Randy Kelley was in his deer stand near Camden 22 years ago when he spotted an 8-point buck and two does feeding nearby.
He watched for a moment and then saw a female feral hog with piglets attack the buck. The hog ran the deer off, and Kelley shot and killed the sow with his rifle.
“Ten minutes later, Daddy came back with 40 hogs,” Kelley said. “They were bad back then. They’re worse now. If you have four or five feral hogs around, you’ll have 40 or 50 in no time.”
The feral hogs, a breed so despised in Arkansas that state lawmakers once passed legislation to disassociate them with the University of Arkansas Razorbacks mascot, root fields, tear up crops, break irrigation pipes and cause massive mayhem to farmers. According to the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, the hogs can cause up to $41 million of damage to farmland a year.
And they are seemingly everywhere.
Seventy-three of the state’s 75 counties have reported “extremely high” rates of feral hogs. Only Clay and Lonoke counties are considered “unsustainable” for the critters, and unofficial counts show they are not overwhelming the areas.
There is no real way to count them. The pigs reproduce quickly, and they are highly transient — one captured hog fitted with a tracking device traveled more than 100 miles to return to his herd when released.
The problem has gotten bad enough that hunters are taking to the air, using helicopters to track the hogs down and pick them off like aerial snipers in an action movie. They are also blasting the hogs with dynamite.
The animals are smart, however, said Becky McPeake, an extension wildlife specialist with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. Shoot one hog, and the rest scatter. They also remember the area and the sound of an approaching helicopter the next time.
“They are an issue,” McPeake said of the hogs, “and they will continue to be an issue.”
McPeake serves on the state’s Feral Hog Task Force, which is charged with finding a solution to reducing the state’s feral hog population. Feral hog hunting is prohibited on public lands in Arkansas, but officers from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Forest Service sometimes trap on state lands.
“It doesn’t make sense not to trap,” McPeake said. “You can trap five, 10, 20, even 30 at a time. You may be able to shoot one or two before they scatter.”
Captured hogs are “dispatched,” or killed, she said. Some farmers can keep the dispatched ones for food, she added.
“They are a problem,” she said. “They root up the land, they consume plants, they chew on bulbs and roots, and they wallow in water, causing water pollution. They eat acorns and compete for food with other wildlife. They take up space for other natural wildlife.”
They are also resilient to cold climates. Wildlife officers found feral hogs surviving in temperatures below 30 F in Canada. The hogs do not sweat and can’t thrive in temperatures above 96 F unless they submerge themselves in water, so hogs often destroy farm ponds by basking in them during hot days.
Kelley’s first encounter with the feral hogs in the deer woods in 2002 made quite an impression. He began working on ways to trap several of them at once, rather than trying to pick one off at a time. He wanted to create, basically, a pokey for Porky.
Kelley tried creating a wooden trap, but the 200-pound boars could bust through them.
“Those boars are as strong as an ox,” he said.
Kelley then worked with metal, and this, he said, is where divine intervention came.
At the time, he worked at a factory in Smackover that made industrial piping. He had never fused metal before but realized he would have to weld steel bars to create a pig brig strong enough to hold scores of captured hogs.
“I had no training in welding. I skipped all the agriculture and shop classes in school. I wasn’t interested in that then, but I had to teach myself,” the 65-year-old said. “I started getting pointers from people at church. The Lord blessed me.”
He quit his job in Smackover 10 years ago and worked full time on his traps, creating the Hawg Stopper.
No, it’s not a replica of the Alabama defensive line. Instead, it is an 8-foot round metal ring that resembles the large hay rings farmers use for feeding cattle. A heavy metal door drops like a guillotine when hogs trip it.
Other traps rely on an internet camera feed that requires a trapper to monitor a video screen. When enough hogs are inside the trap, the person can send a signal that makes the trap door close.
Kelley’s idea may be simpler, but it works. His Hawg Stopper recently captured a 437-pound boar in El Dorado. One of his traps caught 31 feral hogs at once in Oklahoma, and he has trapped scores of hogs in North Carolina.
Business is booming now, and Kelley is, well, bringing home the bacon. His traps are now in 17 states and two provinces in Canada.
He sells the unpainted traps for $975. Similar traps can cost upwards of $4,000 or $5,000, but Kelley said he wanted to make his product affordable to everyone, “not just doctors and lawyers.”
Kelley knew he was doing good work when a woman in Norfork called him to get a trap. He said the woman’s husband saw a feral hog in their yard in Baxter County and shot it. The man killed the pig, but in doing so, blood from the pig soiled laundry hanging outside to dry.
“The clothesline was full of her Sunday dresses,” Kelley said.
Feral hogs are most prevalent in Southern states and range from California through Arkansas and North Carolina and states to the south, but hunters have reported hogs in North Dakota, Maine, Oregon and even Vermont.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that there are more than 6 million feral hogs in 35 U.S. states.
The animals are not native to the U.S. Early European explorers brought them to the New World as a source of food in the 1500s. Free-range stock management then resulted in escapes and a feral hog population was created.
In the early 1900s, more hogs were introduced to the U.S. for the purpose of sport hunting. They, too, escaped. Today’s feral hogs are a combination of the early pigs and the sport-hunting pigs.
There are not many natural predators for the hogs, McPeake said.
“Their primary predator is people,” she said, adding that while feral hog attacks on humans are rare, they do happen.
A Texas woman was killed in 2019 when a herd of hogs attacked her outside of her workplace near Houston. It was only the fifth fatal attack by feral hogs in the U.S. in nearly 100 years, according to research conducted by the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
“It’s rare,” McPeake said. “That’s not to say attacks don’t happen, but it’s very rare.”
Kelley said he installed one of his Hawg Stopper traps in Quebec after a Canadian park ranger climbed a tree to avoid a boar attack and had to wait two hours before the hog left.
The hogs have thrived because of their intelligence, McPeake said. They are quick to associate things with danger. If a pig is trapped in a cage, other pigs will become very reluctant to go near the cage again.
They are even wary of the flavor of bait used once a hog is captured.
“The pigs get educated,” Kelley said. “You have to keep moving the traps around every five days or so. If you don’t, they’ll recognize the area and stay away from it. You’ve always got to stay a step ahead of them. If you leave your traps at the same place, you may catch a few dumb pigs, but the rest will know to avoid it.”
Jason Kocher, a cattle farmer near Mountain View, has trapped at least 200 feral hogs on his farm in the past three years. They have torn up his fields overnight, digging holes and destroying his land.
“They do what hogs do,” Kocher said. “They root. They pretty much ruin a place in a night. We’ve always got to smooth over the land. We’ve trapped a lot, but they are still here. They’re here to stay. Because they breed so fast, you’ve got to kill 80 percent of them to maintain a level number.”
Over the years, Kelley has learned more about the feral hogs. He may use peanut butter as bait in his traps in areas where hogs feast on peanut plants. He said he moves his traps constantly in attempts to outwit the hogs.
“If you leave a trap in the same place, you’ll only catch a few before they avoid it,” he said. “The southern half of the state is terrible with hogs. They are like sharks. They’re solid muscle, and they move around constantly to eat.
“They are out of control, and it’s very hard to stop them.”
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