The Essig Approach to Invasive Pigs

I really shouldn't be spending this much time blogging today when I have a book to finish in the next couple of days. But I saw this piece in the New York Times about feral pigs today and I've got to weigh in on it.



Mark Essig is right about some things and wrong about some others. Or at the very least he has failed to make an adequate argument in support of his points.



Essig is correct about the scope of the feral pig problem. He's also right about the fact that some hunters have trapped pigs and deliberately released them elsewhere in order to create a new huntable population.



Most hunters hate it when this is done. Feral pigs compete with the whitetail deer that are usually a preferred quarry. They eat the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds that hunters want to see survive. Turkeys, quail and pheasant are all put at risk when pigs show up. Mainstream American hunters do not like having pigs in their backyard. Essig is right that more of an effort should be made in the hunting community to stop the people who are peeing in our pool.



I've hunted pigs in several different states and I've observed the USDA approach versus just letting hunters shoot them. Letting the hunters shoot them seemed to work much better. Programs left to the wildlife officers that Essig mentions often (though not always) devolve into decades-long research studies that never seem to get around to serious eradication.



Essig and I probably agree on most points regarding invasive pigs but I think that he's really strayed from logic in his statements against Rick Perry and shooting pigs from helicoptors. I'm not a fan of Governor Perry either but that doesn't excuse me from building a rational case against his policy on pigs. I really have a problem with Essig's statement that:

"However politically advantageous mixing helicopters and guns may be, what we might call the Perry/Barr approach to wild pigs won’t work."

Really? I'm not aware of some huge block of helicopter owning/pig hating voters who are ready to swing New Hampshire or Iowa into Perry's camp. I don't see how Perry's signing of that aerial hunting bill is especially politically advantageous and Essig made no effort to explain it.



Moreover, Essig is arguing against a straw man. When did Rick Perry -- or anyone else -- ever indicate that shooting pigs from helicopters is the whole solution to the pig problem? He didn't. Nobody did. Every invasive pig shot from a helicopter is one less pig. Of course it will help the problem. The question is over how much it will help.



I might as well say that the Essig approach to wild pigs won't work. We can't talk the pigs out of existence. But I suspect that Essig doesn't believe that communication and education is the entire solution any more than Rick Perry thinks that helicopters are the entire solution.



Essig fails to present a single shred of information or proof in support of his thesis that aerial shooting of pigs will not work. The closest that he comes in his piece to taking this head-on is when he states that "...aerial shooting is unnecessarily cruel because it often wounds rather than kills."



Whether it is cruel or not is a separate issue from whether the practice works. Essig is fuzzy about this. If it doesn't work, please cite a study or at least some sort of anecdote. If the practice really is especially cruel then Essig should provide some evidence for this. Is there a study he can point to that shows a dramatically higher percentage of wounded rather than killed pigs resulting from shots from helicopters rather than other types of hunting? Personally, if I was writing this piece in the New York Times and I had any evidence to support my point I probably would have used it.



Don't get me wrong -- maybe the rate of wounded animals really is astoundingly higher. It sounds plausible. 'Truthy', one might even say. But when you are making a case for and against a specific set of wildlife management plans on a platform as big as the New York Times I think that a higher standard than 'sounds plausible' is called for.



I don't want to be too hard on Mr. Essig. Removing invasive species is a very big topic laden with competing ethical conundrums (or is that conundri?) and a vast minefield of technical and ecological issues to sort through. It is very hard to weigh in on the subject of hunting invasives without stepping in metaphorical dog crap if you haven't spent a lot of time studying the topic and hunting the critters in question. I'm sure he'll get better at it.



[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers.]