Local researchers don’t know the population of feral pigs in the Golden Triangle Area. What they do know is that the population is growing, and quickly.
An estimate of damage they’ve done around the area to crops and habitat is also not yet known, but the Mississippi State University Extension Service is conducting a survey to get an idea, Wildlife Ecology and Management Associate Extension Professor Bronson Strickland said.
Although more prevalent in southeast Mississippi, feral pigs have been sighted more and more in the last 20 years over much of the state, Strickland said. A “crude” estimated wild pig population nationwide is about 5.5 million.
“Over the last 20 years, the primary reason we have seen a huge increase is people moving them around for the purpose of hunting, which is highly, highly illegal,” Strickland said.
The first documentation of feral pig sightings comes from Spanish explorers, he added.
A recent study done in an agricultural region of Georgia that comprises about 25 percent of that state found that about $50 million a year in damage to agriculture and another $30 million to forests, roads and equipment could be contributed to the wild pigs, Strickland added.
Lowndes County MSU Extension Agent Reid Nevins said close to home, the majority of sightings reported has been in western Clay County, but there have also been some in Oktibbeha County. Lowndes County has not yet yielded reports of the nuisance animals, but Nevins said at the rate they reproduce — a litter typically produces four to six pigs and females can breed by the time they’re six months old — he would not be surprised if that changed.
“I went down in a field (in Clay County) that looked like somebody went through there with a breaking plow and busted it all up,” Nevins said. “Right now, I don’t ever hear of any problems in Lowndes. They might be here and I don’t know it, but I don’t hear anybody complaining about them. I’m sure eventually the way they move they’ll probably end up here.”
The most common way to stop them is to trap them, Nevins added, and because the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks has deemed them nuisance animals, it’s legal to shoot a feral pig all year.
“Humans are really their only predator,” he said. “That’s what’s so scary about it.”
Although they carry more than 40 diseases, there are two main ones that researchers worry about most, Strickland said: pseudorabies and swine brucellosis. The former is nicknamed “mad itch,” particularly when cattle contract it, but it’s usually fatal to sheep, goats, raccoons, cats and dogs.
Nathan Gregory covers city and county government for The Dispatch.
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