Sport Hunting Ineffective in Reducing Wild Pig Populations

May 02, 2022

A researcher with the University of Saskatchewan suggests, rather than helping reduce the wild pig population, sport hunting actually breaks up groups and makes the animals more elusive and harder to find. Wild pigs occupy about one million square kilometers within Canada with the majority located on the Canadian prairies.

Wild pigs damage crops and cropland, they eat just about anything from small birds and mammals to fully grown white tail deer, they reduce water quality and they harbour disease.

Dr. Ryan Brook, an Associate Professor in the Department of Agriculture and Bioresources with the University of Saskatchewan, says the big experiment aimed at eradication was sport hunting.

Clip-Dr. Ryan Brook-University of Saskatchewan:

It sort of makes sense intuitively. If you really don't understand the ecology and at first light, if you have pigs, people go and shoot pigs, the population goes down. That works for moose, elk, deer, caribou. That has been used for many decades by provinces to regulate the number of tags they allocate to sport hunters and they can have the populations go up or down and the provinces do a remarkable job of sorting all of that out.

That goes out the window with wild pigs. They just reproduce to quickly and they're too hard to find. Sport hunting breaks up groups, unfortunately it makes them more nocturnal so much harder to find. Under any kind of pressure from humans, whether it's being shot at or chased or what ever, those animals will become highly elusive and they'll move into heavy cover.

In the winter they tunnel under the snow to stay warm. They will also tunnel into soil and vegetation so trying to spot them is incredibly challenging. To be honest, most of the time if we find wild pigs, it's not seeing them, it's seeing their tracks. They have shorter legs so you see their belly dragging through the snow.

They also get into these snow caves. We'll fly first thing in the morning and look for steam pouring out of those snow caves or we'll see their nests in cattails. It's rare to see them during the day.

Source : Farmscape

Video: US Soy: Pig growth is impaired by soybean meal displacement in the diet

Eric van Heugten, PhD, professor and swine extension specialist at North Carolina State University, recently spoke at the Iowa Swine Day Pre-Conference Symposium, titled Soybean Meal 360°: Expanding our horizons through discoveries and field-proven feeding strategies for improving pork production. The event was sponsored by Iowa State University and U.S. Soy.

Soybean meal offers pig producers a high-value proposition. It’s a high-quality protein source, providing essential and non-essential amino acids to the pig that are highly digestible and palatable. Studies now show that soybean meal provides higher net energy than current National Research Council (NRC) requirements. Plus, soybean meal offers health benefits such as isoflavones and antioxidants as well as benefits with respiratory diseases such as porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

One of several ingredients that compete with the inclusion of soybean meal in pig diets is dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS).

“With DDGS, we typically see more variable responses because of the quality differences depending on which plant it comes from,” said Dr. van Heugten. “At very high levels, we often see a reduction in performance especially with feed intake which can have negative consequences on pig performance, especially in the summer months when feed intake is already low and gaining weight is at a premium to get them to market.”

Over the last few decades, the industry has also seen the increased inclusion of crystalline amino acids in pig diets.

“We started with lysine at about 3 lbs. per ton in the diet, and then we added methionine and threonine to go to 6 to 8 lbs. per ton,” he said. “Now we have tryptophan, isoleucine and valine and can go to 12 to 15 lbs. per ton. All of these, when price competitive, are formulated into the diet and are displacing soybean meal which also removes the potential health benefits that soybean meal provides.”