Florida is a rich kaleidoscope of wildlife. Some, like the invasive pythons in our Everglades, are unique to our state; the rest are mostly just more abundant than in other states. Deer are everywhere, as are rabbits. Squirrels and wild turkeys keep the hawks, eagles and vultures well fed. Mockingbirds, cardinals and crows could use an air traffic control system. We even have a family of armadillos living behind us in the vacant lot. For the most part they put on a show for us like having a real time David Attenborough documentary parading past our back door nonstop (without the deep British voice, of course).
But the wild hogs, a gift to us from the Spanish settlers that took charge here hundreds of years ago, stop the show when they show up.
At first, they were adorable. A mother appeared with a litter of 4 piglets, all solid black with long skinny snouts and curly tails. There are a few types of feral hogs in these parts, and these were Pineywoods Rooters. Apparently sometimes these are kept as show hogs to enter into county fair contests, and Momma hog and her litter must have known this as she started putting on a daily appearance in our neighbors back yard where they could be easily seen from the street, and they got a regular audience over a couple of weeks. They were all skinny, a result of our overly dry winter not producing enough of their natural diet, the big fat grubs that live 3-6 inches down in the soil, especially under our well-tended lawns. The neighbor on the corner took pity on the little family and fed them.
Ouch.
He became their first victim as a reward for his compassion. That long skinny snout, the “Rooter” part of their anatomy, is a perfect tool for plowing up moist ground to a depth of about 3-6 inches, which exposes the bounty of grubs that live under there. It’s a hog buffet, and momma hog took the opportunity to teach the young’un’s how to find it. Hogs are very efficient at this; their feeding field looks like the work of a professional farmer. Except that our neighbor isn’t a farmer, and he spends more time on his lawn than I spend sleeping.
The hogs became swina-non-gratis and this presented a problem. In deference to the longstanding urban myth, they don’t speak Latin (pun intended) and so didn’t get the memo. And trying to move 100’s of pounds of hogs away from a food source is risky business. For all their cuteness, they harbor an incredible amount of nastiness. Thank God the boars abandon the sow after mating or there could have been trouble only the Sheriff (or anyone with an AR15) could have solved. And that wouldn’t bode well for momma and her brood.
The hogs kept hanging out at the corner house buffet but ventured farther each night in search of more grubs. They found a bird feeder about 200 yards down the street and dug in. They rooted up a bunch of large square pavers in another back yard, rendering a scene reminiscent of the pictures we see of Gaza on a daily basis. They dug what looked like city-engineered drainage ditches randomly throughout the neighborhood. Enough became enough.
We had been traveling for a week and a half while all this hog carnage was taking place and were stunned at seeing it on our return. As yet, our pristine yard hadn’t been touched, maybe because I regularly spread a pesticide that kills the grubs with the intention of keeping the armadillos from turning my yard into a practice putting green with their similar type of hole digging for the same food. But then it started.
Another neighbor texted me that he had seen “the pigs” in our yard a couple of times at night. Then a few “test plows” appeared. They were looking for grubs but not finding. I got a text one evening and ran to get my Bryna pepper ball gun (proudly manufactured in Fort Wayne, Indiana!), a relatively quiet, CO2 powered “less lethal” self-defense pistol that shoots ½” round balls filled with tear and pepper gas.
I loaded mine with “kinetic deterrent” rounds of solid plastic that definitely leave a mark traveling at 300 ft. per second. I chased them out of the yard waving the pistol like a Mexican bandido and shouting up a storm. The largest of the litter, a male, wasn’t terribly impressed by my tirade and stood his ground. I didn’t relent and he finally gave up when I got too close for comfort and fled into the forest. I respected the little bastard for that and decided to name him Dilbert. Don’t ask and don’t judge.
“Ha, that’ll fix ‘em.” I know that pigs are smart, and the sight of a crazy, screaming bearded man with a gun would signal the status of UNWELCOME clearly to them. Sure, it will. “We won’t see them again in our yard” I assured Wendy. Right? Damn right!
I got another text. The were in the side yard. I again grabbed the Byrna. This time I emptied the 5-round magazine at them as I chased them, hitting Momma twice. A few hog squeals and clattering hooves as they disappeared into the forest across the street was what I earnestly hoped would be the last we saw of them.
The next morning, another text, and I’m thinking “Why don’t I just give the Byrna to my neighbor?” I ran out and sprayed another magazine at them to buy a little more time, but it was time to call in the cavalry. It’s illegal to hunt or shoot inside the city limits, and too many neighbors had been witness to this whole spectacle to take covert action (I said don’t judge me!), so we obviously needed a Hog Trapper.
Like almost every other city in America we have Pest Control here in Palm Coast. But the definition of “pest” seems to be reserved exclusively to dogs and cats. If you get a snake up in your lanai, “call the snake guy”, a private firm that will take your (probably non-venomous) menace away for a price (or call me, if it’s a Black Racer I’ll come take it for free and put it in my yard). Same thing for armadillos, or bobcats, or bears, or gators, especially gators. Gators, it turns out, have value, and some of the private trappers will come get those bad boys out of your garage or off your front porch for free. They get paid by selling hides and meat, or occasionally selling a particularly spectacular specimen to one of our many Gator Farms. But we don’t have gators, we have hogs.
Hogs are meat. Why wouldn’t some enterprising trapper come and take them for free and turn them into bacon?
I got my answer from real experience, and I think I’d much rather snare and cage up a gator than a hog any day, even with one arm tied behind my back. Once you snare a gator snout, you render the dangerous end of the deal inert. Then it’s just a matter of muscling a great big lizard into a pickup.
But there isn’t only one nasty end of a hog, and their snouts won’t stay shut when you snare them. And if they get loose, they hold a grudge, bigly. Little Dilbert’s grow up into Big Bad Hogs, but a momma with a litter is far more dangerous.
I easily found a trapper, state certified for his methods and humane treatment, on the Florida Fish & Wildlife website. One of the best in the state works right here in our county.
Chris “Hog Man” Hoons, a local native, has been trapping hogs in the 5 county area for almost 40 years. He builds his own traps (“them for-purchase things ain’t worth crap”) and mixes his own bait, dried corn with “just a little honey” and his secret ingredient, MD 20/20. “Maddog 20/20” should be easily recognized by any Boomer from their teenage years. It’s a highly alcohol fortified sweet wine that puts a body out like a light before ½ the bottle is gone. And the hogs love it. His other weapon is that he’s “a patient man, willin’ to let the hogs do all the heavy work”. I personally witnessed lots of heavy work in the process of setting up the trap, and again when he came back to load the hogs from the trap into a transport cage on his trailer to take them away. It leaves me wondering just how much heavy work those hogs had to do, besides recovering from the 1970’s style hangover they acquire from the bait
Oh, I seem to have skipped the parts about setting the trap and the hogs ending up in there. I called Chris and left a message and he quickly called me back. He had already been talking to another neighborhood man, Dan, whose birdfeeder had been victimized, and who was also friends with the neighbor on the corner, Richard, who had been running the hog daycare in his backyard. Dan was trying to negotiate with Chris to put a trap in Richard’s yard where it seemed like a slam-dunk that there would be bacon in the pan before nightfall (that’s Hog Man talk for, you know, catching hogs). But Richard wasn’t home, unfortunately called away on a road trip to Indiana for a family funeral. I had a ready solution, with my backyard being less than 100 yards from the daycare. I offered to Chris to let him put the trap there. I negotiated the deal with Chris’ wife Mary, $450, and we set an appointment for him to come the next evening and set it up. The $450 sounds kinda pricey, but it’s going to be split 3 ways and is good for “as many hogs as will go into the trap over a 30 day period”. It seemed more than adequate for our needs, especially considering it would cost at least 3 times that to repair our lawns should the curly-tailed oinkers remain on the rampage.
The trap setup is pretty straightforward. It’s basically a large cage with heavy wire on all 4 sides and top and bottom, which is especially important. Remember those plow-snouts? They are also very useful to tunnel out of a trap without a bottom, like those store-bought pieces of crap.
Chris backed his trailer into my back yard and set the trap down, anchoring all four corners with stakes. He rigged up a solar-powered cellular trail cam with a motion sensor to “watch” the door, and a cellular activated release hook that held the door open until Chris determined, using his cell phone to spy on the trap through the trail cam, that the hogs were inside. He triggers the mechanism to drop the door, and voila, “bacon in the pan”.
We were excited to get some bacon in the pan, but by next morning there was zip. Nothing in the pan. I put out a text “Pig Report” to all the principals, and got back pictures from Dan’s backyard trail cam that 4 hogs had been in his backyard that night feasting on bird seed. That’s not fair! We have corn, and honey, and Maddog 20/20! Maybe now that the birdseed buffet is closed, we’ll get lucky the second night.
Nope. On our second morning we awoke sans bacon. On our third morning too, just like that line from Creedence Clearwater’s “Midnight Special”, “ain’t no food upon the table, ain’t no pork up in the pan”. Dan’s trail cam had recorded nothing. We were wondering if maybe the hogs had moved on to greener pastures when we got a report that they were back frolicking in Richard’s daycare diner down on the corner.
Dan’s wife, Sharon, had provided us with a baggie of dry corn to dribble a small trail of treats leading to our trap, and Wendy decided tonight was the night. At dusk we walked down the street to Richard’s, and there were 2 piglets in the daycare. I rattled the corn bag and they instantly came running like a couple of hungry 100 pound feral cats. So, I took this cue and walked back to our backyard, feeling and looking a lot like the Pied Pig Piper. One of the 2 was a large male, and he started getting pretty aggressive about wanting that corn. I kept kicking him away until we got to the trap and he smelled the magic bait mixture, which convinced him to lead his sister into the trap.
Well, we got 2 of the 5, now what do we do? I called Chris. “Just leave them be”, the patient Hog Man says, “momma will be along with the others shortly”. He is watching all this unfold over the trail cam.
And sure enough, here she comes with another piglet, which immediately heads to the bait buffet in the trap. Momma thinks something’s fishy though, and takes her time walking around the trap for several minutes, until she can’t resist the smell of the MD 20/20. She heads cautiously in to partake, and the door falls shut. Chris figures 4 out of 5 is a good haul and assures me the missing piggie will probably show up during the night and push through the trap door to join the others.
Morning comes and no lost piggie. Chris is scheduled to bring his cage and transfer them at noon, and he asks us to hose them down “every now and then” because hogs don’t sweat, the Florida sun is hot, and the hogs are black. We water our piggies hourly, and they love it, squinting and grunting as the cool spray drenches them. They don’t look like sausage so much when they’re smiling at you instead of trying to bite your hand off. We give them the baggie of corn and they gobble it up. It’s pretty obvious they are skinny and hungry and we later find out from Richard that the smallest of the litter hasn’t been seen for a while and has likely died in the forest. For all our talk about pit roasts and bacon, it’s sad and we hope Chris hurries to take them away.
After a much longer day of servicing traps and transporting hogs than he wished, Chris showed up in the late afternoon to haul the brood away and reset the trap. He first assembles the loading ramp.
Transferring the hogs from the trap to the transport cage on the trailer is no easy job. The piglets are all lined up behind mommy for protection, and she is trying to decide which one of us outside the trap she wants to chew the arm off of first. Chris backs the transport trailer up to the ramp, opens the doors on both ends, and starts prodding mommy hog to get up the ramp. She is having none of that and starts charging and snapping at anything put into the trap to coerce her.
Eventually Mary convinces Chris to give up this tactic and he fashions a noose out of a rope. He manages to snag her upper jaw good enough to lead her into the chute and then drags her up into the trailer. The babies instantly follow as if they were one hog, united in support of their leader Mom, and the drama is suddenly over.
We all thought there might be another older litter terrorizing the other end of the neighborhood because Dan had seen hogs on his backyard trail cam, so we left the trap set to see if we can get them too.
The hog trailer disappears into the night, the piggies on their way to a pen in Hastings where they will get antibiotics and corn feed and Mary will remove the three big ticks on mommas ear. Chris and Mary have kept a few of their catches as pets over the years and Mary has been looking on one of these fondly, so who knows?
After a few more days of an empty trap, we came to believe that the hogs seen on Dan’s trail cam were the same that I had lured into the trap, and Chris agrees and comes to take the trap down. It will get placed somewhere else in town because this place, like most of Florida, used to be a huge swamp, and the hogs have been here hundreds of years longer than we have. Palm Coast will continue to rapidly build new housing, and our neighboring swine population will continue to get squeezed down in their territory until there simply won’t be any more bacon to hunt. Before he arrives, a few more visitors come to check out the bait, but we aren’t in the market, so they snack and then move on.
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