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+--- Thread: How to poison feral hogs - and only feral hogs (undermining swine survival) (/thread-10335.html)
How to poison feral hogs - and only feral hogs (undermining swine survival) - C C - May 15, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/05/poison-feral-hogs/618902/
EXCERPTS: . . . There are currently no poisons that can be legally used in the United States against wild hogs, but not for a lack of options. For nearly a century, scientists have investigated chemicals that can fell big, vertebrate pests—particularly feral swine. The animals have become a growing scourge across the country, with as many as 6 million of them causing enormous damage to crops, livestock, and native habitats from North Carolina to California and Texas to Florida. “When you have a grossly overabundant species, the kind of damage they can do is huge,” VerCauteren says. “Sometimes you have to remove the animals to solve the problem.”
Wild hogs pillage cornfields, forests, and cemeteries, leaving behind messes that look like the work of angry asteroids. Between destruction and control costs, the animals cost the country at least $1.5 billion annually, according to the USDA, though ongoing research indicates the actual figure is considerably higher. Analyses of the hogs’ stomach contents and feces show that they eat almost anything, including tree stumps, small vertebrates, sea-turtle eggs, amphibians, baby goats, turkey eggs, turkey hens, and young deer—“anything containing carbon,” VerCauteren says.
But feral hogs don’t wreak havoc in a vacuum. What they eat, other animals like raccoons and bears also eat; and when they die, other scavengers may eat them. Poisoning is a vastly complicated undertaking that requires knowledge of not only what the animals eat, but also when they eat, and where they go, and what other animals are around. It’s a quest that scientists like VerCauteren will solve with not just biology and chemistry but also engineering and technology informed by game theory and risk calculation.
How do you find something that will kill a hog, and only a hog? “You want it to be effective, you want it to be humane, and you want it to only kill what you want to kill,” VerCauteren says. But hogs “are smart, they’re risk averse, and they don’t want to die. If there’s a signal that it could be dangerous, they’ll pick up on it.”
[...] In 2014, the EPA issued Poche a permit for Genesis to test warfarin in Texas, authorizing the first field test of a hog-targeted toxicant. Poche’s group used a warfarin bait called Kaput ... Richard Poche’s group added a fat-soluble tracer to the poisoned food that colored the dead animal’s innards bright blue to alert hunters that the hog had ingested the poison (and to avoid eating the meat).
[...] One of the complainants was the Wild Boar Meat Company in Hubbard, Texas. The company processes wild hog meat for pet food, and it pays hunters for every carcass—alive or recently killed—that they bring to the shop. Its owner, Will Herring, estimates that since it opened, the company has processed 800,000 carcasses.
Herring says he isn’t opposed to poison, but maintains that Scimetrics, Kaput’s manufacturer, didn’t provide enough information to ensure the product was safe for other animals or the environment. “There were quite a few details not disclosed,” he says, “like how effective it was, or how much it costs.” It wasn’t clear, he adds, how the product would affect the food chain. In March 2017, just a month after the state gave warfarin the green light, a judge blocked its approval...
[...] The leading alternative to warfarin is sodium nitrite, the compound that killed a cluster of small birds in the northwest Texas trial last year. In its crystalline form, sodium nitrite looks like a yellower cousin of table salt. It occurs naturally in arugula, beets, and other vegetables; in concentrated doses, it’s used to cure sausage and bacon.
When a hog eats sodium nitrite, the salt triggers a condition called methemoglobinemia, which means red blood cells stop delivering oxygen to tissues. Inside the body, the blood darkens. The animal stumbles. “They suffocate from the inside,” VerCauteren says. “They get lethargic and lay down and go to sleep. It puts them in a coma, and they don’t wake up.”
[...] during the Texas tests in 2018, the scientists discovered more than 170 dead birds and eight dead raccoons. “We were killing those birds,” VerCauteren says.
Clearly, there was a spillage problem. The researchers continued to tweak the bait [...] they ran another field test in Texas. By this time, VerCauteren says, they’d reduced the total spillage to a fraction of what it had been before. They were confident, totally convinced, that no animals could get in. There were no crumbs in sight.
But again, they found dead birds.
[...] The fourth experiment tested what was essentially an inflatable snake that danced above the bait box, called a Scare Dancer. With a 96 percent reduction in bird visitation, the Scare Dancer emerged victorious. In June, VerCauteren ran another field trial in Texas, combining the bait boxes with the inflatable snakes, and didn’t find a single dead bird. After reviewing the data, the EPA gave VerCauteren the green light to launch two larger field tests this summer, returning to Alabama and Texas. A commercially available sodium nitrite–based bait is likely at least three years away, he predicts.
Finding a hog poison that can clear all the hurdles would be a welcome weapon, says Beasley, the University of Georgia researcher. “There’s no one approach that’s going to work in all situations,” he says. “Each individual hog, each local population, responds differently to different control measures.”
“A toxicant is not a silver bullet,” he adds. “It’s just another tool in the toolbox that people have to control pigs.” (MORE - missing details)
RE: How to poison feral hogs - and only feral hogs (undermining swine survival) - Syne - May 16, 2021
You know what is a silver bullet? A bullet. Incentivize more hunting and quit demonizing AR-15s, which are very suitable hog hunting guns.