Wild boar in Ontario

As much as I love to hunt there is no way I’d want wild boars to establish themselves close to me, they are about the worst case scenario I could think of for a wild invasive species.
 
The way they manage hogs in Texas seems pretty effective in open terrain. They also combine heli-hunting and trapping to knock the hog population down.
Plenty of folks with bucks to spend are havin' fun aerial hunts down there.

 
SHELL SHUCKER said:
The way they manage hogs in Texas seems pretty effective in open terrain. They also combine heli-hunting and trapping to knock the hog population down.
Plenty of folks with bucks to spend are havin' fun aerial hunts down there.

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Heli hunting outfits are often high fence operations where they buy pigs to keep enough on the property to keep hunters happy. Gotta keep a lot of pigs on the landscape if they're gonna be dumb enough to be in the open in broad daylight to be shot from a whirlybird.... plus you know, it's a business, can't sell hog hunts without hogs...

Most of the meat gets wasted too, can't have people in the fields collecting carcasses while the heli is in the air and by the time you land and get over there in the heat of Texas it's too late.

Don't get me wrong, I want to give it a try. Looks like an absolutely amazing experience. But most places doing these are not helping fix the problem. What they have done is make a business out of a problem species and that's good in its own right IMO.
 
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Suther said:
Heli hunting outfits are often high fence operations where they buy pigs to keep enough on the property to keep hunters happy. Gotta keep a lot of pigs on the landscape if they're gonna be dumb enough to be in the open in broad daylight to be shot from a whirlybird.... plus you know, it's a business, can't sell hog hunts without hogs...

Most of the meat gets wasted too, can't have people in the fields collecting carcasses while the heli is in the air and by the time you land and get over there in the heat of Texas it's too late.

Don't get me wrong, I want to give it a try. Looks like an absolutely amazing experience. But most places doing these are not helping fix the problem. What they have done is make a business out of a problem species and that's good in its own right IMO.
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I agree on the meat waste on hunts like these. Numerous states & counties in the US have programs for hunters donating properly treated hog meat to food banks which helps in these horrid times of weather modification. Ye can bet there be lots of factory processed hog meat going into pet & stock feed as well.

We be facing a global starvation agenda at present so I be open to any programs that can help regular folks out, be it grains, beans, meat, veggie or seafood.

I'd like to do a minigun hog shoot meself but me priorities & savings come first.
 
Alex McKr said:
I agree. Night hunting would be one viable option. In some parts of the US, night hunting for hogs is the only game in town. Unfortunately, if brought to Canada, I doubt it would take long before some boneheaded 'road warriors' started shooting up the rural pets and livestock... because they were 'bored' at not seeing and shooting hogs right away. Yes...Some mothers do have them.
Years ago, spotlighting raccoons ( tracked and treed with dogs) was a common way of hunting them at night. Not sure whether that is still practiced. Have seen no recent evidence of it on the farms around here.
I certainly have no objection to night hunting...and there are good thermal optics available for the sport. But.....not optimistic at how it would be received. Especially in heavily-populated and urbanized southern Ontario.
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I've had wild hog meat done on the BBQ at a big party with the in-laws in western NY. It wasn't the least bit different than domestic pork. There's a catch,though. Wild Hog sows or younger hogs are really the best if doing a pig roast. Boars can be absolutely rank and inedible if killed during the breeding season or just plain old. We used to run into a real nasty SOB that was too old to breed every now and then,but,couldn't be approached because it would attack. My grandmother (yeah,I'm a farm kid) used to say "they're brimmin',get rid of it". Grandpa would shoot it,then,fire up the backhoe and bury it deep.
 
Once again thank you to all sharing their views and perspectives on boar hunting. I'm new to this forum and its great to see this amazing community participation.

As a kid in Europe I lived on a farm, and boar was responsible for a great deal of damage, especially on our potato fields. I was too young to participate in hunting but remember seeing them in fields occasionally and I certainly remember eating boar chops and sausage. I've served boar on menus in Ontario but this meat was farmed and supplied by meat purveyors. Seeing a sighting of a wild boar in the Hamilton area made me start this thread, and I'm very glad I did.
 
Alex McKr said:
I can't say what feral hog tastes like but... genuine European('Russian') wild boar are excellent eating. The meat is not "pork". It is darker...with a unique taste of its own. It seems many of the feral hogs roaming the US(and Canada), are actually a cross between wild boar and domesticated animals. So, I suspect the meat might be somewhere in between.
In any case, it might not be such a bad thing to allow hunting the animals. Farmers will be happier. Plus, we get to fill our freezers. The only downside of hunting wild boar is that once hunted, they become extremely wary and adept at avoiding humans. The average white tailed deer, by comparison, is dumber than dirt. So, if the feral hogs are anything like their wild counterparts...good stalking skills and a lot of patience(if hunting from a stand, as in Europe) are definitely a requisite.
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Yes, "real" wild boar meat is different from feral pigs. It's as mentioned darker meat and has IMO better flavor if one shoots the right animal. They are best eating when shot late in the fall after they been feeding on acorn, beechnut and chestnut. Makes for very good cured hams.

And yes, real wild boar is very wary and in Europe mostly hunted from a stand around established feeding areas. This is mostly done during the night with night vision equipment and a can, in order to not wake up the villagers :) If an animal is shot around the feeding grounds the "Rotte" most likley won't come back for several month.

Another way of hunting them is driven hunts which is IMO more effective in clearing out a certain area where they appear to be a pest. Never seen a feral hog running at speeds a razorback will and jumping a 3-4' fence which appears to be not a problem for a 2-3 year old.

They are amazing animals.
 
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HuntingChef: Welcome to the Forum. I am glad you enjoyed this discussion. You will find a wide assortment of experience and expertise from which to tap into. Some very knowledgeable folks here.
 
Landowners (or agents acting on their behalf) have the right to protect their property from damage caused by pigs, including for the purpose of maintaining biosecurity.
 
Does no one remember the wild Boar hunt business that was north of Hamilton.
They had top quality German bloodline hogs available to hunt on their fenced property.
They were forced to close and rumour was that the owner let loose his remaining hogs
 
Suther said:
Hunting does multiple things. Dispersion is a major one, you simply cannot reliably kill them all via hunting, if you could they wouldn't be considered such a major problem. Educating them to fear humans is another, pigs have little issue going nocturnal to avoid us. The science on this is not at all dubious. If you want hogs gone, you need to trap them. Entire sounders, in one go. It is NOT easy work, and the people with the skills to actually do the job successfully is a very small number.

Another major problem is people LIKE TO HUNT HOGS. That means people do #### that they shouldn't (from an ecology standpoint at minimum, usually from a legal standpoint too) so they have huntable populations. Things like feeding them and transporting them to new areas. Hogs didn't walk from Texas to Pennsylvania, someone gave 'em a ride in the back of their truck...
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I simply don't believe 'the government' has the resources, let alone skill set, to make trapping entire sounders the solution to the invasive hog problem.

burnsy56 said:
My deepest sympathy goes out to land owners.
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100% & this hunting ban, I believe, is part of the problem.
 
The reason people trap is because they don't want to actually walk and hunt, and you can sell the love pig just as if it's another piece of livestock to someone selling pig hunts.

The idea that killing them is useless is so dumb. Can it or can it not breed again after I've killed it? Explain how letting every one live makes their population go down to zero?
 
Jay said:
I simply don't believe 'the government' has the resources, let alone skill set, to make trapping entire sounders the solution to the invasive hog problem.



100% & this hunting ban, I believe, is part of the problem.
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I agree. That concept will work fine until the population explodes to the point where government programs can't possibly keep up. After that,the damage to agriculture will become horrendous. Farmers will be screaming bloody blue murder,citiot hikers and bird watchers will be terrified to go into the woods (with good reason,too,because those hogs are damn nasty). That's what will drive politicians to enact hunting schedules as a form of mitigation.
 
Jahnj0584 said:
The reason people trap is because they don't want to actually walk and hunt, and you can sell the love pig just as if it's another piece of livestock to someone selling pig hunts.

The idea that killing them is useless is so dumb. Can it or can it not breed again after I've killed it? Explain how letting every one live makes their population go down to zero?
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Hunting in many states is VERY liberal with regards to hogs, especially on private land. And yet, the population has tripled in the US since the 80s and are now found in twice as many states.

Recreational hunting can't get it done. Pigs cause $500M+ in crop damage yearly in Texas alone. If hunting was so effective you'd think farmers would have caught on by now??

The issue is not "will hunting lead to dead pigs?", the issue is "will hunting have a net benefit on the problem?" and there is a lot of work that has been done that shows the answer to that is likely no, especially if you don't want the problem to spread.
 
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Suther said:
Hunting in many states is VERY liberal with regards to hogs, especially on private land. And yet, the population has tripled in the US since the 80s and are now found in twice as many states.

Recreational hunting can't get it done. Pigs cause $500M+ in crop damage yearly in Texas alone. If hunting was so effective you'd think farmers would have caught on by now??

The issue is not "will hunting lead to dead pigs?", the issue is "will hunting have a net benefit on the problem?" and there is a lot of work that has been done that shows the answer to that is likely no, especially if you don't want the problem to spread.
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Any source for this work that has allegedly been done ? Was this done by the government ?

I wonder how Europeans handled the issue over the last 1000+ years. Probably the Romans were given out government contracts for studies on how to deal with boars, lol.

Hunting boars when done right will keep the numbers down there's no question about it. The net benefit is less destroyed crops and meat on the table.
 
Suther said:
Hunting in many states is VERY liberal with regards to hogs, especially on private land. And yet, the population has tripled in the US since the 80s and are now found in twice as many states.

Recreational hunting can't get it done. Pigs cause $500M+ in crop damage yearly in Texas alone. If hunting was so effective you'd think farmers would have caught on by now??

The issue is not "will hunting lead to dead pigs?", the issue is "will hunting have a net benefit on the problem?" and there is a lot of work that has been done that shows the answer to that is likely no, especially if you don't want the problem to spread.
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I can grant your points in regards to a boar population that has already reached a certain population level - once they reach a certain level, hunting is simply insufficient.
But logic demands that hunting can absolutely be more effective with a smaller or nascent population.

I mean, just game it out: if the very first wild boar to enter ontario is shot by a hunter on day 2, hunting will have absolutely solved the wild boar problem.

If we had a population of 2, hunters could easily kill both of them, and then the problem would be solved.

If the population was 3, then of course hunters could still kill the entire population, even with canadian magazine limits.

I could continue counting like that, but i'm sure you get the idea, right?

Now, in texas where the boar population is 2.6 million, obviously hunting is insufficient to resolve the problem.

So somewhere between 3 and 2.6 million is a line, before which hunting can be an effective solution, after which it is not.

Since ontario is surely on this side of that line, it makes sense to me that hunting should be used at this point so that it may be an effective solution while it still has the capacity to be so.

For that matter, even if we had passed the point where hunting along would be capable of resolving the problem, to my mind that simply means that additional population control measures should be added to the arsenal to supplement hunting.

The idea though that, even in that situation, hunting would contribute to the problem rather than the solution simply defies sense. The problem is excessive boar. The solution is killing boar. Hunting, i.e. the killing of boar, is therefore by definition part of the solution, even if it is an insufficient part. To argue otherwise would be to say that squirting water on something is not part of the solution to the problem of them being too dry: even if your squirt gun is small and insufficient, they are still necessarily becoming less dry with every squirt you make.

(Gosh, worst analogy yet).

I have heard the various arguments put forth by experts - about boars adapting and spreading in response to hunting - and frankly i'm just not buying it. They sound like the kind of arguments some sheltered urbanite would come up with sitting there thinking in their office. That's not the kind of argument that comes from real experience. In real experience, every dead boar is absolutely one less boar that's a problem.

I suspect, as do many others, that these expert arguments about how hunting is supposedly counter productive come from such people and reflects their already existing anti-hunting bias. Show me passionate and experienced hunters who make the same argument, and i'll find it a little more credible. Till then, it's just more of the same anti-hunting drivel that we've heard many times before.

Bottom line, i think that before the population explodes, hunting can be an effective solution, and after the population explodes, hunting may be insufficient and therefore additional measures will also be necessary, but hunting will still never hurt.

The current ontario ban reflects toronto-based anti-hunting bias more than scientific facts.
 
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