Super Hog?

[Mad Charlie]

An article I found this AM, what do you Texas hunters think?

https://www.koin.com/news/hog-wild-u-s-and-texas-have-out-of-control-population-of-super-pigs-expert-says/

[Double Naught Spy]

The article is a bunch of hype. Nobody knows how many hogs there are. Using TAMU's estimates of ~20% per year increase in the population, even with all the hunting and vehicle kills and that we purportedly had a population of more than 2 million back around 2005, we should have a lot more than 9 million hogs in Texas alone by now, and many more in the USA. When you query 'expert' folks about how many hogs we have in Texas TODAY, they will generally tell you 3-5 million.

Domestic hogs may have been bred for large litters of more than 10. I have cut open a LOT of pregnant sows as have the people at A&M. The average litter size is 6-7. Based on the math, feral hogs can have 3 litters a year. Reality is that they have about 1.5 litters per year.

THE SKY IS FALLING! The hybrids will kill us all! Not likely. There aren't that many true European boar bred into the population to do much significantly. Everybody that finds a hog with a razorback or that is big or has big teeth will claim that "there is some Russian this one" and other such nonsense. None of those are diagnostic traits, LOL.

There are some really freaking large hogs, but in every case that I know of, the hogzillas over 500 lbs have all been farm raised or are so flat-nosed (short snouted) and floppy-eared to indicate that they are not more than a generation or two from being domestic. The size of hogs tends to go down in the wild as compared to their domestic counterparts. Some hogs may still grow old and into the 300-450 lb range, but they are few and far between.

[Mad Charlie]

Thanks, I'm glad you responded because I figured that with as many as you have killed and performed necropsies on, along with your background, that you would have surely noticed any aberrations, so to speak. I haven't seen anything like what the article references here in Fl, not even a mule foot. Just plain ol' hogs.

I thought the article was mostly BS, but wanted to ask Texas hunters.

[Texcl2]