They live among us, pretending to be dogs or cats or ferrets or newspaper publishers.
Unloved, unwanted, they engage in furtive sex as a means to increase their share of market through reproduction.
They lower real estate values wherever they roam, hoping against hope that the plummeting prices will be blamed on recession or zoning boards.
Massachusetts can fight back. The tipping point has not yet been reached. The invasive creatures can be stopped. Yes, a crusading columnist can ride through the state, much like a modern-day Paul Revere, announcing that the wild hogs are coming, the wild hogs are coming.
Massachusetts? Massachusetts, you say? No, Columnist Cohen, you are correct about almost everything, but you can’t possibly be right about this. We have universities and museums and baseball stadiums. We even have a handful of Republicans. But, wild hogs?
Oh, ye of little faith. We have wild hogs. The Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, which is sort of the Pentagon and CIA combined when it comes to tracking and doing battle with wild hogs, reports that Massachusetts is one of those states in which wild hogs occasionally come for vacation, get lost, and never find their way out again. There are 11 such states, including Maine and New Hampshire, but interestingly enough, not Connecticut or Rhode Island.
To be sure, there are states in which entire subdivisions have been taken over by the hogs: the Mississippi and Arkansas and West Virginia kinds of places. And there are states that are in transition, which is to say, the wild hogs are running for public office, but not yet winning anything beyond the occasional county commission seat: Indiana, Kansas and Nebraska, for instance.
It may already be too late for many of these states – even those in “transition,” a term used to lessen the panic among the citizenry. The hogs are “opportunistic,” according to the scientists, which means that they will crash your daughter’s wedding, apply for welfare benefits, and eat almost anything, be it animal, vegetable, mineral, or sold at Fenway. They dig giant holes in the ground, which have been known to swallow up hybrid cars; and they will run amok through suburban gardens, leaving them looking like Gov. Deval Patrick’s legislative agenda.
Hog Heaven
States have declared them unloved and unwanted. They’ve established and expanded hunting season for hogs, and sprinkled hog contraceptives in areas where they have been known to park and make out and stuff. Nothing works.
The Savannah Lab researchers say that lucky states like Massachusetts, which are afflicted with only the occasional hog, have the best chances at success in avoiding a hog catastrophe. The advice: hunt them, trap them, declare them ineligible for market-rate housing. The time to act is now.
In Tennessee last year, after a particularly depraved 2008 in which the hogs mated like Hollywood movie stars, officials at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park removed 602 wild hogs and then offered them to naïve states such as Massachusetts and New Hampshire, which don’t know any better.
Some might argue that in Massachusetts, an occasional hog might wander up to the Berkshires and disrupt a Tanglewood concert, but that the creatures would avoid Metro Boston with all its confusing, one-way streets.
In fact, the hogs are perfectly comfortable in dense traffic. In January, wild hogs wandered on to a section of the German autobahn, shutting down the highway for hours.
The fear in Massachusetts is that the social services network will take on the wild hogs, with reformed wild hogs being hired as counselors, or that churches will host parades, beseeching the hogs to be kind. Hogs, much like human gang members, don’t respond well to reason.
In Texas, one of those states with an “established” hog population that is well beyond the “transition” stage, a state legislator has proposed labeling the hogs livestock “predators,” which would empower Texas government to pull out the shotguns and bring home the bacon, so to speak.
Be warned and be ready. If a wild hog stops you, looks confused, and asks for directions, send it to hog-free Connecticut. That’s called “regional planning.”
