Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBvqtbZdSZQ
the jurgen experience the pig thing i'm glad you brought that up because that is one thing that i keep hearing out here from folks that uh there's an attitude about pigs that they're disgusting they're just dirty creatures and they kind of just want them dead and uh i've talked to people that go helicopter hunting and uh i go what do you do with all the pigs and they're like you leave them there and i'm like what yeah i'm like that doesn't seem that seems not just wasteful but well you know i mean there's a lot to that you have to have right because of the so you have to eradicate a certain amount of those pigs but yeah isn't there like a lot of food that you're just letting rot there is so i mean you've this is the this is the pandora's box topic for me um i'm i'm very vested in it i just wrote a book about feral hogs um steve vanella to come full circle on that and he called me the hog apologist um and it's true but to to your point i think that you know we'll start we'll start there with uh a feral hog let's explain the numbers too so people need to know how how [ __ ] crazy it is yes and and and of course these numbers are not going to be clearly defined you know that it's hard to get a census on hogs so the estimate uh in the united states is around 6 million the estimate here in texas is between 2 and 4 million so probably somewhere in the middle of that maybe 2.6 that's a number that you'll see a lot maybe around 3 million but whatever so literally more than the entire population of austin in hogs spread out around around the state and in the time we've been talking about them you know how many have been born yeah so they have no breeding season they can breed at a very young age um you know let's say five or six months is is very
conceivable um and then they have a gestation period of three months three weeks three days and then they can drop a litter of you know always three days so you can just plan it out yeah i mean it's pretty pretty precise like that i bet women are very jealous yeah yeah yeah well i'll be giving birth on wednesday yeah got a timed in and after that i mean they're they're able to go back into estrus pretty quickly after that and their litter size can be anywhere uh from you know two to twelve but you know let's just say it's you know even six is a lot so you've got a you've got a ten month old animal dropping six babies and they can do it three times a year well twice you know that'll the way that works out you know you've got i think it's 20 i want to say 26 days that they can go back into estrus something like that it might be 23 days i can't remember the number right now after they give birth and they're back in estrus and if if they're living in an area that's got a high population of bores they're probably going to get bred pretty quick and so that's when you see this explosion that has happened and so they're not indigenous to this country so they came here in the mid-1500s columbus brought some to i mean just the caribbean islands but the mainland was it's usually attributed to hernando de soto who dropped off a bunch of pigs on his way and before he died in arkansas and then there was some other uh explorers that also brought in picks spanish explorers that brought in you know domestic semi-domestic hogs and dropped them off and so what we saw was this real slow build in pig populations there was also some pacific islanders that dropped them off in hawaii way before that so if you're talking about the technical united states why did they drop them off in hawaii it's food source no no when when oh oh it was it was uh i couldn't give you a number it's way previous to the 1500s wow that's
wild so that's a weird debate in hawaii right because a lot of people are saying they're an invasive species yeah and then some folks like well so are people sure because if you think about it the hog's been there as long as the people almost there's going to be a lot of parallels yeah yeah there's a a very destructive european animal arrives on our shores so yeah and and now there's a lot of them so you know you've got these populations exploding throughout time but really kind of concentrated in the late you know 1900s you know like the 80s and then you saw people uh you know you've got a guy that loves to hunt on his ranch in west texas and he says to his friend in east texas he's like sure as hell i'd like to be able to shoot something out here year round buddy in east texas is like wow man i got some pigs and then you know traps a couple throws them on a trailer and now you have 253 out of 254 counties in texas have hogs feral hogs wow and they're spreading all across the country too right yeah there's a downward migration from saskatchewan you know and those are escaped domestic hawks but i mean let's also define what a feral hog is it's a it's a pig that's just on the wrong side of a fence i mean once they get out that's a feral pig so i like to say it's a it's a domestic pig or a feral hog is just a pig without an address you know they just as soon as they get out of that pin they're feral and i will readily admit i mean not even on purpose but we have shot while hunting pigs that had ear tags you know meaning that at one point that was a farm pig it's not anymore and what it's doing is it's breeding like crazy out there with with a feral bore and it's just creating more feral pigs so like i said once they're on the wrong side of the fence they're fair game well we should explain to people what happens
to pigs right i've talked about it on the podcast before but if people haven't heard that episode there's a physiological change that happens to pigs when they get wild so when you're saying that this these are pigs they're wild pigs people like wait but they're bores boards are different than pigs it's all called sue scrafa right correct correct and once they escape within months their hair can become shaggy and we're talking about the same pig you know not its offspring right their hair can become shaggier and their snouts will elongate in order to allow them to root more effectively because that's one of their primary ways of feeding is rooting and that's the most destructive way i mean they can dig three feet down in soft dirt and they're getting roots to getting insects they're they're omnivores and they they'll go after anything and and so once they get out they go feral quick they get they get street smarts too i mean they go nocturnal i mean they're smart smart animals and so you add all this together you know the the the herds that were initially brought here for food and then further domestic herds and then you have escapees over hundreds of years of of you know settling in this country and you've got escaped domestic cogs then you've got hogs specifically brought in for hunting namely your russian bores your eurasian boars um which are kind of the big hairy razorbacks how much different are those is it all it's still the same species right yes it is and they're i mean they're they're it's like i believe and you know not i don't want to stand by it but i believe it's just like a subspecies there's one more latin name after suscrofa uh for the eurasian but freely interbreeding it's not like i mean they're not hybrids where they're not well they make hybrids right but the hybrids are viable absolutely
yes it's not like a hybrid like a liger where they can't no no no no no nothing like that and so then you've got some some kind of specific areas california had a lot of russian bores brought in and there's certain areas in texas the powderhorn ranch down near port o'connor was one that had it bro some brought in specifically and deposited there is the difference in the flavor or the the way they look like the flesh it would be really hard to determine that now because most of them over the years have interbred with your standard feral pig and so purebred populations of those hogs are very hard to find it's debatable whether the powderhorn ranch population is purebred russian bore i've read i've read different things about it some say that it's not some say that it is it's a high fence it's got a high fence around it has had one since the 1920s i believe oh wow and so whenever they brought in the bores those are the same breeding population right they think but you know you know a fence doesn't mean [ __ ] to a pig you know i go under it you know any way around it that they can flood waters come up they can swim you know it's so it's it's not known but there is one sequestered population of feral hogs in the united states and that's on osaba island off the coast of georgia and so that was an iberico hog brought over here by the spanish you know pointy hats long brown robes they dropped some hogs on that island and that island has sustained a population of purebred iberico hogs to this day and it's called osaba island and they have an osaba island hog which is a purebred iberico hog which is the same hog that produces the 150 150 dollar a pound uh serrano ham catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video
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