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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

I love pigs and dread the thought of butchering mine. Where I live wild pigs are not a problem, but in the Southern states of the USA there are literally millions. They are the most invasive of species, descendants of those imported from Europe or maybe Russia in the 19th century. Some get to be enormous. They destroy property and they're tearing up hundreds of thousands of acres of land. They're smart and dangerous. The right solution is of course to shoot them en masse, but the optics aren't so good on that solution.

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One may recall the "30 to 50 feral hogs" tweet that got turned into somewhat of a joke/meme a year ago. Here's an article that delves into the realism a bit...

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/6/20756162/30-to-5...

Trapping an entire sounder of feral hogs is apparently a better choice than trying to shoot a few of them, as any hogs not killed will repopulate quickly: https://www.uaex.edu/publications/pdf/MP534.pdf

Around 600000 are shot per year in Germany, as a point of reference.

Wow! I somehow decided that Germany was densely populated enough that the numbers wouldn't be nearly so high.

Aren't those boars though? Or are those the boars and pigs same animal just that one is feral? My knowledge of boars is entirely from Asterix and Obelix so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Though if the comics (from 1950) are to be believed, they were also aplenty in Gaul 2000 years ago.

Not many people know that if you take the standard domesticated pig we’re all used to and let it roam free, it will change physically and behaviorally pretty quickly and resemble a boar. Pretty “wild” stuff.

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/31104/202...

It's not entirely clear how many generations this take and whether breeding with the wild population is involved though. This would be extremely fascinating if we knew this to be entirely epigenetic...

It happens in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have wild pigs.

The boars they eat in Astérix are Sus Scrofa. The pigs we eat nowadays are originally the same species, now slightly altered by domestication and selection. They are sometimes considered as a subspecies Sus Scrofa Domesticus, and sometimes their own species Sus Domesticus. In any case, they are very close to each other, and I am not sure the difference between a feral Sus Domesticus and a proper Sus Scrofa would be significant. They still can mate.

There were indeed plenty of boars in medieval Europe, and there still are plenty of them now.

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