By Cary Sims, County Extension Agent – Agriculture/Natural Resources, Angelina County
I let my dog outside earlier this week, as is our morning routine. It wasn’t until I checked on her later that I noticed nearly a quarter of my backyard was “disheveled.”
I’ve lived at my current residence for 18 years and have never seen hog damage in my backyard.
At the end of summer, Angelina County Sheriff Tom Selman asked me if I would support a grant application he was putting together to obtain state funds for feral hog traps. As I’ve taught and demonstrated hog trapping as a part of my job, I was all in.
Now, as a recent victim, I’m seeing red.
If you have feral hogs on your property, you probably already know they can make a mess in a hurry. A few hogs can tear up a pasture, root through a hay meadow, destroy a food plot or turn a nice lawn into something that looks like it has been plowed.
Trapping is one of the most effective tools we have for controlling feral hogs. But there is an important lesson that I think sometimes gets overlooked: if you’re going to trap them, you need to try to catch the whole group.
Hogs travel in sounders
Feral hogs are social animals and normally travel in groups called sounders. A sounder may contain a sow and her young, along with several other females and young hogs. If you trap only part of that group and the rest escape, you may have just taught those remaining hogs that your trap is something to avoid.
That is why Texas A&M AgriLife Extension recommends using large traps when dealing with a sounder. The larger trap gives the entire group room to enter before the gate is triggered.
The work happens before the trap is set
The most important part of successful trapping actually happens before the trap is ever set.
Start by locating the hogs and determining how many are using the area. A trail camera can be extremely valuable here. Put the bait where the hogs are already comfortable feeding and watch them for several days.
Once you know how many hogs you’re dealing with, build or position a trap large enough to accommodate the entire sounder.
Then leave the gate open.
That’s right. Don’t try to catch them immediately. Texas A&M AgriLife recommends pre-baiting the trap with the gate secured open and allowing the hogs to become comfortable entering the trap and feeding inside. Continue monitoring with a camera. Only when the entire sounder is regularly entering should you set the gate to capture them.
This may take some patience, but patience is much cheaper than educating a group of hogs to avoid your trap.
Corral traps beat box traps on a group
There is another good reason to use a larger trap. Box traps are convenient and portable, but they are better suited for individual hogs or very small groups. When dealing with a larger sounder, a corral trap gives you a much better opportunity to remove the entire group at one time.
Once the trap is successful, don’t simply assume the job is finished. Continue watching the area for a while. AgriLife recommends post-trapping baiting and monitoring to determine whether any hogs from the original sounder remain or whether another group is using the area.
And remember, feral hog control is rarely a one-time project. If you have hogs today, chances are good you’ll have to deal with them again.
The goal isn’t necessarily to catch a hog. The goal is to remove as many hogs as possible without teaching the ones you miss to become better at avoiding you.
That’s the difference between catching hogs and actually managing a feral hog problem.
As of this writing, Sheriff Selman has not heard whether the grant was approved. Either way, we know how to trap them. We do everything we can to catch the entire sounder.
For more information on feral hog management and trapping, visit the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension feral hogs website at feralhogs.tamu.edu.
Cary Sims is the County Extension Agent for agriculture and natural resources for Angelina County. His email address is cw-sims@tamu.edu. Contact: 936.634.6414.
Educational programs of the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service are open to all people without regard to race, color, sex, disability, religion, age, national origin, genetic information or veteran status. The Texas A&M University System, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the County Commissioners Courts of Texas Cooperating.
