Texas House Orders Study Before Using Poison on Feral Hogs

The ‘feral pig apocalypse’ is a costly bureaucratic poisoning boondoggle that will harm wildlife in incalculable ways. There is an obvious alternative: Let the market solve the problem the bureaucrats created, and let Texas’ leaders lead towards a solution that benefits wildlife, habitat and the economics of land ownership.

Feral pigs, according to wildlife and food quality ‘experts’, are unfit to eat because they carry diseases. But, over the last 30 years in Texas, we have slaughtered and tested tens of thousands of animals without finding diseased pigs (don’t confuse parasites with diseases). There’s no telling how many wild pigs have been handled and eaten by farmers, ranchers and outdoorsmen. Who has ever heard of an illness related to that?

Factory farms, on the other hand, are breeding grounds for pig epidemics. The Euros have higher safety standards than we do and they readily accept our free range pork. Instead of feeding rat poisons to wildlife, let us remove regulations and allow landowners to round up our pigs and sell them for cash money to the meatpackers just like we did until Big Agriculture made doing this illegal.

Who opposes this common sense? The confinement pork producers — who are now dominated by the Chinese — and their cronies, our “pure” food protectors, for whom the feral pig ’solution’ is a source of pork (the pun is intentional).

Make it legal and profitable and every youngster will have a pig trap, whereupon the pig ‘problem’ will be history.

NOTE: This article initially appeared on SAExpressNews.com on April 17

The Texas House has approved a bipartisan bill requiring further study before the state’s agriculture commissioner can authorize the use of a poison he’s boasted will trigger an “apocalypse” against the invasive creatures.

Approved Monday 128-13, the measure requires further academic or policy scrutiny on the poison’s effects on the hogs as well as residents, hunters and the environment. A final, largely formulaic vote is all that’s needed to send it to the state Senate.

Texas is home to an estimated 2.5 million feral hogs, which can be destructive to crops and property.

Commissioner Sid Miller has planned to alter state agricultural rules to allow the use of a pesticide called Kaput Feral Hog Lure. It is bait food laced with warfarin, a blood thinner that’s lethal to feral hogs.