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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Predators were designed for exactly this job

Pigs don't really have any effective natural predators

Coyotes, Foxes, Dingos, Racoons, Wolves, Pumas, Leopards, Jaguars, Alligators, Eagles, Bobcats, Owls, Hawks, Black bears, Brown bears, Boas, Anacondas, Wolverines...

In some places zoologists had reported up to 80% of wolves diet composed of wildboars, consistently around the year.

A mature feral hog may reach a shoulder height of 36 inches and weigh from 100 to over 400 pounds. The extreme larger hogs are generally not far removed from domestication. Males are generally larger than females.

I'd like to see an owl take one of those.

You need to think further. A piglet is also a pig.

Owls? Eagles? Against a 300 lb. hog? Regardless, half of those animals don’t even live in the U. S.

And raccoons?

I think we need to resurrect the sabertooth Tiger for the big adult hogs

That doesn't mean that they are effective predators at keeping boar populations in check.

In fact, eating lots of boars is the whole and complete definition of keeping boar populations in check.

Cougar are far more effective at hunting them than any group of entitled Elmer Fudds. It should be illegal to hunt cougar, and they should be reintroduced back to everywhere they were extirpated. But there's also a sense of what's been happening with coyote, which is the more they are hunted, the more pressure is put on them to proliferate, i.e. the more coyote hunters kill, the more coyote there will be. It may very well be far more effective to TNR or haze feral pigs, no matter how much fun killing things is.

Do you have a link to your Coyote example? From the outside it sounds like complete nonsense and I have never heard of an animal that works like that.

This is common biology knowledge and has been proven. Pigs do it also. Fishes also change its strategies under heavy predator's pressure.

Shouldn't be difficult to find examples on any decent ecology handbook

I studied biology and it wasn't in the curriculum I learned. If you have an ecosystem that can support 100 coyotes, how does shooting 10 make the ecosystem magically able to support 200?

There are some population management strategies where harvesting large mature animals allow an ecosystem to support a greater number of younger and smaller animals, but that is a very different phenomenon than what you described.

Well, you're going to have to do a little thinking for yourself. We've been slaughtering coyote by the hundreds of thousands annually for over a century, and in that time their range has expanded to 48 stages. The coyote population has tripled since 1980 alone. You think there are less hunters? No, there are a lot more. We've gotten really good at killing coyote, upwards of half a million a year. It is ineffective. Hunters are causing the problem, not helping it. When coyote are killed, this pressure increases litter sizes. That's why it's happening. And if hunters continue the way they have been, we're going to be literally swimming in coyote.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-killing-coyot...

Predators were… designed?

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