].”
This logic may seem opaque to the uninitiated: After all, there has been a 65 percent decline in the population of forest elephants across central Africa just in the decade between 2004 and 2014. In addition, the population of savannah elephants declined continent-wide by 8 percent every year between 2010 and 2014. At that rate, the population will decrease by half every nine years. If Trump Jr.’s wisdom escapes you, it might help to recall the controversy around Corey Knowlton, a man who won an auction at the Dallas Safari Club back in 2014. He bid $350,000 for the privilege of shooting a black rhino, a species close to extinction then, and which may be extinct by now. Mr. Knowlton explained that he was actually helping their survival because he planned to cull only an older cranky bull, giving younger black rhino males the chance to rise to the top of the hierarchy of aggression. It’s the circle of life! Plus, the money would go to the government of Namibia, which needs it to pay its park rangers to protect against poachers, which Mr. Knowlton most emphatically is not. (That would be the circular thinking of life.)
It oughtn’t be so surprising, then, that this past November of the first year of his presidency, Donald Trump Sr. drafted a policy that reversed an Obama-era ban on importing trophies from elephant kills in Zimbabwe and Zambia, using an exception to the Endangered Species Act that permits importation of trophies if “hunting actually benefits conservation for that species.” Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society, describes the arrangement as nothing more than “pay-to-slay,” and, after a great deal of public outcry, President Trump suspended the suspension of the ban, promising a thorough review before making a final decision. As CNN reported on January 9, 2018, “White House officials declined to say whether the review is ongoing, when it might conclude, or when the President’s decision may be announced.”
The thrill of the kill is not just about going on African safari, however. Hunting rare and “exotic” animal populations is a billion-dollar business just within the United States. The Fish and Wildlife Service allows the killing of certain rare or threatened species if game-hunting businesses take measures such as contributing 10 percent of hunting proceeds to conservation efforts. At Ox Ranch in Uvalde, Texas, trophy hunters pay $7,500 to kill a Himalayan tahr, $9,500 for an Arabian Oryx, $12,000 for a sitatunga antelope, $15,000 for a black wildebeest, and $35,000 for an African bongo antelope. “We love the animals, and that’s why we hunt them,” says Ox Ranch’s CEO, Jason Molitor. And according to John Tomecek, of Texas A&M’s AgriLife Extension Service, “Ranchers can sell these hunts and enjoy the income, while doing good for the species.”
More enjoyable yet, Ox Ranch “offers its guests the opportunity to drive and shoot World War II-era tanks. People fire at bullet-ridden cars from atop an American M4 Sherman tank at a shooting range built to resemble a Nazi-occupied French town.”
Elsewhere in Texas, wild boars have been deemed far from extinct. Indeed, there’s an overpopulation of them, at least as asserted by many farmers over whose land they roam. In an act of public-spirited volunteerism, Ted Nugent—hard-rock singer and self-proclaimed guru to Donald Trump—Ted Nugent saved the day. Nugent enjoys “machine-gunning hogs,” as he expressed it. “Pigs turn me on.” Armed with a helicopter and a machine gun he flew over a range spraying a wide arc of bullets down upon on the ground. In a swooping rain of firepower, he killed 455 of the varmints. He had quite a good time, apparently, since he conducted the hunt live on SiriusXM, and dedicated the kill to Bill Maher and “other animal rights freaks.”
It should be noted that there is a law in Texas against aerial sport hunting, but in an efficient economy of public-private exchange, Nugent’s sortie was not considered “sport-hunting,” but rather population control. It’s a view that he and that other happy hunter Donald Trump Jr. share. As does their friend Joe Arpaio, newly pardoned by Trump and newly announced candidate for Senator from Arizona. In 2011, then-Sheriff Joe, in his endless hunt for migrant laborers, launched what he has called an “air posse.” As the word “posse” implies, it was made up of 30 private planes, staffed by “citizen vigilantes and deputies from human smuggling and drug enforcement units,” armed with M-16s and a .50-caliber machine gun. According to Arpaio, “We’re going to use our automatic weapons if we have to, and I’m tired of my deputies having to chase these people and I’m sure the air posse will be able to spot these guys running as they constantly do from us.”
Kafka once observed that “A myth becomes true and effective by daily use, otherwise it only remains a bewildering play of fantasy. For that reason, every myth is bound up with the practical exercise of a rite.” The rite of hunting reminds us that without the Great White Hunter’s money, there’s not much else to Africa. Without a little culling of the herds, feral bulls will ravage everything in sight.
As the wise man said: Myth is always bound up with the practical exercise of a rite.
Though a new Texas law allows hunters to shoot feral hogs and coyotes from hot air balloons, it’s not easy to find a balloonist offering the activity.
“I have never had a phone call from anybody asking to do this,” said Pat Cannon of Lewisville, spokesman for the Balloon Federation of America. “I think that people have not stopped laughing yet.”
The law went into effect Sept. 1, but state permitters, insurers and balloonists say they haven’t heard of anyone planning to hunt hogs from hot air balloons. They point to factors like visibility and difficulty steering that make the activity hard.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has not granted any of the permits needed for hot air balloon hunting, said Steve Lightfoot, a department spokesman. Rob Schantz of Jacksonville, Florida, who heads one of the country’s few balloon insurance agencies, said no balloonists had asked if the activity could be covered under their policies. His agency will not offer coverage for aerial hunting.
Among other logistical challenges, the balloon’s burners make a “horrendous roaring noise,” Schantz said. “It would scare anything away, and if they had a chance to take a shot, you could shoot somebody’s dog or shoot a person.”
The new law, authored by state Rep. Mark Keough, R-The Woodlands, is just one of Texas legislators’ attempts to curb the feral hog population in the state. Called a menace, the estimated 2 million feral hogs in Texas are responsible for about $400 million in damage each year, and their population would grow rapidly if left unchecked. A “pork-chopper” bill – allowing hogs to be hunted from helicopters – has been on the books since 2011, and state officials haveconsidered poisoning the animals with a lethal pesticide.
Lightfoot said department rules that govern hunting from a helicopter are similar to those for gunning from a hot air balloon. Among them is a requirement that there be an agreement with a landowner permitting aerial hunting on his or her property. Lightfoot said Tuesday the department had received one phone call inquiring about the needed permits, but that none had been issued.
Keough said in a statement the new law “will open a whole new industry towards eliminating the growing population of feral hogs in the State of Texas.” After the measure passed both legislative chambers in May, state Rep. John Cyrier, R-Lockhart, wrote a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott saying it could lead to “future catastrophes” without increased oversight of commercial ballooning.
Judith McGeary, executive director of the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, said feral hogs pose a very significant problem to farmers and rural communities, as they destroy land and can carry diseases.
“There hasn’t been a good way to control them,” she said. Hunting from a hot air balloon isn’t expected to be a magic bullet, she said, but it seems like a “reasonable additional tool to add.”
But balloonists and pilots point to numerous challenges that make hunting from a hot air balloon difficult, if not impossible.
First, hot air balloons only fly under certain conditions. Wind, clouds, thermals and time of day are taken into account by the balloonist, and aren’t always conducive to hunting. For example, because balloons float on the wind, they couldn’t circle a pack of feral hogs while the hunters tried to shoot them.
“Let’s just assume you have a herd of feral hogs running one way and … they turn left. The balloon can’t turn left,” said Schantz, the insurance underwriter. “The balloon just keeps going and the feral hogs are off on their merry way the other way.”
For similar reasons, balloons would likely be unable to stop to retrieve the carcasses of shot hogs, said Joe Reynolds, a private pilot in Austin. Because the animals can weigh hundreds of pounds, it would also be difficult to hoist them into the balloon’s basket, and they might exceed the balloon’s load limit, said Reynolds.
Ideally, Cannon said, hot air balloon hunting would take place over land that has a large feral hog population, is owned by one person, and is in a fairly rural area – as balloons must fly at higher altitudes over houses and populated zones. A GPS tracker could help balloonists navigate boundaries that demarcate one property from the next, and make notes of where shot feral hogs fall. The landowner or someone else on the ground could pick up the carcasses.
Still, spotting those property limits from the air can be difficult, Cannon said. If the balloon is accidentally flown over a neighbor’s property, and “somebody points a gun down and shoots and discharges a weapon over that guy’s land,” Cannon said, “he could be prosecuted for that.” Dogs, donkeys or other animals could be mistaken for feral hogs and coyotes from the vantage point of a balloon.
Reynolds, the private pilot, said he’s fielded calls about the activity. But it often becomes immediately apparent “that the reality of it is not going to work.”
“I can’t speak for every balloon pilot in the world,” he added, “but nobody that I’ve talked to is going to try to take any of this on.”
Disclosure: The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. A complete list of Tribune donors and sponsors can be viewed here.
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Shooting wolves and bears from airplanes is once again legal in Alaska’s national wildlife refuges after President Trump signed legislation to allow the hunting of predator animals.
The legislation signed Monday repeals a federal rule put in place during the Obama administration that banned the aerial shooting or baiting of animals with food in order to curb the population of bears, wolves and other predators.
Put in place by the US Fish and Wildlife Service in August 2016, the rule prohibited the hunting of predator animals unless it was authorized by a refuge manager. It also outlined specific times when the ban could be temporarily lifted in order to reduce a predator population if the decision had been evaluated and other alternatives studied.
Former Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe, characterized the hunting tactics at the time as “a withering attack on bears and wolves that is wholly at odds with America’s long tradition of ethical, sportsmanlike, fair-chase hunting.”
Alaskan lawmakers disagreed.
“Not only was it a massive jurisdictional power grab, it clearly undermined the laws passed by Congress to protect Alaska’s authority to manage fish and wildlife upon all our lands,” Alaska Rep. Don Young, a Republican, said in a statement earlier this month when the Senate passed the resolution along a party-line vote. “Alaskans take the management of our lands and wildlife extremely serious.”
USFWS
A map shows the 16 national wildlife refuges in Alaska.
National wildlife refuges cover nearly 78 million acres in Alaska, stretching from the Arctic in the north to the Aleutian islands in the south.
According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the practice of “predator control” was implemented often to increase the population of other non-predatory species, including those that would be targeted by hunters in the refuges.
The ban also prohibited the killing of bears when they were near cubs or dens.
The Center for Biological Diversity criticized the legislation as it headed to President Trump’s desk for his signature.
Becky Bohrer / AP
“This isn’t hunting – it’s slaughter,” government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity Brett Hartl said in a statement. “Killing wolves and bears in this cruel, unsportsmanlike fashion is outrageous, especially in national wildlife refuges that belong to all Americans.”
The Sierra Club also condemned the lifting of the ban.
“Targeting cubs with mothers, baiting, and other extreme hunting measures promoted by this resolution have no place on our public lands,” said Alli Harvey, Alaska representative with the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign.
Alaska’s congressional delegation, however, supported the bill’s passage through the Senate and House to overturn the hunting ban. Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan applauded the change and criticized the Fish and Wildlife Service, which he said usurped the state’s authority.
“Alaskans have been able to maintain these strong and life-sustaining traditions through a rigorous scientific process that allows for public participation and ensures we manage our fish and game for sustainability, as required by the Alaska Constitution,” he said.
Oklahoma could soon join Louisiana and Texas in allowing hunters to shoot feral hogs from helicopters.
| March 28, 2017, at 1:06 p.m.
Oklahoma May Legalize Hog Hunting From Helicopters
FILE – In this Feb. 18, 2009, file photo, the shadow of a helicopter hovers over feral pigs near Mertzon, Texas. Oklahoma lawmakers are considering a bill to allow hunters to shoot feral hogs from helicopters. Aerial gunners are already used to help control feral swine in Oklahoma, but the work can only be done by trained, licensed contractors with support from the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Food and Forestry. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File) THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Oklahoma could soon join Louisiana and Texas in allowing hunters to shoot feral hogs from helicopters.
The Tulsa World (http://bit.ly/2neDl3i ) reports that aerial gunners are already used to help control feral swine in Oklahoma. But that work can only be done by trained, licensed contractors with support from the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Food and Forestry.
Lawmakers are considering a bill to expand the law to private operations.
Under the proposal, private landowners, companies and pilots would have to apply for a state license and be responsible for the activity. But hunters on board the aircraft wouldn’t need a license, nor would they have to provide their names to the state.
The agriculture department says its agents killed more than 11,200 feral hogs, mostly by air, last year.
Best lines: Stephanie Bell, an animal-cruelty director for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said in a statement that feral hogs “should not be sentenced to death simply for trying to forage and feed their own families.” She noted correctly that feral boars were brought to the United States to be hunted for sport before they proliferated across Texas and other states.
(Steve Hillebrand/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service handout)
Securing a Texan’s right to shoot wild pigs from a helicopter may have been Sid Miller’s best-known accomplishment before this week.
The state’s agricultural commissioner hangs a boar’s head and toy chopperoutside his office to remind people of the law he got passed, the Austin American-Statesman reports.
But Miller has never stopped searching for better ways to kill some 2 million feral hogs in Texas that the commissioner accuses of eating newborn lambs, uprooting crops and “entire city parks,” trampling across highways and causing more than $50 million in damage a year.
Miller said he would return his entire research budget to the state. He doesn’t need it anymore, he says, after finding “a new weapon in the long-standing war on the destructive feral hog population.”
It’s called warfarin: the pesticide with war in its name. Pigs eat it. It kills them slowly, often painfully, and turns their innards blue. It’s already wiped out swine herds in Australia, which later banned the product as inhumane.
“If this hog is poisoned, do I want to feed it to my family?” the group’s vice president, Eydin Hansen, asked the Dallas CBS affiliate. “I can tell you, I don’t.”
Stephanie Bell, an animal-cruelty director for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said in a statement that feral hogs “should not be sentenced to death simply for trying to forage and feed their own families.” She noted correctly that feral boars were brought to the United States to be hunted for sport before they proliferated across Texas and other states.
Tyler Campbell, a former researcher with the U.S. Agriculture Department, led the agency’s feral-hog studies in Kingsville, Tex., for several years, when warfarin was first tested on pigs in the United States.
“It was fast-tracked,” he said.
The test results weren’t pretty, he said. Marketed as Kaput Feral Hog Bait, the product is comparable to rat poison — with similar effects.
“They bleed,” Campbell said. Internally and externally, usually for a week or more before they die.
Just as concerning, he said, were difficulties in preventing other species from eating the poison — which is known to paralyze chickens, make rats vomit and kill all manner of animals.
The EPA regulations — which Texas plans to strengthen by licensing warfarin’s use — requires hogs to be fed the poison out of bins with 10-pound lids.
The lid tactic won’t work, Campbell said. Before retiring from government research a few years ago, he saw a study in which raccoons lifted much heavier lids in search of food.
“The wildlife community at large has reasons to have concerns,” he said.
Some people are worried in Louisiana, where officials are considering using warfarin on the state’s population of feral hogs.
Even if only hogs can get to the bait, LaCour said, “they’re going to drop crumbs on the outside.” Those crumbs might then be eaten by rodents, which might be eaten by birds, and thus warfarin could spread throughout the ecosystem.
People should be concerned too, LaCour said: Millions take low doses of warfarin, like Coumadin, to prevent blood clots. Ingesting more from poisoned game could be “very problematic,” he said.
Miller isn’t worried.
The commissioner’s office didn’t reply to requests for comment. But in a statement to the CBS station DFW, he said years of testing prove that other wildlife, or pets, “would have to ingest extremely large quantities over the course of several days” to get sick.
Texas Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller has a plan to kill wild pigs. (Eric Gay/AP)
As for the hunters’ objections, Miller said a blue dye will make poisoned hogs obvious long before they reach the oven.
“If you want them gone, this will get them gone,” the commissioner told the Statesman.
As precedent, he pointed to Australia, where he said warfarin “was used for many years” on feral hogs.
It was — in experiments that concerned government officials so much they later banned its use on grounds of “extreme suffering.”
“It is considered inhumane and its use is being phased out in all states and territories,” reads an Australian government assessment from 2009, shared with The Washington Post by Campbell.
The poison was effective, granted. It proved as apocalyptic as Miller promises, taking just a few months to wipe out an estimated 99 percent of wild pigs in Sunny Corner State Forest during an experiment in 1987.
Other studies described poisoned hogs’ last days in explicit detail: Some were lucky; massive internal bleeding killed them quickly after they ate warfarin. Most suffered for a week or more — one pig for a full month before it died.
“Animals moved only if approached closely and spent most time lying in shelter,” researchers wrote in Australian Wildlife Research in 1990.
Some leaked blood from their eyes or anuses. Many bled internally — sometimes into their joints, causing severe pain. An autopsy revealed one pig’s liver had fused to its stomach.
Being shot from a helicopter, the Australian government concluded, was objectively less cruel.
The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service is still collecting public comments on a proposed rule to limit predator control activities on Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuges. At stake is an opportunity to stop:
• brown and black bear trapping
• brown bear baiting
• the killing of black bears, wolves and coyotes in their dens
• the aerial gunning of bears
An “experimental” study performed under the guise of conservation involved killing 890 Canadian wolves (and other animals) using aerial gunning, trapping, and strychnine poisoning. This research and publication represents the moral failure of the Alberta government, participating universities, the Canadian Journal of Zoology, and the scientists, and it didn’t work. Read More
Exposing the Big Game 