Pigs gone wild

College of Agriculture and Bioresources professor Dr. Ryan Brook said there’s lots of tools in the tool box that could be used to control pigs.

“Capturing with net guns out of helicopter and restraining and using a penetrating bolt gun to euthanize them can work. There are big large ground traps to catch entire groups of pigs that can be very effective, ground teams that go out and take out entire sounder groups,” Brook said.

Hunters have been involved in the control of the feral population but it’s not the answer.

“One thing that is very clear on the prairies is that we’ve had decades of sport harvest and hunters going out and we 100 per cent respect hunters and the role they play on all of these issues and certainly they play a major role in regulation of other wildlife populations,” Brook said. “In wild pigs though it’s pretty clear that sport hunting breaks up groups and splits them around and makes them much more wary and so, because of sport harvest, we have this large expanding wild pig population but now we have animals that are much more split up and extremely wary and more nocturnal and harder to find and because they are so elusive hiding under heavy cover.”

Brook said multiple methods are needed to control the wild pig population.

“The window to actually achieve that is closing very rapidly so we need a national plan, we need international collaboration with the U.S. and we need provincial plans and perspectives and resources to help make that so.” Brook said.

Dr. Brook acknowledges that will be costly and every year we wait it will get more expensive.

Any sighting of wild pigs can be reported to Dr. Brook at the University of Saskatchewan.

You can also learn more about the Canadian Wild Pig Research Project on Facebook.

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alice.mcfarlane@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @AliceMcF

by Alice McFarlane

Pigs gone wild

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