That’s a lot of pigs

Knoxville News-Sentinel – More than 500 wild hogs removed from Smokies

Wildlife managers at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park have removed more than 500 wild hogs this year, the most since 1987. Biologists attribute the increase to several years of bountiful mast. Like black bears, the reproductive rates of wild hogs are highly dependent on good mast crops, especially acorns.

Since the late 1950s, the park has removed almost 12,000 wild hogs. The animals are a target for control because they’re non-native, and they do considerable damage to the ecosystem by eating rare plants and salamander, defecating in streams and churning up the ground.

The park’s hog population traces back to the early 1920s, when a herd of European wild hogs escaped from a game reserve on Hooper’s Bald in Graham County, N.C. By the 1940s, the wild hogs had spread into other counties as well as the Smokies.

My first job after college was working as a field biologist in the Smokies. The first week I was talking to a guy who was stationed over by the physical plant near Sugarlands who hunted hogs up in the higher elevations. He’d go out at night with a nightscope-equpped shotgun. He had just started and had only seen one hog and his shot at that one had missed.