Wild hogs are devouring SC’s countryside. Are hunters making the problem worse?
The loss of her family’s corn crop two years ago still causes Rachael Sharp to wince when she thinks about how it happened.
Feral hogs rooted up the Sharp’s freshly planted corn fields and devoured the seeds. Then, not a week after her family planted a second crop to replace what had been lost, the pigs came back and feasted again.
All told, Sharp lost more than $116,000 as a result of the damage wild pigs caused on 224 acres of corn in Allendale County. But what really bothers her is why the hogs were there in the first place.
“There are people in the middle of the night who have trailers and they’re going out and letting hogs loose,’’ Sharp said.
State wildlife officials say Sharp is right. Unsavory hunters are illegally stocking the woods with hogs so they’ll have something to kill for sport — and that’s causing problems for farmers, foresters and nature preserve managers from the Lowcountry to the Foothills.
South Carolina has an estimated 150,000 wild hogs roaming the countryside, rooting up forests, eating crops and creating a general nuisance. Each year, they cause $115 million in damage to South Carolina’s landscape, the S.C. Farm Bureau reports.
Feral hogs are such a concern that South Carolina officials are pushing for a change in state law that would make it easier for wildlife officers to charge people who illegally transport pigs. The bill is pending in the Legislature and will be discussed Wednesday, March 10, by a Senate subcommittee.
Charles Ruth, a Department of Natural Resources big game expert, said the movement of feral hogs into many parts of South Carolina shows that it’s more than just natural reproduction at work.
Rogue hunters are continuing to turn hogs loose, despite years of state efforts to stop them, he said.
“The expansion we’ve seen in the past 15 to 20 years is primarily related to transport and release, ’’ Ruth said.
In some instances, live hogs are being brought in trucks or trailers to South Carolina from other states, then released, Ruth and DNR wildlife officers say. In others, hogs from one part of the state are being transported to areas of the state that once had few wild pigs to hunt, Ruth said.
Statistics on feral hog populations by county were unavailable last week, but DNR maps — based on reports of hog sightings — show multiple places where wild swine are more prevalent. Areas that had relatively few wild hogs in the early 2000s are now having to deal with the porkers, DNR records show.
Not everyone is sure that hunters are a key reason for the state’s pig expansion problem, but Ruth points to Allendale County as a prime example of a place where hogs are released into the wild.
In 2005, feral hogs in the small, rural county were confined to the Savannah River floodplain, along Allendale’s western edge, the agency’s hog distribution maps show. But by 2017, they had been found across all of Allendale County, the maps show.
“Why for hundreds of years had those hogs really not dispersed or expanded out of that flood plain, then suddenly since the late 1990s, early 2000s, they are more in the interior of the county?’’ Ruth asked.
Wild pigs have existed since at least Colonial times in the swamps and forests of the Lowcountry, the result of escapes or releases of the animals, according to the DNR.
Some remnant populations also have occurred in other parts of the state, including the offspring of a population that escaped a North Carolina hunting enclosure in the early 1900s and wandered into the South Carolina mountains, the department says.
Still, most of the northern and western parts of the state had relatively few hogs until recent years.
Now, counties like Anderson and Abbeville have hogs in many places, DNR swine distribution maps show. Other interior counties, including Chester and Fairfield north of Columbia, had few hogs in 2005. Today, chunks of those counties report wild pigs, the DNR’s maps show.
Davis Peeler, a dairy farmer from southern Anderson County, thinks wild hogs might be moving away from the Savannah River to farms looking for food.
Peeler said he’s killed hundreds of hogs on his property in the past decade. Despite his efforts, not all of the hogs are being stopped. They will eat winter rye grass that he grows and sometimes cause problems for his cattle, Peeler said.
In one unsettling instance several years ago, a pack of wild hogs surrounded and attacked a calf on his farm, he said. After receiving a call from a frantic farmworker who witnessed the attack, Peeler said he found the gruesome aftermath.
“It was a calf mangled up, halfway eaten,’’ he said. “I saw the carcass.’’
Peeler told The State that he knows of a neighbor, now deceased, who acquired a Russian or European boar and began breeding pigs to be used for hunting.
“He bought, bred, trapped and raised them to generate income off of hogs,’’ Peeler said.
Bo Martin, a veteran pig hunter from Cherokee County who specializes in killing hogs for landowners, said he has not run across anyone illegally releasing pigs, so he’s not sure how widespread the practice is. But he agreed the animals have found new homes.
“We’ve seen and caught hogs in places that have never ever had hogs before; they’re not natural to the habitat,’’ he said. “How they are getting there, I have no earthly idea.’’
Sharp, the Allendale County farmer, said she suspects pigs are being released on some hunting preserves that advertise nationally. Hogs then leave the property, she said.
“These people are making money off of bringing these hogs in,’’ she told The State. “They guarantee one hog. Someone might come in from Minnesota and pay them $400 to kill a hog. There’s an industry and money in this for people.
“Somebody is going to get hurt economically. It’s just who it is going to be. Currently, it’s the farmer.’’
The DNR’s Ruth said the range expansion of wild pigs in Allendale County has had local residents “raising hell about a couple of hog-hunting operations.’’
At this point, it isn’t publicly known how many illegal pig haulers are operating in the state or whether it’s organized. DNR officials declined to identify any suspects they believe are fueling the expansion of hogs. The agency also did not have data to show how many pigs are released illegally each year.
But the department said some people are escaping prosecution for unlawfully transporting hogs. Agency officials blame a weakness in state law.
Even though it is against the law to transport and release hogs without a permit, DNR officers have to see hogs being trapped and set free before they can make arrests, officials say.
Pig plantations
A recent study by researchers at the University of Georgia identified 154 commercial hog-hunting operations in 14 states, mostly in the Southeast. In 2017, South Carolina had 22 wild-pig hunting outfitters, ranking it third behind Florida and Georgia of the 14 states, the study found. South Carolina had some of the highest numbers of pigs harvested, the study said.
Georgia researchers, who based their work on internet searches and surveys of commercial pig-hunting operations, said the impacts of “ill-advised and perhaps illegal’’ transport and release of wild pigs should not be dismissed.
“Outfitters may contribute to movement of wild pigs as they seek hunting opportunities for their clients,’’ the study said.
The average price for a hog hunt in the Southeast was between $400 and $500 per hunt, the study said. Hog-hunting operations offered some hunting in fenced areas, but others did not, the study said.
Tom Naumann, who runs a preserve in Chesterfield County that offers hog hunting, said he’s never brought in pigs for hunters to kill because his swine population is self-sustaining. But Naumann said the practice of transporting and releasing hogs has been used by others.
“There have been lodges through the years I’m sure that have supplemented their population by releasing hogs,’’ he said.
Nationally, wild hogs have expanded beyond the bottom lands of the Southeast to hills and desert areas across many states, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. An estimated 6 million are wandering through a majority of the states, causing an estimated $1.5 billion in property damage nationally each year, according to the USDA and the recent University of Georgia report.
Feral pigs are a destructive force because they will eat almost anything and they reproduce prolifically. Males, on average, are about 220 pounds, while females are 155 pounds, according to Mississippi State University. But the animals can grow much larger. In some cases they’ve reportedly approached 800 pounds.
Federal and state officials have launched multiple efforts to stop the march of hogs, including shooting pigs from helicopters and developing poisons to knock back populations. In South Carolina, the federal government, for instance, traps and kills hogs in places like Congaree National Park.
“Range expansion over the last few decades is due to a variety of factors, including their adaptability to a variety of climates and conditions, translocation by humans, and a lack of natural predators,’’ according to the USDA.
The bill before the Legislature would bolster state laws that ban the illegal capture, transport and release of wild pigs. It would allow state wildlife officers to charge people who don’t have proof the hogs they are hauling are being transported for legitimate reasons.
People hauling hogs would need a bill of sale, identification from the state veterinarian’s office or other paperwork, the bill’s proponents say. Otherwise, the state could issue a $1,000 fine and revoke the person’s hunting privileges, Ruth said.
“It’s an effort to tighten the law,’’ Ruth said. “Right now, from an enforcement standpoint, the case has to be made down in the woods because, as soon as the bad guys get the pigs in a trailer, then all bets are off if they’ve got their stories straight.’’
Hog-scarred land
Not everyone has expressed enthusiasm for the change in the law. Some small farmers have raised concern that it could land them in trouble for trying to conduct legitimate business, such as taking pigs to a customer. Legislators have modified the bill in an effort to resolve those concerns.
Questions have also surfaced about forcing people to prove their innocence by showing paperwork, rather than the government having to prove their guilt.
But the S.C. Farm Bureau, one of the most powerful lobbying forces at the Legislature, supports the bill because of the troubles farmers are having with feral pigs rooting up crops and causing a general nuisance.
The Farm Bureau has put together a web page called “Halt the Hogs’’ that features video testimony from farmers who say their livelihoods are threatened by the voracious porkers. Among those featured on the web page are Allendale’s Sharp and Anderson’s Peeler.
Aerial footage provided by the Farm Bureau shows crop fields with so many hog tracks the land looks as if someone had used a backhoe to dig up the earth. Some fields resembled moonscapes, with craters in the ground.
State Rep. Sylleste Davis, R-Berkeley, said some farmers have told her they won’t plant certain fields because the hogs are so devastating. But she said the advance of hogs across the landscape is affecting more than farmers.
The agriculture department reports that wild pigs are hurting rare species. In Florida, one agriculture department report says wild hogs contributed to a reduction in 22 plant species and four rare species of amphibians. In South Carolina, hogs on North Island near Georgetown ate thousands of rare sea turtle eggs before hunters successfully knocked back the population, The State has previously reported.
Forests also are being affected. The Francis Marion National Forest, for instance, is having difficulty managing the woodlands because of hog damage to the ground, Davis said during a recent House subcommittee meeting.
Hogs make it difficult to set controlled fires to clear out forest underbrush and they can destabilize the soil with their rooting, which causes soil erosion, according to Davis and the book Ecology and Management of a Forested Landscape.
She and Ruth said the new legislation could help the state make a dent as part of an “all hands on deck’’ effort to stop the devastation from feral pigs.
“We just have to try lots of different ways .... to control this,’’ she said. “This bill is just one small piece of that. This bill does not fix the problem. It’s just another arrow in the quiver.’’
This story was originally published March 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Wild hogs are devouring SC’s countryside. Are hunters making the problem worse?."
