A feral hog weighing roughly 400 pounds was captured at the Gateway Hills Golf Course in the Texas Hill Country last week. Trappers were called in to remove the beast from the San Antonio area golf course.
The wild animal had been tied up after it was found at the golf course on Thursday, September 12, 2019. Lone Star Trapping experts were assisted by hunting dogs in the capture, which was shared on social media by team member Wyatt Walter. Walton described the hog as being “extremely large” and “trap smart.” The company has a record of capturing over 1,200 feral hogs from the same area over the past three years, in addition to thousands more they’ve captured in the surrounding area.
Photo: Facebook/Wyatt Walton
“The work isn’t done,” Walton said in a Facebook post. “As San Antonio continues to flourish in population, there’s that much more native land having developments built on it. To accommodate the growth, native wildlife is just being pushed and pushed. Eventually, you [will] end up having instances with human interactions as [the wild animals] are just trying to survive.”
Photo: National Park Service
As of September 1, 2019, it’s legal to kill feral hogs in Texas without a hunting license. The passing of SB 317 allowed for this measure to take effect. In an interview with KLTV in February 2019, Senator Bryan Hughes, who led the charge on the bill, said: “This was once a problem that folks dealt with only in rural areas [but] now they’re coming into suburban areas…You don’t need a hunting license and there’s no season, these hogs are so aggressive and so harmful that you’re doing the state a service by killing them.” The bill amended a line which noted that harmful wild feral hogs could only legally be hunted if they were “causing depredation.”
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has noted that, at last count, there were over 1.5 million feral hogs in Texas. At full maturity, they’ve been known to reach 36 inches in height and weigh anywhere between 100 and 400+ pounds. In their search for sustenance, the damage and destruction that they wreak on livestock, ranches, and agricultural property has been enormous.
