Hog Wild

“There are two types of people in Louisiana,” says Shane Kessler. “Those that have a hog problem, and those that are about to have a hog problem.”

Outside of Grand Ecore, Kessler turns onto the Campti Cutoff and glides along the shoulder, pair of thermal binoculars raised to scan the subtleties of night. His truckful of thermal equipment, including rifle scopes and drone, turns the world into a photographic negative. At 1,000 yards, heat signatures of hogs can appear indistinguishable from cows or deer, and so, methodical as a pathologist perched over slides, Kessler studies behavior.

“I never see them this close to the road,” he says, but there it is, 50 yards away and moving fast. Kessler slips from the truck, careful not to make any noise. Beneath a full moon, his rifle barrel sweeps back and forth, fluid as a metronome. He treads toward the tree line. On he moves until the woods consume him.

Four nights a week, from dusk and often until dawn, Kessler stalks his prey. On an average night, his truck clocks 250 miles while he and other hunters from Rougarou Hog Control snake through back roads to patrol farms and pasturelands of landowners who hire the company to combat the ceaseless problem that threatens to strangle their livelihood.

When not engaged in this all-out forever war, Kessler serves as a firefighter in Pineville and tactical medic for the Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office SWAT team. Away from those roles, he sleeps through the day, preparing for when hogs are most active. This started in 2014, when a hunting club hired him to eradicate hogs on its property. Word spread. Work flowed in. “Farmers said, ‘We need help.’ Before I started, I had no idea how much they go through. Just the weather alone is enough, but there’s also this man-made hog problem.” Before turning onto the Campti Cutoff and sighting the faint imprint of the night’s first feral hog, or pig—he uses the terms interchangeably—Kessler said, “We now shoot pigs on 100,000 acres over eight parishes: Natchitoches, Rapides, Avoyelles, Evangeline, Red River, Grant, St. Landry, and Allen.”

Kessler and Rougarou Hog Control form one squad in the soldiery toiling to eradicate the problem that dates from times when Louisiana stock laws allowed raising hogs—much as ranchers raise cattle, and for similar reasons—on private lands. The last of those laws ended in 2007, but by then the hogs were already out there. Turned loose to fend for themselves, they did what hogs do best: eat, root, reproduce, repeat. They became anybody’s game. Then they became everybody’s problem, destroying land and levees, timber, and crops before moving on to wreak havoc elsewhere.

Things got so dire a few years ago that Chad Methvin of Glory Island Plantation southeast of Natchitoches thought he would have to stop planting corn in certain fields.  “I thought the war was over,” he said. “I was ready to wave the white flag.”

* * *

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries estimates a feral hog population of 700,000 across all 64 parishes. That’s larger than the combined human populations of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lake Charles. A 2022 LSU AgCenter study assessed an annual $91.1 million dollars in damage to Louisiana’s agriculture and timber industries.

As financial loss and damages increase, farmers and the state have implemented multiple methods to mitigate the menace. Some have used air cannons. Placed at the edge of fields, these thunder all night in intervals to send hogs scurrying back into the woods before they feast. This also torments any human in proximity. They’ve tried hunting, but spend time with a farmer who works all day, every day, only to stay up all night, every night, to track a nemesis that full-time feral hog trapper Billy Conlay considers the smartest animal in the woods not named coyote, and see how quickly you reach the crossroads of fortitude and despair. They’ve tried trapping, pre-bating an area with corn before installing an octagonal pen. For those who’ve never met Conlay or read studies that show swine intelligence exceeds that of dogs and three-year-old children, this presents another problem. Close the trap door on a single hog, and you merely tip the sounder—that social group of hogs that feeds together—to your sole tell.

“Guys who buy traps and just fill them with corn, they don’t catch hogs,” Methvin said. “They spend $3,000 to educate hogs.”

The problem intensifies on rural farms. “I’ve had buddies in Cloutierville lose 20 to 30 acres in a night, routinely,” Methvin said as he sat across from Conlay and Benny Dobson, district planner for the Natchitoches Soil & Water Conservation District. “That’s $18,000 in a single night. It doesn’t take many nights of that before you get a huge disdain for hogs.”

While every Louisiana farmer has a hog story, most of them first-hand, others in cities and towns have also catalogued tales of destruction. Conlay once spent a month eradicating hogs in New Orleans. He killed 30. “Hogs are in the city,” the mayor of Haughton informed NSWCD technicians three years ago. In Powhatan earlier this year, feral hogs rooted through a 1 1/2-acre graveyard, destroying tombstones and markers. “This had nothing to do with fresh graves,” Dobson said. He then echoed what many who combat the problem utter with a mixture of resilience and dread: “They’re just destructive.”

Methvin nodded. “They don’t take a break. When you go to Christmas dinner with your family, the hogs are out there in the woods. They just keep coming. It’s not until they get to the city limits that most people realize there’s a problem. But when people in Natchitoches go to put their trash out and get hit with a hog.”

Those reports go to Conlay, one of two trappers on call seven days a week for NSWCD, who has trapped hogs within Natchitoches and Natchez city limits. While he patrols the parish, other reports of ruination crisscross the state. Consider one: 15 acres of farmland in North Louisiana destroyed twice. “The hogs went right down the field, rooting up the seed,” Dobson explained. “The farmer had to replant. Once he got it up the second time, the hogs went at it again.” They eat the seeds and move on, repeating the process like an uninvited guest who nibbles the corner of each chocolate in the box only to leave the dregs.

On the table, Dobson set down photocopied images, a litany of destruction: Front yards ravaged overnight; more graveyard damage, this time in Lena. His finger drummed against a photograph of a busted poly pipe from which water spewed like a quarter-hearted attempt to replicate Old Faithful. Hogs had punctured and flattened the pipe much as they routinely flatten fields, every farmer swift with yet another story, each following the same arc: The problem is here, everywhere, and it’s not going away.

Dobson addresses all of this like someone who has been called back for yet another tour of duty. He preaches so that others might avoid weathering the wrath. He worries about farmers. He worries about the timber industry. (Hogs peel bark off pine trees to rub against the resin and keep mites off.) He worries about water quality. He worries about destruction of levees and the threat to Louisiana’s infrastructure. He worries about kids who ride off-road vehicles, unaware that, overnight, hogs have trampled the land, leaving ruts deep and wide enough to overturn them.

He worries about diseases. All that rooting displaces soil. The larger the hog population, the greater the displacement. Picture Centre Court at Wimbledon, immaculate on day one. Cut to match point of the Grand Final. Now note these differences: The key players here weigh, on average, up to 250 pounds. (Kessler once shot a 504-pound boar.) They run 30 miles an hour. And they devote all their time and energy—when not eating and reproducing—to pushing and digging soil with their snouts. This reduces ground vegetation cover, leaches nutrients, impedes soil decomposition cycles, and accelerates erosion, diminishing water quality.

* * *

Such problems lurk at the back of Dobson’s mind. They’re certainly engraved in Kessler’s psyche. Out of the woods, without firing a shot, he returns to the truck and unpacks his drone, a DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise equipped with a thermal camera. “The drone is invaluable for finding pig damage,” Kessler says, placing it on the hood of his truck in preparation for takeoff. “Once the crop grows, it’s hard to help farmers—unless you have a drone.” With it, he can detect hogs in dips and rises so slight they’re invisible to the human eye. He can also patrol in five minutes what on foot would take half an hour.

“He’s hard to see once you get down in the grass,” Kessler says of the typical hog as the drone rises, spotlight bearing down like something out of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” before it darts toward the tree line. Once there, Kessler locates the elusive hog. Only something isn’t right. It plods the border between two properties, and Kessler has permission to hunt only on one.

For several minutes, the drone hovers over the hog while Kessler checks and rechecks the field map on his phone. Still uncertain, he decides to call the landowner. They discuss natural boundaries, the distance between roads, the size of the hog, which, sight unseen, the landowner fingers as culprit of the most recent damage. All the while, Kessler keeps one eye on the heat signature. But now, no doubt, the hog has entered adjacent property. Relaying this development, he thanks the landowner and hangs up.

“Without permission, we don’t kill,” Kessler says as the drone returns, bathing him in light. “There’s nothing we can do.” At least not here, but he’s got a dozen other properties to check before sunrise, each with reports of recent destruction, so he packs up and resumes his night prowl.

* * *

Kessler’s conundrum coincides with Dobson’s.

“They’re my problem today and yours tomorrow.”
Dobson said at Glory Island Plantation

That’s why since 2014 he has helped to manage the NSWCD’s Feral Hog Aerial Gunning Program, which started after the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service began shooting feral hogs from a helicopter on federal refuges in Natchitoches Parish. “At that time, [APHIS] couldn’t shoot on private land. So we started to pull farmers aside and ask them what they think about such a program.” The farmers asked NSWCD to form a cooperative to begin its own helicopter gunning program. Thirty farmers enrolled after the first session.

“In the beginning, we were killing beaucoup hogs,” Dobson said. “But if the paperwork isn’t signed, we can’t shoot.” Witnessing that success, more farmers enrolled the next year. Now, for seven days each February and March, a helicopter and shooters cover 59,000 acres of private land in the Red River watershed. Between aerial gunning and trapping, NSWCD has removed 14,677 hogs since 2014.

“Those numbers are beginning to decline, but it’s not to say hogs are done,” Dobson said.

Kessler has seen similar progress. In Louisiana, he’s shot as many as 42 hogs in a single night, abandoning the work only because two of his hunters had to clock into other jobs after sunrise. His numbers in Texas are even greater because in Texas everything is: 300 in three days.

There’s no sign, however, that Kessler and Conlay are shooting themselves out of business. As LDWF states, “Feral hogs … are the most reproductively efficient large mammal on Earth, and they can adapt to survive in nearly any environment. Statisticians have estimated that due to the feral hog’s high reproductive rate, 70 to 75% of the population must be harvested to control the population. In Louisiana, hunter harvest numbers are less than half of that, so populations are growing.”

Dobson made a quick calculation, the kind he’s honed through years of public presentations. “Start out in the fall with three females, who mature at six months. Those three will have a litter in the spring. That litter will have a litter in the fall. Now you have three litters from those first three hogs. The old sows will also have a litter in the fall. Now you have six litters in the fall. That’s about 197 hogs. Remember, you started with three.”

“Some people see a baby and say it’s wrong to kill it,” Methvin said. “I see a mother that’s about to reproduce.”

“Those numbers are over one year,” said Conlay, who, in a two-month period, caught 69 hogs in one trap. When hogs enter the trap, Conlay receives a phone notification and live video feed. If there aren’t enough hogs in the trap, he ignores the message. If it’s what he wants—and he always wants a sounder—he dials the relevant trap number and presses a button. The door drops.

* * *

Through the night, Kessler moves from field to field. Before the entrance of each, he cuts his headlights and activates the green light mounted on the winch bumper of his truck. Since green falls outside a hog’s color spectrum, this allows him to see while remaining invisible to his prey. He unpacks the drone, sends it up, checks heat signatures. In fields peppered with deer and cows but no hogs, he calls back the drone, packs it, and moves on.

At midnight along the Red River, he sights a hog from the driver’s seat. It’s there, 300 yards away, advancing toward the tree line. “You will never catch him while he’s moving,” he says. “You need him to start feeding.”

The drone goes up. For half an hour, Kessler hovers while the hog continues its relentless trudge.

* * *

Earlier, half an hour after sunset, Kessler drove along Cane River and called the Natchitoches Parish Sheriff’s Office, a nightly notification to inform the relevant force of his whereabouts. The dispatcher recognized his voice. They chatted for a minute before she sent an email to everyone on duty to inform them of Rougarou’s reconnaissance. Still, various departments will occasionally receive a call in the middle of the night. Someone has seen men getting out of a truck with rifles, and, once, a woman called after spotting Kessler’s truck, its green light gleaming, adamant she had glimpsed a UFO.

At 3 a.m., that light illuminates the gates of a farm near Natchez. Its owner, Thomas Tubre, joins Kessler, who sends up the drone and immediately sees four heat signatures at the edge of the woods. Dense foliage obscures the forms. Needing a closer look, Kessler removes the tripod from his truck and mounts his rifle.

“Three, two, one,” he says.

The two hunters enter the field, advancing by way of hand signals. Kessler raises an arm. Tubre falls in line. If a hog sees them, it will only notice one motionless form and return to feeding. The hunters edge toward a clearer vantage. Kessler positions his tripod. Peering through the thermal scope, he sighs.

“Deer.”

Once again, he turns back, tripod and rifle perched on his shoulder. “If I’m patrolling and don’t get pigs, I take it personally,” Kessler says. “There’s nothing I like more than calling a farmer to say that I’ve helped with his problem. Pigs have to get it right every night. We’ve just got to get it right one time.” But it’s 3 a.m., and as of now, he’s got no such calls to make. And so he pushes on to navigate the nightscape of Louisiana’s back roads, one lone hunter in pursuit of a common threat.