A herd of juvenile wild hogs graze in a field in December 2006 about two miles… (Red Huber, Orlando Sentinel…)
A plague of feral hogs descended on a section of Palm Beach Gardens last year, crossing a depleted canal to dig up lawns in search of food.
"They would just start rooting, and their nose is like a bulldozer," said resident James Moser. "A whole family will come over and dig holes about three inches deep, like craters. In one night, they'll do a whole yard."
Another group entered the west Broward neighborhood of Plantation Acres, trampling costly landscaping and leading the community to hire trapper Jon Gherardi to hunt them down with dogs, an unusual sight in this affluent neighborhood.
Called feral hogs, razorbacks or wild pigs, these voracious, fast-breeding animals have long been a fact of life in Florida, where they were released nearly 500 years ago by early explorers. But they have extended their range enormously in the last 30 years, aided by hunters illegally trucking them into new territory as game animals, expanding from 17 states in 1982 to 37 states today.
They are despised by farmers for consuming crops, spreading disease and killing livestock. And homeowners, particularly near wilderness areas, are stunned to wake up and find their yards transformed into fields of mud and uprooted plants.
"The Everglades are packed with them," said Bryan Swanson, owner of All Star Animal Removal. "It's getting worse. We're getting a lot more calls from people of hogs destroying their property."
One boar was rooting around an industrial park in Coral Springs last December. And about five years ago, after Broward County acquired a 10-acre undeveloped area in North Lauderdale, the county learned that it had also acquired the huge wild hog that lived there. County workers were afraid to go on to the property, said Kevin Garvey, a Pompano Beach animal trapper, who was engaged to catch it. A camera crew hired by Animal Planet accompanied him, he said.
"When Animal Planet saw the size, they took off running, even the cameraman," he said.
He tracked down the pig and shot it with a high-powered rifle.
Like horses and cattle, hogs came to North America on the ships of Spanish explorers, with the first ones thought to have arrived in Florida in 1539 with the conquistador Hernando DeSoto. In those days, pigs were pasture animals, and rather than being penned on farms, they were allowed to fend for themselves, being hunted down for food as required, said John Mayer, manager of the Environmental Analysis Section, Savannah River National Laboratory, who has conducted extensive feral hog research.
These hogs are among the ancestors of the lean, black-haired animals that haunt the South Florida wilderness, where they have become an important prey for the endangered Florida panther. Other explorers and settlers released hogs elsewhere, and the species became widespread in the southeastern United States, where they joined white-tailed deer, quail and turkey as prime targets of the region's hunters.
Today an estimated 5 million wild hogs live in 37 states. Texas has the largest number, with about 2 million. Also ranking high is Florida, where conservative estimates place the number at about 500,000, many remaining deep in the wilderness, others emerging to rip up farms, root through citrus groves and dig up lawns.
"We've been in million-dollar homes, we've done golf courses, citrus groves, gated condos," said Jeffrey Mayer, co-owner of All County Hog Removal of Port St. Lucie, which operates in Martin, Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties. "We took 15 or 16 hogs off a gentleman's home in Jupiter Farms. They pushed under his fence and were just rooting and snowplowing through."
By all accounts, the blame for this rests with people, not hogs. The cheap pork at Publix or Winn-Dixie is the result of breeding to develop animals that can reproduce at an astonishing rate. A female pig can give birth at the age of 10 months, and after that she can produce litters of four or five piglets twice a year.
"These animals have the greatest reproductive rate of any large animal on earth," said Stephen Ditchkoff, associate professor of wildlife ecology and management at Auburn University. "They'll consume just about anything. They're good at utilizing a wide range of food sources, and as a result, they're very successful as a species."
How did they spread so fast? Pigs escaped from farms or were let loose during periods of rock-bottom pork prices. And among the biggest culprits, scientists say, are hunters who illegally brought wild hogs from Florida, Texas and other hog-rich states to states that didn't have them so they could be hunted.
"They're easy to trap, throw in a truck and release," Ditchkoff said. "It's a rapidly growing problem."
The vast majority are descendants of domestic pigs, which undergo physical changes in two or three generations in the wild, becoming leaner and hairier. Others are Eurasian wild boars, often released as game animals, and many are hybrids of the two. Males of all breeds develop four long canine teeth called tusks.