Feral Hogs Go Suburban

Feral Hogs in the city

I was locking a pipe-rail gate behind R.L. Loving’s pickup truck, when the woman walked through her patio door, into her backyard, shielded her eyes with a hand and stared intently across the bayou at us. “This could go either way,” R.L. said.

In the back of his truck squatted a large cage made of heavy-gauge wire. Inside the cage were three live feral hogs — a big sow and a couple of shoats. We were on the edge of a large tract of as-yet-undeveloped property barely outside Houston’s city limits and hard against a patch of suburbia filled with half-million-dollar homes.

R.L., an accountant and financial adviser by profession but an outdoorsperson at heart, had permission — the blessing, really — of the folks who control the tract to live-trap and remove feral hogs there. He is good at it. Continue reading Feral Hogs Go Suburban