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Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

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Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#131

Post by Scoundreller »

Tade0 wrote: post #127
motohagiography wrote: post #65

The solution is to eat them. It's humane and it's free range pork. Let rural butchers test and certify the meat and sell it to local restaurants as a super premium product, then leverage the now all electronic game tag system for supply chain management. The only thing standing in the way of solving the feral pig problem is the attitudes of the urban governing class toward people capable of hunting and our histrionic…

> The solution is to eat them. To quote a certain president: sounds good, doesn't work. Over here in Poland despite having open season for boars all year round and eliminating 185k specimens due to ASF a few years ago there are still a lot of them. The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork. I mean, they disrupt ecosystems with their omnivoracity and propensity to mu…

> The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork.

Is it actually wild boar?

We have butchers and farms selling “wild boar” products in Canada, but it’s actually farmed from descendants of recent “adoptions” of wild specimens.

It’s wild in terms of genetics; which might still be better; but isn’t accomplishing much in terms of culling.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#132

Post by ETH_start »

Siberian tigers are proficient predators of wild boars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar

>>A single tiger can systematically destroy an entire sounder by preying on its members one by one, before moving on to another sounder.

Siberian tigers are endangered due to poachers seeking to meet the demand for tiger body parts in traditional Chinese medicine, and could be well protected by Canadian conservation authorities on Canadian soil far from China.

A population could be transplanted to Canada and allowed to proliferate, to act as a natural wild pig limiter.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#133

Post by ETH_start »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #114
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biological warfare, in one form or another, might be the only way, but that comes with risks that are probably unacceptable, even in light of the amount of damage they cause.

Put lions in - wolves are too small, and jaguar won't touch them, jaguar is solitary but pigs come in packs.

Lions can't handle the Canadian climate, Siberian tigers can, and they are proficient boar hunters.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#134

Post by ornornor »

likeraindrops wrote: post #77

CBC has an article [1] with more pictures of the pigs themselves, tusks and all, as well as their typical weight. Over 300 pounds! Largest recorded was 640 lbs. They remind me more of wild zebras than friendly farm oinkers. [1] https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/why-canadas-super-pigs-migh...

> Back in the ’80s and ’90s, Eurasian wild boar were brought here to be raised for their meat.

> A number of the animals escaped from their pens and mated with domestic pigs.

Yet another human caused issue. What a surprise.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#135

Post by ornornor »

psychlops wrote: post #55
r3trohack3r wrote: post #12

> [The] reality is still that outside of the Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, there are no meaningful opportunities to hunt wild pigs, which is not allowed in Ontario and Quebec In the southern United States it’s open season on wild pigs to keep the population under control. In at least Texas, you can take a machine gun mounted to a helicopter to go hog hunting: https://www.helibacon.com/texa…

> Pigs are dangerous. They’re mean, dirty, and can wreak havoc in ecosystems. Coming across a feral pig is dangerous, and they travel in squadrons so it’s likely you’ll cross a handful at a time. Sounds a lot like humans.

It does!

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#136

Post by michaelmrose »

motohagiography wrote: post #65

The solution is to eat them. It's humane and it's free range pork. Let rural butchers test and certify the meat and sell it to local restaurants as a super premium product, then leverage the now all electronic game tag system for supply chain management. The only thing standing in the way of solving the feral pig problem is the attitudes of the urban governing class toward people capable of hunting and our histrionic…

You have what is believed for instance to be hundreds of thousands of wild pigs in Saskatchewan Alberta and Manitoba. Sows are capable of producing up to 12 piglets per year. Meanwhile those 3 have a combined population of 7.3M around 18% living in rural areas or about 1.3M.

You can already legally own some rifles in Canada and hunt pigs in accordance with the law however you need to kill around 70% of the population each year just to keep the population the same size due to fast breeding and the survivors being about as smart as dogs do learn and become harder to kill.

It's not obvious that either gun control nor well earned disdain for the rural population are a meaningful contributor to the problem whatsoever. Nor is it obvious why any sane person who isn't already inclined to join the reserves would do so for the purpose of obtaining essentially a hunting license nor why tossing in rural open carry would improve the bargain. Instead such a license ought to be free since you are in effect doing the government a favor.

It seems more likely that people just aren't sufficiently inclined to kill enough of them because its a lot of work that wouldn't be sufficiently rewarded. Establishing a demand for harvesting and marketing them is something you would have to do the ground work on BEFORE people are inclined to put in the effort and furthermore it seems incredibly unlikely that the market should demand enough at a price that would support the amount of harvesting at a high unit cost required to even stabilize the population.

I would suggest government pay employees directly to shoot a shit ton of pigs. It is far cheaper than trying to store and process them and avoid incentivizing breeding them by not paying independent agents per kill.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#137

Post by michaelmrose »

motohagiography wrote: post #76
darkwizard42 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah here is the issue, feral pig meat isn’t really pork the way most people know it. It’s gamey and often parasite ridden.

Maybe the solution is to kill the parasites, through detection and processing technology, and spraying habitats. If we really can't eat them, the other solution is to use chemistry to make something that feral pigs get addicted to and that they will give up food, sex, and nursing their young in pursuit of, and which is a human controlled substance we can manage. Drop enough of it in their habitats that they can alway…

Animals in non-contrived normal environments don't actually do that. Furthermore poison of any variety is unlikely to be sufficiently targeted to just kill pigs and most isn't very humane.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#138

Post by Tade0 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #131
Tade0 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The solution is to eat them. To quote a certain president: sounds good, doesn't work. Over here in Poland despite having open season for boars all year round and eliminating 185k specimens due to ASF a few years ago there are still a lot of them. The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork. I mean, they disrupt ecosystems with their omnivoracity and propensity to mu…

> The meat is great - leaner than pork and gamey, but it's also expensive - 2-4x more than pork. Is it actually wild boar? We have butchers and farms selling “wild boar” products in Canada, but it’s actually farmed from descendants of recent “adoptions” of wild specimens. It’s wild in terms of genetics; which might still be better; but isn’t accomplishing much in terms of culling.

> Is it actually wild boar?

There isn't much of a market for farmed boar, because it's still expensive.

We have a strong hunting lobby (many members of parliament are active hunters) so there's actually more bureaucracy with maintaining a farm of them than hunting. Farms probably exist(never heard of any), but it's not a particularly profitable business.

Becoming a hunter is actually one of the two most popular ways of acquiring a firearm permit(the other being sport).

During the ASF epidemic there was controversy regarding the origin of some of the meat on the market because, according to the law, boars culled due to ASF can, ahem, only be eaten by the one who hunted them, so the spike in supply was suspicious.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#139

Post by stametseater »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #100
stametseater wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamma irradiation is very effective at killing trichinosis in swine flesh and is approved for this purpose in America.

A cobalt source for the home ? That's plainly nuts. In Europe they dealt very successfully with trichinosis by inspecting pig carcasses. But I have no idea if you can take a muscle sample from a porker you shot yourself to your local large-animal veterinarian to see if it's trichinotic. (In rural areas they just might that service - back then in my home village we had that pharmacist who was a devoted mushroom hunter…

Obviously food irradiation is done at specialized processing facilities where hunters would send their kills, not at home. Here's a clue for you: it's already the case that most hunters don't process their own meat.

> That's plainly nuts.

You're the one who said it, so right back at you buddy. Stop pulling absurdities out of your ass and attributing them to other people to have something to disagree with.

Re: Researchers are trying to mitigate the spread of wild pigs in Canada

#140

Post by swalling »

cryptonector wrote: post #105
motohagiography wrote: post #65

The solution is to eat them. It's humane and it's free range pork. Let rural butchers test and certify the meat and sell it to local restaurants as a super premium product, then leverage the now all electronic game tag system for supply chain management. The only thing standing in the way of solving the feral pig problem is the attitudes of the urban governing class toward people capable of hunting and our histrionic…

Just hunt them. You can't eat them all without going to huge expense having all-terrain refrigerator trucks to pick them up with. Vultures and other animals and just nature will take care of the carcasses. That's what people do here in Texas, where we have the largest wild pig population in the U.S., and it's a big big deal. There are hog hunting festivals. I've only ever seen videos of this, but this is one of those…

The open hunting season in states like California and Texas actually creates a perverse incentive among hunting guides and private land owners to deliberately introduce and maintain feral pig populations, in order to act as supply for their business.

It’s widely accepted among wildlife ecologists that hunting has minimal control effect and might actually be causing more spread.

https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/reports/Wildlife%...

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