Wild ‘super pigs’ from Canada could become a new front in the war on feral hogs

"EVIL COMES FROM THE NORTH"

LOG LADY, TWIN PEAKS

The Conversation
December 22, 2023

Feral hogs’ long snouts and tusks allow them to rip and root their way across the landscape in search of food. 

USDA/Flickr, CC BY

They go by many names – pigs, hogs, swine, razorbacks – but whatever you call them, wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are one of the most damaging invasive species in North America. They cause millions of dollars in crop damage yearly and harbor dozens of pathogens that threaten humans and pets, as well as meat production systems.

Although wild pigs have been present in North America for centuries, their populations have rapidly expanded over the past several decades. Recent studies estimate that since the 1980s the wild pig population in the United States has nearly tripled and expanded from 18 to 35 states. More recently, they have spread rapidly across Canada, and these populations are threatening to invade the U.S. from the north.

The wild pigs in Canada are unique because they were originally crossbred by humans to be larger and more cold-hardy than their feral cousins to the south. This suite of traits has earned them the name “super pigs” for good reason. Adults can reach weights exceeding 500 pounds, which is twice the size of the largest wild pigs sampled across many U.S. sites in a 2022 study.

As a wildlife ecologist, I study how wild pigs alter their surroundings and affect other wildlife species. Early detection and rapid response is of utmost importance in eradicating an invasive species, because invasions are more manageable when populations are small and geographically restricted. This is especially true for species like wild pigs that have a high reproductive rate, can readily move into new areas and can change their behavior to avoid being captured or killed.

Minnesota wildlife experts are keeping a wary eye on their northern border for signs of wild ‘super pigs’ moving down from Canada.

Omnivores on the hoof

Much concern over the spread of wild pigs has focused on economic damage, which was recently estimated at about US$2.5 billion annually in the United States.

Wild pigs have a unique collection of traits that make them problematic to humans. When we told one private landowner about the results from our studies, he responded: “That makes sense. Pigs eat all the stuff the other wildlife do – they just eat it first, and then they go ahead and eat the wildlife, too. They pretty much eat anything with a calorie in it.”

More scientifically, wild pigs are called extreme generalist foragers, which means they can survive on many different foods. A global review of their dietary habits found that plants represent 90% of their diet – primarily agricultural crops, plus the fruits, seeds, leaves, stems and roots of wild plants.


Lesser prairie chickens are a ground-nesting species – found in parts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas – that is listed under the Endangered Species Act. Feral hogs prey on the birds and their eggs and damage the birds’ habitat by rooting up and consuming native plants and spreading invasive plant seeds. Greg Kramos/USFWS

Wild pigs also eat most small animals, along with fungi and invertebrates such as insect larvae, clams and mussels, particularly in places where pigs are not native. For example, a 2019 study reported that wild pigs were digging up eggs laid by endangered loggerhead sea turtles on an island off the coast of South Carolina, reducing the turtles’ nesting success to zero in some years.

And these pigs do “just eat it first.” They compete for resources that other wildlife need, which can have negative effects on other species.

However, they likely do their most severe damage through predation. Wild pigs kill and eat rodents, deer, birds, snakes, frogs, lizards and salamanders. This probably best explains why colleagues and I found in one study that forest patches with wild pigs had 26% fewer mammal and bird species than similar forest patches without pigs.

This decrease in diversity was similar to that found with other invasive predators. And our findings are consistent with a global analysis showing that invasive mammalian predators that have no natural predators themselves – especially generalist foragers like wild pigs – cause by far the most extinctions.

Altering ecosystems

Many questions about wild pigs’ ecological impacts have yet to be answered. For example, they may harm other wild species indirectly, rather than eating them or depleting their food supply.

Our work shows that wild pigs can alter the behavior of common native wildlife species, such as raccoons, squirrels and deer. Using trail cameras, we found that when wild pigs were present, other animals altered their activity patterns in various ways to avoid them. Such shifts may have additional cascading effects on ecosystems, because they change how and when species interact in the food web.


Another major concern is wild pigs’ potential to spread disease. They carry numerous pathogens, including brucellosis and tuberculosis. However, little ecological research has been done on this issue, and scientists have not yet demonstrated that an increasing abundance of wild pigs reduces the abundance of native wildlife via disease transmission.

Feral hogs can be seen rooting up the soil in this trail camera footage from Alabama.

Interestingly, in their native range in Europe and Asia, pigs do not cause as much ecological damage. In fact, some studies indicate that they may modify habitat in important ways for species that have evolved with them, such as frogs and salamanders.

So far, however, there is virtually no scientific evidence that feral pigs provide any benefits in North America. One review of wild pig impacts discussed the potential for private landowners plagued with pigs to generate revenue from selling pig meat or opportunities to hunt them. And it’s possible that wild pigs could serve as an alternative food source for imperiled large predators, or that their wallowing and foraging behavior in some cases could mimic that of locally eradicated or extinct species.

But the scientific consensus today is that in North America, wild pigs are a growing threat to both ecosystems and the economy. It is unclear how invading super pigs would contribute to the overall threat, but bigger pigs likely cause more damage and are generally better predators and competitors.

While efforts to control wild pigs are well underway in the U.S., incursions by Canadian super pigs may complicate the job. Invasive super pigs make for catchy headlines, but their potential effects are no joke.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Aug. 26, 2019.

Marcus Lashley, Associate Professor of Wildlife Ecology, University of Florida


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

CANADIAN, EH

‘Incredibly intelligent, highly elusive’: US faces new threat from Canadian ‘super pig’
'EVIL COMES FROM THE NORTH ' - TWIN PEAKS
Adam Gabbatt
Mon, February 20, 2023 

Photograph: David Carson/AP

For decades, wild pigs have been antagonizing flora and fauna in the US: gobbling up crops, spreading disease and even killing deer and elk.

Now, as fears over the potential of the pig impact in the US grow, North America is also facing a new swine-related threat, as a Canadian “super pig”, a giant, “incredibly intelligent, highly elusive” beast capable of surviving cold climates by tunneling under snow, is poised to infiltrate the north of the country.

Related: Lynx facing extinction in France as population drops at most to 150 cats

The emergence of the so-called super pig, a result of cross-breeding domestic pigs with wild boars, only adds to the problems the US faces from the swine invasion.

Pigs are not native to the US, but have wrought havoc in recent decades: the government estimates the country’s approximately 6 million wild, or feral, pigs cause $1.5bn of damage each year.

In parts of the country, the pigs’ prevalence has sparked a whole hog hunting industry, where people pay thousands of dollars to mow down boar and sow with machine guns. But overall, the impact of the pigs, first introduced to the US in the 16th century, has very much been a negative, as the undiscerning swine has chomped its way across the country.

“We see direct competition for our native species for food,” said Michael Marlow, assistant program manager for the Department of Agriculture’s national feral swine damage management program.

“However, pigs are also accomplished predators. They’ll opportunistically come upon a hidden animal, and the males have long tusks, so they’re very capable of running and grabbing one with their mouth.

“They’ll kill young fawns, they’re known to be nest predators, so they impact turkeys and potentially quail.”

The wild pigs are also responsible for a laundry list of environmental damages, ranging from eating innocent farmers’ crops to destroying trees and polluting water. They also pose “a human health and safety risk”, Marlow said.

A pig is a “mixing vessel”, capable of carrying viruses, such as flu, which are transmittable to humans. National Geographic reported that pigs have the potential to “create a novel influenza virus”, which could spread to humankind.

The first record of pigs in the continental US was in 1539, when the Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto landed in Florida with an entourage which included 13 swine.

During the four-year expedition, which saw De Soto order the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans, declare himself “an immortal ‘Son of the Sun’”, and then die of a fever, the number of pigs grew to about 700, spread across what is now the south-eastern US.

But it is only relatively recently that the pigs have become a problem.

“They lived a benign existence up until, you know, probably three or four decades ago, where we started seeing these rapid excursions in areas we hadn’t seen before,” Marlow said.

“Primarily that was the cause of intentional releases of swine by people who wanted to develop hunting populations. They were drugged and moved around, not always legally, and dropped in areas to allow the populations to develop. And so that’s where we saw this rapid increase.”

The number of pigs in the US has since grown to more than 6 million, in some 34 states. The pigs weigh between 75 and 250lbs on average, but can weigh in twice as large as that, according to the USDA. At 3ft tall and 5ft long, they are a considerable foe.

Marlow said his team had managed to eradicate pigs in seven states over the past decade, but with little realistic hope of getting rid of the swine completely, there are also fears over the potential impact of pig-borne disease, particularly African swine fever.

The disease is always fatal to pigs, and in China, which is home to more than 400 million pigs – half of the world’s pig population – African swine fever wiped out more than 30% of the pig population in 2018 and 2019. African swine fever has presented in Europe, too, but Marlow said it has not yet been detected in the Americas.

That’s something that Ryan Brook, who leads the University of Saskatchewan’s Canadian wild pig research project, hopes to maintain.

In Canada, like in the US, wild pigs are a relatively recent problem. Up until 2002 there were barely any wild pigs in the country, but Brook said the population has exploded in the past eight years. The animals are now spread across 1m sq km of Canada, predominantly in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

“Wild pigs are easily the worst invasive large mammal on the planet,” said Ryan Brook.

“They’re incredibly intelligent. They’re highly elusive, and also when there’s any pressure on them, especially if people start hunting them, they become almost completely nocturnal, and they become very elusive – hiding in heavy forest cover, and they disappear into wetlands and they can be very hard to locate.”

Brook and others are particularly troubled by the emergence of a “super pig”, created by farmers cross-breeding wild boar and domestic pigs in the 1980s. The result was a larger swine, which produced more meat, and was easier for people to shoot in Canadian hunting reserves.

These pigs escaped captivity and swiftly spread across Canada, with the super pig proving to be an incredibly proficient breeder, Brook said, while its giant size – one pig has been clocked at more than 300kg (661lbs) – makes it able to survive the frigid western Canada winters, where the wind chill can be -50C.

“All the experts said at that time: ‘Well, no worries. If a wild pig or a wild boar ever escaped from a farm, there’s no way it would survive a western Canadian winter. It would just freeze to death.’

“Well, it turns out that being big is a huge advantage to surviving in the cold.”

The pigs survive extreme weather by tunneling up to 2 meters under snow, Brook said, creating a snow cave.

“They’ll use their razor-sharp tusks to cut down cattails [a native plant], and line the bottom of the cave with cattails as a nice warm insulating layer.

“And in fact, they’re so warm inside that one of the ways we use to find these pigs is to fly first thing in the morning when it’s really cold, colder than -30, and you will actually see steam just pouring out the top of the snow.”

Given the damage the pigs have wrought, a range of attempts have been made to get rid of them. Scientists and researchers in the US and Canada have had some success with catching whole sounders of pigs in big traps, while in the US attempts have been made – sometimes unsuccessfully – at poisoning wild pigs.

One method that has worked in the US, Brook said, is the use of a “Judas pig”. A lone pig is captured and fitted with a GPS collar, then released into the wild, where hopefully it will join a group of unsuspecting swine.

“The idea is that you go and find that collared animal, remove any pigs that are with it, and in ideal world then let it go again and it will just continue to find more and more pigs,” Brook said.

Brook said a variety of methods are required to tackle the pig problem. But the efforts are more about managing the damage caused by these non-native mammals, rather than getting rid of the pigs completely. In Canada, that chance has gone.

“Probably as late as maybe 2010 to 2012, there was probably a reasonable chance of finding and removing them. But now, they’re so widespread, and so abundant, that certainly as late as 2018 or 19 I stopped saying that eradication was possible. They’re just so established,” Brook said.

“They’ve definitely moved in, and they’re here to stay.”

Tasty Bacon or Fellow Being? The Paradox of How We Relate to the Intelligence and Emotions of Pigs

by Marc Bekoff

 August 30, 2024
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Photo by Matthieu Pétiard

Pigs are fascinating animals. Science shows they can solve challenging problems, love to play, display wide-ranging emotions, and have unique personalities. In short, they are both intelligent and sentient—capable of feeling. It’s clear that it is illogical and immoral to treat pigs as mere objects.

In 2015, I reviewed an essay notable for its summary and distillation of research on sentience in pigs. Compiled by researchers Lori Marino and Christina M. Colvin and published in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, “Thinking Pigs: A Comparative Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Personality in Sus domesticus” unearthed some interesting findings.

The main aims of the paper were to present pig psychology separate from its role in agriculture and pinpoint critical areas for further exploration. To accomplish these aims, “Thinking Pigs” considered various topics, including domestication, sensory abilities, learning skills, time perception, spatial learning and memory, novelty seeking, social cognition and complexity, self-awareness, personality, curiosity, and play.

“Pigs display consistent behavioral and emotional characteristics that have been described variously as personality… [:] coping styles, response types, temperament, and behavioral tendencies,” the researchers concluded. Advocating for greater respect and understanding of pigs’ complex mental capacities, the authors called for a shift in how humans perceive and interact with them.

The Cognitive Lives of Pigs

Since “Thinking Pigs” was published, many other studies have shown that pigs possess cognitive abilities widely accepted as indicating “human-like” intelligence. For example, a 2023 explainer by Rachel Graham for Sentient Media titled “Pigs Are Intelligent and Clean Animals, Actually” cites several studies revealing pigs to be even more sociable and intelligent than was previously known.

Pigs use tools in different situations and have been seen using sticks to dig and build a nest. Like primates (including humans), wolves, and birds, pigs employ third-party mediation, adopting a “triadic contact” strategy to resolve group disputes.

Significantly, a 2009 study showed that pigs could interpret a mirror image to find a food bowl and demonstrated a marked interest in their reflections. This is notable because the mirror or mirror self-recognition (MSR) test has long been used to measure self-recognition and cognitive self-awareness in nonhuman animals. Very few species have demonstrated these behaviors: great apes, bottlenose dolphins, orcas, manta rays, Eurasian magpies, domestic pigeons, and cleaner wrasses.

In 2021, scientists reported seeing and recording a female wild sow successfully figuring out how to rescue two young wild boars from a trap, demonstrating remarkable problem-solving skills.

The Emotional Lives of Pigs

While referring to the emotional lives of pigs, the authors of “Thinking Pigs” noted, “Some of the more interesting studies demonstrating emotional contagion in pigs involve responses to other pigs’ anticipation of positive or negative events, revealing the importance of social factors in emotion.”

In one study (Reimert, Bolhuis, Kemp, and Rodenburg, 2013), naive test pigs were exposed to pen mates trained to anticipate upcoming rewarding events (receiving straw and chocolate raisins) or aversive events (social isolation). When the naive pigs were placed in the company of the trained pigs, they adopted the same emotional anticipatory behaviors (for example, ear and tail postures and increased cortisol release) as the trained pigs with the direct experience. These findings show that not only can pigs connect with the emotions of other pigs but they can also adopt the behaviors of their pen mates, who respond emotionally in anticipation of future events.

The rescue incident mentioned above, where a wild sow was filmed saving the young from a trap, suggests the species’ capacity for deep emotion. During the rescue effort, she exhibited piloerection (bristles on her back standing up), which is typically a sign of distress and indicates an empathetic emotional state.

Does It Matter If Pigs Are Smarter Than Dogs?

I came across a 2013 article by David Crary in the Associated Press titled “Pigs Smart as Dogs? Activists Pose the Question.” As a scientist who has studied the cognitive and emotional capacities of a variety of nonhuman animals and as an adviser to The Someone Project—an initiative by the nonprofit Farm Sanctuary “documenting farm animal sentience through science”—I have addressed some of the points raised in the article using solid scientific research as a foundation.

First, as I have noted in several reports (for example, in an article “Dogs Are Brainier Than Cats, But Are They Really Smarter?” and in another titled, “Do ‘Smarter’ Dogs Really Suffer More than ‘Dumber’ Mice?”), as a biologist, I don’t consider questions comparing the intelligence of different species helpful. In fact, they can be very misleading.

The same applies to how “emotionally complex” or “emotionally sophisticated” one species is relative to another. Comparing members of the same species might help understand how individuals learn social skills or the speed at which they learn different tasks. However, comparing dogs to cats or pigs doesn’t provide any relevant information.

Another reason these cross-species comparisons are relatively meaningless and lead to a slippery slope is that some people use this to justify subjecting the less intelligent animals to all sorts of invasive and abusive conditions based on the assumption that they suffer less compared to animals with higher intelligence. There is no sound scientific reason to make this claim; the opposite might be true.

All mammals are sentient beings who share the same neural architecture underlying their emotional lives and experience a broad spectrum of emotions, including the capacity to feel pain and suffer. All one has to do is look at available scientific literature to see that millions upon millions of mice and other rodents are used in various studies to learn more about human pain. Yet, even though we know that mice, rats, and chickens display empathy and are very smart and emotional, they are not protected by the Animal Welfare Act.

Lori Marino, founder of the Kimmela Center, who also works on The Someone Project, said it well: “The point is not to rank these animals but to reeducate people about who they are. They are very sophisticated animals.” I’ve emphasized the word who because these animals are sentient beings, and while making food choices, we must consider who we eat, not what we eat.

Should an Animal’s Intelligence Save Them From Being Eaten?

A 2014 paper titled “The Psychology of Eating Animals” addressed what authors Steve Loughnan, Brock Bastian, and Nick Haslam called the “meat paradox”: the baffling fact that most people eat and simultaneously care about animals. This study showed that “when there is a conflict between their preferred way of thinking and their preferred way of acting, it is their thoughts and moral standards that people abandon first—rather than changing their behavior.”

In other words, people who wish to escape the “meat paradox” simply decide to deny that the animal they are eating can suffer. Perceiving nonhuman animals as highly dissimilar to humans and lacking mental attributes, such as the capacity for pain, also helps ease the conscience.

Similarly, researchers conducted three studies exploring the relationship between an animal’s perceived intelligence and participants’ views of their moral standing. The researchers hypothesized that participants would be more willing to consider intelligence morally significant for animals they did not view as a food source. They concluded that arguments about animals’ intelligence were generally not persuasive when participants had already “categorized” the animal as food.

That said, discussions about the comparative intelligence of nonhumans may still persuade a small number of people to avoid consuming animals. For example, after starring in the 1995 movie Babe, whose character won a piglet at a county fair, the actor James Oliver Cromwell became vegan and a strong advocate for pigs. He said in a statement, “Having had the privilege of witnessing and experiencing pigs’ intelligence and inquisitive personalities while filming the movie ‘Babe’ changed my way of life and my way of eating,” according to a 2023 Variety article. I call bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, Babe, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.

Referring to the Intelligence or Emotional Lives of Animals Is Not ‘Humanizing’ Them

There are some people who, meanwhile, disagree and oppose the work done through The Someone Project. For example, David Warner of the National Pork Producers Council claimed, “While animals raised for food do have a certain degree of intelligence, Farm Sanctuary is trying to humanize them to advance their vegan agenda—an end to meat consumption,” stated Crary’s article.

While many advocates and organizations are working to ensure people drastically reduce their meat consumption and move toward a vegetarian or vegan diet, pointing to the intelligence of animals or their deep emotional lives is not done to “humanize” them but to highlight the attributes they already possess.

Indeed, when we pay attention to solid evolutionary theory, namely Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolutionary continuity, we see that humans are not the only intelligent, sentient, and emotional beings. It’s bad biology to rob nonhumans of their cognitive and emotional capacities. We’re not inserting “something human” into these animals they don’t possess; we’re identifying commonalities and then using human language to communicate what we observe.

In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, underwritten by world-renowned scientists, made a similar observation when it noted that available scientific data clearly showed that all mammals, and some other animals, are fully conscious beings.

In April 2024, a group of top scientists went one step further and signed The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which confirms there is “‘strong scientific support’ that birds and mammals have conscious experience, and a ‘realistic possibility’ of consciousness for all vertebrates—including reptiles, amphibians, and fish,” stated NBC News.

Now is the time to shelve outdated and unsupported ideas about animal sentience and factor sentience into all the innumerable ways we encounter nonhuman animals. When these declarations were made public, there was a lot of pomp and media coverage. Such fanfare is not required. Our new relationship with animals needs to be a deep, personal, and inspirational journey that comes from our hearts and has a substantial and rapidly growing evidence-based foundation.

Much research on pigs centers on their welfare because pigs are used globally for food and are horrifically abused. As I noted in a review, Jessica Pierce and I coined the word “welfarish” to emphasize how attempts to improve an animal’s life who is abused for human ends are only “sort of okay” in very few instances. In fact, they are far from okay in countless situations. The humane-washing welfarist and apologist Dr. Temple Grandinthinks it’s perfectly okay to eat other animals as long as we give them a good death. Her standards of what is a good life for so-called “food animals” fall very short of anything respectable and compassionate. Her so-called “stairway to heaven” is actually a stairway to deep and unimaginable physical and psychological pain leading to an undignified and violent death—a veritable “stairway to hell.”

A more straightforward way to fulfill our ethical obligations would be to stop factory farming immediately and allow those animals who find themselves in these horrific places to have a good life. Indeed, as people realize they are eating animals suffering from a lot of pain, non-animal meals will likely become more common.

Who we eat is on the minds of many people, and the conclusion of a 2013 article by Nicholas Kristof called “Can We See Our Hypocrisy to Animals?” in the New York Times provides some valuable insights regarding this. Kristof writes, “May our descendants, when, in the future, they reflect uncomprehendingly on our abuse of hens and orcas, appreciate that we are good and decent people moving in the right direction and show some compassion for our obliviousness.”

Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, adapted and produced this article based on two by the author initially appearing on Psychology Today, found here and here, with the author’s permission.

Marc Bekoff is a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His books include The Emotional Lives of Animals (New World Library, 2024), Dogs Demystified: An A-to-Z Guide to All Things Canine (New World Library, 2023), and with Jessica Pierce, A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans (Princeton University Press, 2021). He is a contributor to the Observatory. Find him at marcbekoff.com and on X at @MarcBekoff.

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