I saw the first signs a few weeks ago while walking across the couple of acres that serve as our ‘front lawn’. I do keep try my best to keep the varied species of grasses and weeds some might call a lawn under control but it’s been a real challenge lately with all the wet weather. I noticed where the ground had been disturbed and instantly knew a sounder of hogs from the nearby woods had invaded our neighborhood. We had an abundance of acorns on several of the mature post oaks on our place and back during the fall, squirrels did a good job burying a good many of them. Wild hogs are used in Germany to sniff out truffles and their keen noses have no problem locating a soured acorn or hickory nut a few inches deep. The ground under those oaks honestly looked as though a garden tiller had been at work. I love hunting and eating wild hogs and thought it was neat having them coming to me, on several occasions, I’ve seen their sign within ten feet of my front porch. I’d thought of using my thermal scope mounted on a big bore air rifle and hunting from the porch swing but a trail camera I set up captured their images in the middle of the night. A half mile from home on some land my neighbors let me hunt, I have them patterned to a corn feeder each night just about dark. I just don’t wish to lose sleep waiting for these ‘home hogs’ to show, even if my ‘stand’ is a front porch swing!
This ‘hog problem’ as my neighbors call it was not limited to my place, the nuisance porkers were working over the entire neighborhood. I shed a sympathetic ear when my friends were complaining about the rooting done by the porkers. I even joked with them a bit at first with statements like, “Heck, I really like them aerating to soil for me, it will make my assortment of every grass species known to northeast Texas flourish”.
One of my neighbors has his place on the market and the porkers were hitting him pretty hard. He even resorted to setting a radio outside a window and playing late night money market shows all night. The hogs kept coming and as smart as I know hogs to be, they might just be opening up their own financial planning companies soon! He didn’t laugh when I joked that a potential buyer might be a hunter and relish the idea that hogs were actually coming out of the woods to his property. It became clear that It was time for ‘Ole Luke’ to go into action to keep harmony and lessen stress in the neighborhood!
