Wild pigs are one of the world’s most invasive species. They’re spreading across Canada.

Jordan The first time I heard about wild pigs, they were a meme. If you’re someone who spends a lot of time online, you might remember a joke about 30 to 50 feral hogs, invading a suburban lawn, being used as justification for the owner toting a powerful automatic rifle. The second time I heard about wild pigs, that meme didn’t seem so funny anymore.

News Clips …Here in the Hamlet of Claremont, a bit of an unusual site in recent weeks, residents have reported seeing more than a dozen wild boars roaming the area…

…they destroy crops, eat pretty much anything they can find, and can transmit swine fever to wildlife and humans alike…

…they are the worst invasive, large mammal on the planet…

Jordan Recently, a group of wild pigs were sighted, not that far from where I live, in the Greater Toronto Area. The fact that they are beginning to show up in Ontario and beginning to show up near urban centres, should alarm anyone who has been paying attention to what they’ve been doing in the Prairie’s for the past several years.

This is an animal that’s been described as one of the most invasive species on earth. It does terrible damage to farms and to ecosystems, and even to people, if they’re cornered or in some cities around the world where they seem to be everywhere. So what makes wild pigs or feral hogs so dangerous, so tough to hunt or catch and eradicate? How have they spread so far and so fast? And, uh, what are we doing about it?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Omar Mosleh is a journalist with the Toronto Star based in Edmonton. Hey, Omar.

Omar Hi. How are you?

Jordan I’m doing well. Thank you for making the time for us.

Omar Thanks for having me.

Jordan Why don’t you begin by telling me what happened to Bob Brickley 20 years ago. That’s kind of where this starts, right?

Omar Yeah. I thought it was a good place to start. So Bob Brickley is a farmer in Southeast Saskatchewan, and he was telling me about a day when, you know, it was a peaceful day on the prairies where he was combining wheat. You know, just hauling grain with his wife and they see these black creatures on the horizon. And they looked like pigs, but they’re certainly not the pigs that they are used to, you know, this family is well acquainted with domestic pigs because his wife has a farmer in the family who raised pigs. And so they see these things and they resemble pigs, but they are very different than what they’re used to. They’re aggressive looking, they’re mean looking, they’re hairy and they’re black. So they knew they weren’t the kinds of pigs they were regularly used to. So from what I remember, they were able to shoo them off, but they came back quite soon and they were picking on their animals and eating their grain and then just basically causing devastation to their farm over the course of several weeks and months.

And this farmer realized, hey, if I don’t do something about these wild pigs, which they eventually realized that’s what they were, this is going to have a devastating effect on my farm. So Bob Brinkley decided to team up with some other farmers who were facing similar issues with these wild feral pigs and try and do something about it.

Jordan What did they do?

Omar Well, they formed basically a group, it’s called the Saskatchewan Moose Mountain Wild Boar Eradication Team. So these are a bunch of farmers who are well acquainted with hunting and they had spoken to their local officials and this is a fairly rural area, so you’re going to have like a member of provincial parliament, here called MLAs, that’s going to be overseeing the land of like a quarter of the province, huge, huge areas, because it’s sparsely populated. So it wasn’t that easy for them to get the attention of their local politicians. And so they decided to essentially do this on their own. They said, we’re going to go hunt these pigs. We’ll just kill them until they all disappear. And they quickly realized that was not going to be the easiest approach.

Jordan Why not? These are experienced farmers, and how many pigs could we be talking about here?

Omar Well, at the time he had counted, just over a dozen. But they learned they were breeding quite prolifically. So the issue with hunting wild pigs, there’s kind of a laundry list, but the biggest issue is that they breed so prolifically. So you could take out, you know, maybe five or 10, but you don’t know if there’s more piglets on the way. The other issue is that they’re extremely cunning and smart. So these pigs know how to hide. They’re not easy to find. They typically dig into like the roots and the mud to find their food. So they’re very good diggers and they can actually hide under like the foliage and leaves and mud. So you can’t actually find them that easily. And the problem is if you try and shoot them and they scatter and they get away, they become much, much more cunning towards trappers. They actually become more resilient and smarter in terms of being hunted. Like they learn and they learn different strategies and how to evade hunters. So yeah, they’re just really smart creatures and they’re not easy to get your hands or your rifle on.

Jordan It sounded to me for a minute, like you were talking about the Raptors from Jurassic park.

Omar There’s probably some resemblances, certainly in terms of intelligence. I’ve been told pigs are about like equally as smart as dogs, if not smarter.

Jordan I’m going to get you to fast forward 20 years in just a minute. But first when we’re talking about these original wild pigs in Saskatchewan, do we know where they came from or at least where they likely came from?

Omar Yes. So they were brought here by farmers. Essentially what happened is they were brought from Europe. The actual original breed is called the Eurasian wild boar, and they took these Eurasian wild boars, which kind of looks like the boar you might remember from the Lion King, it has tusks, a brownish blackish hairy back. And they crossbred them with domestic pigs. Because domestic pigs, people don’t realize, are huge. Like the ones on the farms can reach like 800 pounds because they’re bred to be really, really fat. So, you know, more meat. So what happened was, the feral pigs are maybe only 300, 400 pounds, but you breed them with these domestic pigs and they’re reaching like 600 pounds. And so what happened was farmers realized they weren’t that easily to actually raise, it turns out they’re quite aggressive and they kind of overestimated the market for wild pig meat. So a lot of these farmers just let them go. So, you’re not worth raising, and literally just opened their fences and let them run free. And some others escaped because they don’t really like being fenced in. And so that’s how you saw this population start to get out from farms primarily in Alberta and Saskatchewan and make their way to Manitoba and kind of really establish themselves in the Prairies.

Jordan So now, 20 years later, do we have any idea how many of these wild pigs are in Canada and how far their territory stretches?

Omar There is no firm number. There’s been more than 60,000 sightings. So, you know, the two people who really helped me with this article, Ryan Brook, and Ruth Aschim at the university of Saskatchewan, were able to actually map out the population of wild pigs in Canada. And so the 60,000 sightings are not unique. They could be duplicates. They were even able to say we really don’t have a firm number on how many there are in Canada, but certainly thousands. One of the researchers said in the Southeast of Saskatchewan where Bob Brickley happens to live. He believes there’s more there than the rest of Canada. And they’re like really highly concentrated in that one corner of Saskatchewan. But overall it’s hard to say, but certainly in the thousands.

Jordan Now, we’ve kind of talked a bit about why they’re so difficult to hunt and why they escaped. Why are they considered an invasive species? Like what’s so bad about them?

Omar There’s an old expression that pigs will eat anything. I don’t know if you ever saw the movie Snatch, but they do literally eat anything and everything, and it causes problems. Like for example, they were recently spotted in Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton. And that was quite concerning because of the bison there, it’s quite a unique park in a sense, and they’re not going to start attacking bison, but the bigger issue is them attacking the food and just sort of destroying the ecology of the local wildlife. They’re described as ecological train wrecks, they just attack and eat anything and everything they can.

Jordan What about with humans? Will they physically attack humans? How dangerous are they if somebody encounters one?

Omar It’s extremely rare, but it has happened. There was one case in Texas where a woman was killed by a group of them. Typically they like to keep to themselves, but they have been described as aggressive to me. One of the hunters who I interviewed, Bob, he told me one ran at him when they cornered it. And he described them as being quite aggressive. But generally they’re not interested in humans and that is not the primary threat that they pose. The bigger threat is to wildlife.

Jordan I realized that 20 years ago it might’ve been tough for Bob and his friends to get the attention of the local MLA. But what about in the years since, as researchers have been kind of ringing the bells and as it’s become clear that these things are proliferating. What have governments, if anything, tried to do to get a handle on this?

Omar Yeah. You see kind of this piecemeal approach to doing something about this in Canada. One of my really helpful sources for the story was the USDA in the United States because they’ve really made this a huge priority in terms of tackling this. And then they’ve committed a lot of money from Congress. Whereas in Canada, you don’t see that just yet. The provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have all taken varying approaches to how to do this. You’ve seen things like offering bounties, sports hunting, essentially saying you don’t need a license to kill wild pigs, just free rein hunting of wild pigs. Those approaches have not been very successful.

And in fact, going back to them learning if you try and hunt them down and they escape and then become more cunning. It actually has the potential to increase the population of these wild pigs because they just get more and more resistant to being caught. So you’re seeing provinces do things like ground trapping, aircraft surveillance — what they’re doing above Elk Island national park, trail cameras, drones, they say you need to kind of a toolbox approach.

One of the interesting and funny things, the story that the researcher told me was that they really like strawberry. So they’re really into strawberry jello and like strawberry sauce. They have this amazing sense of smell and they absolutely love strawberries. So yeah, the provinces are doing different things. A lot of what you’ll see is these kinds of hotlines, you know, call in if you see a pig, squeal if you see a pig. Alberta had a pilot project that ended, Saskatchewan and BC and Manitoba seem to be all taking it seriously. And now Ontario is also dedicating funds and resources to trying to eradicate this. And it’s quite early, it’s in the early stages in Ontario. So some people are quite impressed that Ontario is actually taking this really seriously.

Jordan I wanted to ask you about Ontario, because one of the researchers in your piece, I believe, said that it’s going to be really important to study what happens now, because this is kind of like the vanguard of their approach. What do we know about how far they’ve spread into Ontario and what could happen?

Omar Well, Ontario is interesting because of the GTA and you don’t really have anywhere in Canada with that level of urban sprawl and population density. They were recently spotted in Pickering, which you know, is right in the fringes of Toronto. And that was quite alarming because people are saying, well, once they’re in Toronto, at that point, if they’re going to be penetrating a city of 2.8 million and a greater area of like 7-8 million. They can really survive anywhere. It seems like they haven’t really established wild populations in Ontario. It’s believed that those ones that were running around escaped from a farm, but it doesn’t take much for that to happen. And so I think Ontario and the GTA will be an interesting case study because if they get established in an area with that many people living, it just shows just how good they are at being able to really tailor their approach to that particular population. Like they’re going to be eating out of garbage cans and stuff, and just finding everything they need.

Jordan Well, tell me what that looks like in other cities around the world. And what happens when these things get into a really dense urban population? Do we have examples?

Omar Yeah, I’m told Hong Kong has a huge problem now. The researcher in my story has said they actually chase people down and knock them over for their groceries in some cases, which was fascinating to me. And they seem to be able to change their approach to what they need to do to survive wherever they are. Like if you’ve got them living in the fields of the Prairie’s, but also on the fringes of cities, these guys are very, very smart and it’ll be interesting to see if you start seeing them interact with humans in the greater Toronto area, like we’re hearing happens in Hong Kong.

Jordan I also want to ask you about a viral tweet, not yours, not mine, but I dunno if you remember a couple of years ago, there was a country rock singer who was talking about why nobody needs to own automatic rifles, like an AK 47 or whatever. And the viral reply to that was a man who said, you know, I need this AK 47 to protect my children from the 30 to 50 feral hogs that will run into my yard while she’s playing. Everybody laughed at that. After reporting this story, what do you think of it?

Omar Honestly, it doesn’t seem that far from the realm of possibility. The way Bob described these things was he described them as like a hoard of these just vicious, very stubbornly resistant animals that have just kept coming back to his farm and attacking the grain and attacking the cattle. He told me this story about how his cows were crying for like hours on end, because they were so scared of these pigs coming back. And like, honestly, Bob was such a great conduit to tell the story through, because he’s this guy in the middle of nowhere in Saskatchewan, but it also just became like his life mission to take these things down and to eradicate them from the area. And the level of dedication was just really impressive, but it also showed how resilient these things are and how, he basically said you have to become completely obsessed with it in order to actually make a dent in their population. And he certainly did. So, you know, I don’t put it past anyone who really feels like these pigs are a serious threat to their livelihood and to their lives. In Saskatchewan it’s like a hobby now, it’s like a pastime, let’s go hunt, feral pigs. These people are really serious about protecting their farms and I can’t blame them one bit.

Jordan Omar. Thank you so much for this. A pleasure to talk to you.

Omar It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jordan.

Jordan Omar Mosleh of the Toronto Star.

That was The Big Story, for more from us head to thebigstorypodcast.ca or find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryFPN. You can always email us, thebigstorypodcast.@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. And you can find us in your favourite podcast player, whenever you need a fresh daily news podcast.

Thanks for listening, I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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