00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we're gonna be diving way deep into into wild pigs um and we get tons of questions about wild pigs, and I'm gonna give like sort of the ends of the you know, I'm gonna give two ends in the middle and sort of the sorts of questions we get about wild pigs. A question about wild pigs might be where someone would right in and send a link to an article, and it would be how somewhere somewhere wild pigs have turned up and they are causing their wreaking ecological havoc and what does one make of That'd be like a type of thing people always winding about wild pigs. A lot of people might be like, hey, what's up? Or wild pigs good to eat? Can you get sick from them? Or what? That's another that's the middle part that people want to hear about wild pigs. And another common question we get about wild pigs would be if wild pigs are so bad and they're everywhere and they're gonna kill everyone and destroy the whole universe. And everyone's overrun with wild pigs. How come no one will let me go hunt wild pigs on their property? Like, wouldn't you think that if pigs are that bad, it wouldn't be so bad to have a stranger on your land hunting. But it seems that they're not quite that bad. So that's another question. And who's gonna walk us through all of this? Not your honest it will be in part the portions that he's comfortable with would be our guest, Parker Hall. Now, Parker Hall, h can two things and you can do it. However, three things you can do whatever or do you want? Um? What do you do at work? Who do you work for? And then I would like to get a little bit into how did that happen? Okay, what do I do at work? I'm a professional email doer and meeting goer. To get out I know, I work for the U. S Department of Agriculture APHIST Wildlife Services UM. So our mission is to provide federal leadership with human wildlife conflict. So that can range from ferrell swine or wild pigs. I have to call them ferrell swine, UM call him. That's what they told me. Wild pigs, Ferrell swine, hogs, whatever. UM. It can range from that to protecting airports from collisions with birds, to UH beaver control in the Deep South, flooding roads and bridges, to coyote and predator control in the West. So it really depends on where you are in the in in the country is as to what that the different states do. UM. So Wildlife Services is non regulatory. That means we don't make any rules, UM, which is kind of a good good position to be in. So anywhere we are, we're there by by invitation. We're oftentimes invited to help whatever land management agency bit, a state agency, UM, another federal agency on evasive species, and Farrell swine is one that that UH that we deal with all over the country. So two thousand and fourteen there was an initiative and APHIST initiative that provided some funding set up a national program. Said all right, there's enough damage being going on with Farrell swine, we're getting on, We're getting enough people that are having some trouble with them, be at the agg industry, being at landowners, be at the natural resources people, that we need to do something about it. So that's kind of how UH this program got got set up. So um, now that's that's too right. What's the third one? How I got here? How you got here? Just as a person to be here? But I'm already we we put that on hold for a minute, sure, because I already got a problem. All right, It okay. Wild pigs were introduced here in the by the Spanish. Right, so they took off across the ocean. Needed something to eat, right, guys were going out, Uh, we don't know where we're going across the ocean. It's far. We better bring something to eat. So they float, float, float, float float. They hit some land to go, oh man, that was good. We're still alive. Hey, we're still going. We don't know where we are. Let's put some pigs on because when we come back, we're gonna be hungry again. And so those repetitive introductions from those explorers all through the South and the Islands, going all the way down through you know, down to the South America and lesser antillities and the Caribbean all through there. You know, those repetitive introductions finally finally took hold. Native Americans figured out that hey, this is better than eating some of the stuff we're eating right now. So they fostered that and and those those pigs grew and they kept them around and they established population. So since the fifteen hundreds, they've been all up and down. So what happened during those hundreds of years when it didn't like there was a shift, right, because we had hundreds of years of it just being that there's some that there's wild pigs around, there, wild pigs around and then all of a sudden in my lifetime in it's like, holy shit, wild pigs, Like like what what was that? So? Um, is it perception or is it reality? Or is it it's reality. So if you look at a natural expansion of any population, be it be it wild pigs or or anything, it's kind of like a balloon blowing up, right, you're blowing the balloon. It gets bigger, bigger, bigger, and the population spreads. Well, that's not been the case of feral pigs. I mean you guys from Michigan, right, there's feral pigs in Michigan. They didn't get there from Florida by chance. They got there in the back of pickup truck. Um, So it became you know, uh, I grew up in Georgia, hunting hogs. It was fun. It's a it's a cultural thing in the Deep South. A lot of people do it, and you know, but it's been maintained, particularly in the Deep South. Uh, Texas, California. Oh yeah, my whole family, and they still do. Um, of course they do. Um. But I think it got um cool or whatever for lack of a better term, cool too, Uh hunt pigs by television shows. It got put on TV, and people think that killing the two hundred pound hog is awesome. They're very few laws regulating hogs. Um. You know, it differs by state, but they're all they're all a little bit confusing. Um. You know, it's easy to catch pigs, uh. As one of my good friends says, it's it takes a very very little energy to put pigs in the back of a truck and move them, but it takes tremendous energy to get them back from the wild and put them back into that pickup truck. And that's a fact. So, UM, I think there's a there's a there's probably a lot of ways for people to begin to understand that. And if you're not familiar with wild pigs, would be just the But you know what, we often called bucket biology with fisheries, where you can have you can trace back to sort of like a single inner doctory effort of a fish species into some lake and river system, and then pretty soon it becomes literally impossible to undo, like literally impossible to undo the damage. Correct. Yeah, So with the pigs, I remember, well, you know, but but you're assigned to a specific like does your expertise extend beyond where you're Oh, sure, yeah, we we do. We do a lot of different different things in the state, in the two states, because that would I want to ask about was I remember in Michigan It wasn't that long ago. Michigan was putting up some trying to create some legislation around Obviously, you can't block people from transporting pigs because it's all the same species, right, Sue scraffa is the same thing you buy in a grocery store. Is it's all the same species. But they were trying to put some language around what types of pigs could be moved into the state. Can you explain that a little bit when when you talk about that people are moving pigs, right, They're not moving barnyard varieties of pigs are well they're doing, they're doing all all of the above. Um, like you mentioned, it's all the same species. They can all interbreed. So. UM. Spanish pigs like we talked about before, are the ones that were introduced in the fifteen hundreds in the South. Um, those have there's been introductions from the Eurasian wild wild bore, big Harry wooly ones that everybody thinks about, you know that that came over from Europe and those were introduced into New Hampshire Vermont area and in some in in California moved around. Um, people like them for sport. I know the New Hampshire Vermont ones were for brought in for hunting purposes, right right, But it's just hard to hard to contain them. Yeah, yeah, it's hard to contain them. And you know there's there's been sales. Hey you have some of those. You know, a guy comes in and goes, what's it cost, you know, sell me some of those. Well nobody cares. He loads them up ears on her bucks or whatever it is, and and and moves them to Idaho. In terms of blue you know, they're they're incredibly hardy, they're incredibly fucooned. You know, a hundred and fifteen days or so. Um, they have a litter. Uh, go go a few weeks, get pregnant again. You know, they can have a couple of litters a year. So, um, they're super hardy. You know, they're they're they're the ultimate invasive species. Compare that to a deer who puts off between you know, yeah, yeah, no, I want I want to get back into the into the long term story. But first I want to ask that this is true. People like to say they like to put this timeline around. If you take a domestic like a domesticated domestic variety pig, and you turn it out, that the minute you turn it out, all of a sudden, it girls big, gigantic tossing gets a wooly coat. You know that that's not It depends on the species, not the species, but the uh I don't know if it's a subspecies or whatever. You know, a pink pig that's that's grown for in a in a pig parlor is a little different than you know, some of these heritage pigs or whatever. So there's a bunch of different flavors, if you will. But um, if turned loose over time, they do revert back pretty quick. It's not overnight. You know, we a lot of times when when hogs get loose, Um, we'll get reports there's some there's some feral swine over there, and they get hungry and go back to the feed bucket in two days. Uh, all of those in between, you know, sometimes they go off and if they have a litter, then then those pigs are generally pretty wary. Um, they're dealing with predators, dealing with those first wild born generation. Yeah, that's right. Now. You take a farrellhawk and put him in the pen, and it doesn't take long for them to tame right down. Yeah. I mean, you know, in a couple of weeks, you start shaking the food bucket, you know, it starts approaching a little bit, and over time they'll tame right down as well. So you can you can read domesticate them, you can. Yeah, all right now, I'm ready to go back and do what we're gonna do A minute ago is uh you kind of alluded to it. Now, So you grew up hunting pigs? I did. Yeah, I grew up hunting and fishing. My dad was U. S. T. A Aphist wildlife services employee for his career yeah, so you grew up that's how it's kind of wondering. So you grew up kind of knowing that this is the thing a person could do. Yeah, of course, yeah, I did, um, but but I didn't have the aspirations to be a state director. I remember thinking as I was going through school. I graduated from the University of Georgia Bareley. Um, I think I had a stellar two point two or three uh mostly hog hunting at night and crappie fishing. But I did get a I did get a degree in in UH in wildlife. So UM. I remember thinking, if I can ever make about thirty five or forty thousand dollars a year trapping beavers, I will have reached the pinnacle. So I started off as a beaver trapper in Alabama and I went through, um several years of that, and I didn't just do a private nuisance. I was working as a as a as a specialist for U s d A. Yeah, so a entry level and and that went on for several years, and I got into doing some invasive species work. When I was I was down in the US Virgin Islands doing work down there, and met my wife down there, and how are you catching the beavers? And and when I was now con embarrassing their foothold, So the whole game and the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know those handcock wife treats you guys were you guys were getting after him for real? Yeah that's yeah, that's dudes from Michigan use those. Yeah, never touched. So yeah, I did some work in the in in the islands, and then um uh I went to Florida. Didn't kind of work in the islands offshore eradication kind of stuff, and we did uh rat eradications, goat eradications to protect threatening dangerous species small offshore islands. It's really neat. Actually, when you remove um, a species like a rat or a goat, what the island does? You know? The smaller islands, man, they they blew like a flower you right back, you know when you remove those invasives. Did you ever use the Judas strategy? Yes, and I still do. Can you explain that? Yeah, So if you remember your your your Bible stories, Judas was the one who betrayed Jesus and and so that's where the term Judas animal comes from. So you take that animal capture. So in Ferrell swine will take one and put a radio transmitter on on its necker in its ear um, capture it, turn it back loose, and it'll run back to the other you know, the sounders which call a group of hawks. It'll go back to a sounder or um, you know, other other pigs and it all lleg you to those. So it's real effective. It's really really effective, particularly in low densities. Yeah, you know where we are right now. Yeah, yeah, it does good. Yeah, we use it a lot. So you you studied up on wildlife, wanted doing beaver work, and then your career kind of took off, it did, and then one day, um, someone springs on you that your jurisdiction is going to be this is so, this is how I was a state I was a district supervisor in in South Florida and doing evasive species. I really python. Yeah, we did work on the burnme's python a little bit. Yeah, you hit all the big news story animals. Yeah, they're um, you know, they're they're difficult. That's a difficult problem. The snakes, is it. Yeah? Do you think that they'll that there will ever be a solution. There's just too hard to protect you know. Uh, they sent a man to the moon, so I don't know, but they you know, the thing about the invasive reptiles is, let's face it, they're not gonna go past the freeze line for the most part. So you know, they're they're confined to those habitats in those areas that that are akinada to how they evolved. You know that. So we won't some day be talking about Burmese pythons in Michigan like we're talking about so, I don't think so until wintertime. I've been in Michigan in the wintertime and pythons won't do too well. Yeah, So South Florida and what other You probably worked on pigs in South Florida. I did. We did a lot of pig working Florida. Did iguanas, yeah, sure did. In Florida I did. We did some more rat eradications actually to protect next nesting Uh shoreboards. UM, predator control on beaches for for sea turtles was was a big one. Um. What's something that gets after sea turtle legs? Man? Everything likes an egg, right, U. Raccoons are bad Farrell swine or or terrible on them. There's places where Farrell swine are on on the beach, saltwater beach. There are guys who their job is to stay on the beach all night long to make sure farrell swine don't come out there and dig up sea turtle nests. And they're seeing something. Oh man, they're doing they're doing effective control and they're saving thousands and thousands and thousands of sea turtles. I mean one nest is wrecked by a hog. And we've been on beaches down in in South America. We've been on beaches where all the turtle eggs have been dug up by jaguars. Everything looks a turtle legg ghost, crabs, raccoons, armadillas, possums, foxes. So you'll you'll select a you guys would select a beach and just be like hands off. No. Remember now, remember we're um, we're non regulatory. So we're there by the invitation of what ever entity is responsible for that that's right, that's right, whatever entity has jurisdiction over that beach asks us to do that work. I understand. Yeah, So it's always coming from it's a it's a it's a local ask, and you guys provide the expertise to to execute what they're hoping to correct accomplish. So from South Florida, then what happens to you? So from South Florida, UM, a position came open as a state director and New Hampshire and Vermont. Now, like I said, I grew up in Georgia. I've never been north of Tennessee hardly. Um. I was in South Florida and that position came open, and I talked to my wife about and said, here's an opportunity, you know. Uh so we said, yeah, that that'll be fine. She's from Missouri and I'll get to that in a man and you can deduce. But went up to UM, got selected for that position and had a wonderful experience in New Hampshire Vermont UM working on all all sorts of different creat A lot of black bear stuff was going up. Non natives, right, a lot of a lot of natives there. Yeah, yeah, did some moose work. You know, it's it was uh for for Georgia. Boy, it was a really neat experience. And then the black bears are getting trouble with orchards and oh yeah, the whole thing ride down in the you know, it's a it's a big tourist economy in the summertime, it's gorgeous in New Hampshire and Vermont and uh, you know the black bears down there, falling tourist arounding doughnuts and you know the whole You guys do a lot of relocations. Yeah, yeah, a lot of relocations there. Yeah, okay, yeah. What did you get involved with any fish anywhere? No? No, not a fish guy. There's other than are the wildlife services people who mess with fish. There are wildlife services people that, um, yes, that do invasive fish work. I think there's one state out west that does. I'm not quite sure, but as a general rule, we don't do That's that's left to the fisheries. Bottle just fish are a whole different thing, you know, under the water, and those guys can do math good. Yeah, yeah, the fisheries. Gyah. What was the common moose conflict? The common moose conflict was, uh, the moose walking through where they you know, they make the maple syrup and those guys have great big taps right when these tubes coming way down to their tap house. Sometimes they have thousands these tubes coming on and the moose just walk right through, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they're like, you know, it's the middle of the middle of SAPs running and those guys are freaking out. Man, all their taps just got yanked off. So um, you know it was interesting, particularly for me. It doesn't know anything about moose, you know, so it was educational experience. Yeah, I can imagine. It was a good time. So then from there, from there, uh, the Missouri State Director Missouri Iowa state director position um came available and my wife said, guess what, big boy, I like the Royals, So yeah, we I put in for that position. And you know, I think it was a good move for me and as much that uh, I was not from the northeast. But it was a great experience. And but to get to uh sometimes a little bit more familiar with different but a little more familiar. Sure. Sure. And so you as the state state coordinary, state director, state director, state director everything again here everything falls under your purview, so to speak. But you guys are particularly focused. They're paying a lot of attention on wild pigs or is that just a small part of the It's just it's it's more than a small part. In Missouri. So we have what's called the Missouri Aero Swine Partnership and that is eleven different land management agencies who were committed to UM suppressing or eliminating ferrell swine from from the state of Missouri. So it's it's a it's a pretty good chunk of our of our program. UM we do UH Iowa does a lot of work at um UH dairy farms for starling's invasive like like those UH starlings, pigeons, sparrows, those things, you know, the milk and you know, the whole the whole deal. Airport stuff. If a deer runs out on the airport and you know at three in the morning and the planes trying to land, you know, we have we have people there to help assister move that. You know. UM a lot of airport working in Missouri. UM Avian influenza, so a disease component UM of our program sampling for different diseases, which goes hand in hand with the ferrell swine stuff. UM stamp on there. So a little bit of everything. Now, UM the Missouri Department of Conservation UM has has pretty much driven this this program. So we're doing feral swine work by you know, their invitation in their direction. Now you mentioned suppression or eradication. Doesn't that cause a little mission confusion? Can't you just pick one? Yeah, well we use the word elimination, you know, so there's no mission confusion. No, there's no mission confusion. Lay the um lay the wild pig situation. Like, give me a little bit of history on the wild pig situation here in Missouri. Yeah, because it's different than Florida, right because in Florida they've been underground for centuries? Is it too early in the timing might be off, but I'd like to definitely know at some point if it's legal to hunt pigs in the state, and I want timing is off, but you can ask should have waited? So you weren't you weren't detecting the flow. I was gone. It's not very clearly defined. Has it my flow? Yeah, it's a little it's a little herky jerky. I don't see why we can't get into that right now. It's yeah, so it's yeah, it's completely legal to hunt ferrell swine in Missouri. Where it is illegal to hunt ferrell swine is on the Missouri Department of Conservation lands. It's it's illegal on uh Fort Leonard Wood. It's illegal on Army Corps of Engineers UM land, but on private land. UM. Right now on the Mark Twain National Forest, it's legal to hunt ferrell swine. What is the the obvious question comes up, Uh, why if you want to get rid of them? Yeah, so, UM, let's go back to the first part of of when we started talking. In in Georgia when I grew up, there's no season, there's no limit, there's really no restriction on how you can hunt them with what you can use. You can use guns, bows, bazookas, whatever, and has been that way and they only grow. So hunting does not work to eliminate. We use hunting as a as a tool to manage our our native species. UM not eliminate or that's that's what that's why we have UM limits and particularly uh if you can or can't shoot female of any of any animal, because that that you know, the result of removal of those is population control. And so that's something that UM Missouri Department of Conservations say, Look, we're not going to reinvent the wheel. I mean, these guys all over the South has chased them for millennia and it's the stronghold of feral swine. They're there. Like recreational hunting because of the because of like the fecundity and all these other factis recreational hunting, even when it's unrestricted, isn't doesn't do it right. Right. So you know, a recreational hunter goes out and he has a good time and and he he harvests a hog, and he comes back and they clean it up and they have a meal. But it did absolutely nothing for the population. You know, Um, it's fun, it's great, it's good recreation, but it's an exotic, invasive species that should be removed if they're competing with our natives. Yeah, so the thinking so extend that out and and uh explain the thinking on on restricting hunting. Well, I don't know that it's a I mean, it doesn't work. It's been proven that hunting does not eliminate a species of of any species. Um, recreational sport hunting doesn't. Um, So you know, I don't know that. Go ah, Brandon Butler. Brandon Butler wants the button. Another big issue is creating the demand. So if there's a demand for Farrell hogs, then there's going to be a desired supply, and by eliminating the opportunity to hunt them. You're hopefully eliminating that instead. Right, So if the Department of Conservation, you know, even though they're they're setting these traps up, that's another problem. They're setting up these traps, putting a lot of man hours into it. Parker and his teams doing the same thing. They work really hard to train these sounders to come to these traps so they can catch a mass of these pigs at one time. People will find those traps and they'll set up on them like hunting spots, and when the sounder comes in, they'll shoot one or maybe two, and then they scatter the rest and they'll run way off and they'll they'll set up new ranges. So you blow the whole plan. You waste all that money that's been spent, not only on the staff that's out working, but on the the corn there sour and all the other bait, the materials it takes to make the traps. But as he said, had hog hunting is fun and a lot of people down in this part of the country, I mean, they have dogs, they're you know, they're really into it. So they're expecting there to be a supply of hogs on the landscape. Well, I'll throw this in from I mean, this is something like this aspect of it is something I'm familiar with and in j honest and I UH have had discussions with an individual who was a hog trapper and at a time in the past had even gone so far as to sell wild hogs to people who he later learned, we're using the wild hogs to establish populations of wild hogs and areas that did not have them in order to be able to hunt for them. That's going on down here. There's there all over the country. There's this othery're spreading as they were ever getting prosecuted for this. Yeah, there's a case going on in the county north of US right now where somebody is is a known UH violator who propagator, Yeah, who actually raises these hogs and then releases them, trailers them in from other states, keeps them in a pen. When people are ready to go hunting, those people will pay this guy. He'll release those hogs and they'll go chase him down on open lands, not pen lands, on open lands. Yeah, so he'll keep him in a pen until he has clients. Once he has clients willing to pay they'll release those hounds, or they'll release those hogs, and they'll release the hounds, the hounds will chase him down. The one dog goes out and finds them, the rest of the dogs come in and hold them. That person goes in and likely stabs the hog or or may shoot it. But a lot of them are killing them with big booie knives and chasing them down that way. So they're they're not only creating a demand for the recreation of it, but there's a small group of people that are creating uh an industry around it. And you're talking about doing so in a very economically depressed part of the country. So when these guys can get cash on hand for letting you go out and kill some hogs, you know, it's hard to convince them that that's not a good deal. Do you mind? Do you mind real quick laying out Brandon, you mind real quick laying out your affiliations? Yeah? So, I'm the executive director of the Conservation Federation of Missouri. We work with hunting, angling, all conservation wildlife groups across the state. I've known Parker for a few years. There was a Feral Hogs symposium where state wildlife leaders came from kind of all over the Midwest, and we did a tour of a state park and then we went on some private property. And that was the first time I was ever really exposed to the real destruction that these hogs do to agg lands and why there's so much money being spent to eradicate them, because so much money is being lost by farmers down here as their pastures are destroyed and crop fields can be decimated. It was it was really eye opening to me, and I've kind of been studying it with Parker ever since. No, Parker, when you look at the like the voices that most want to so I I kind of understand the voices that are interested in having pigs is like isolated groups of people who want to have and they want to have a hunting out, some hunting opportunity. What are the voices of the people here, um that sort of have the best argument against the pigs being here. Well, I understand those people too, because, like I said, I grew up doing it in its phone And you know, right or wrong, they've they've uh in senitized and sanitizes the incentivized, incentivized two chase or chase lounge earlier. Right, So UM, so I understand that. And but we're land managers right or or we're stewarts of atlantis. An exotic invasive species. It's no different than bush honeysuckle UM shouldn't be here. It competes with their natives. UM. And I think it's it's difficult for for US wildlife people to go. I was competing with our natives and they're still dere in turkeys around and you know, and that thing I think people have a hard time with because they look and be like, Okay, but Texas is known for its white tail hunt. Texas has wild picks. That's right, Texas has the most wild picks. UM. But you know, you look at the things that deer in Turkey aren't the only things on the landscape, UM. Agricultural damage, UM, threatening an endangered species, water quality. You know, all of these things UM are being caused from an exotic invasive species that shouldn't be here. So, I mean, you know, we're wildlife biologists in some In some instances you just want to be like, jeez, that's what we're supposed to do. I mean, we're supposed to protect our our native species. It's not it's just not falling us flora as well. Yeah, yeah, I know in Hawaii they talk about uh, you know, an unknown quantity, but perhaps dozens of species of wildlife we're lost with the introduction of pigs and rats unto the Hawaiian Islands because they had a whole suite of you know, because of a lack of certain types of predation, they had whole suites of ground nesting birds that vanished. Going you look at the disease issues too with the domestic um uh uh uh industry we have here. You know, the potential for a disease to get in the domestic industry could be catastrophic to the state. Um. You know, we're one state south of of the biggest pork producing state in the country. It's just Iowa. UM. So you know, there's a fear there that wild pigs would would sure they have they have those diseases. They carry those diseases that the um agg industry has done such a wonderful job of getting rid of. And it's taken them a long time. Um and and now they're out. You know, they've they've got those uh domestic populations for lack of a better word, clean and um, you know, reintroducing some of those diseases could be a real setback financially, as you know, for for consumers as well as producers. Well, it's funny there, and I don't I don't. I don't expect you to comment on this unless you want to. But what's funny there is to have this idea of you know, you know, you call ferrell swine, but like common vernacular where you have this idea of a wild pig introducing disease to a domestic counterpart. It's sort of the opposite of the fear around domestic deer introducing disease to their wild counterpart. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's off that's off topic. Yeah, Well, we've kind of breathed over like the problems you know that the pigs do and how and why. But can we just get in that a little bit more? Like you talk like you're like water water quality, but what exactly do they do to diminish water quality? And what are they doing to you know, kill all these uh crops for all these farmers exactly. Well, one of the creeks that we were hunting around down here, Um, it looked better this year, Steve and I walked past it. But last year this real lush, little spring creek and the spring was really pumping. Yesterday when we were down there, it was just absolutely decimated with rooting. I mean, you go down there and you're expecting to be in this real serene, natural valley, and it looked like a monster truck had been ripping up and down this spring creek. Now this is way back in a wilderness, so very few people are laying their eyes on that. But if that was your private property, that would be infuriating to you. So you would call the government or whoever your representative is and say something has to be done about this invasive species that's destroying you know, my an sky that would be there in their feeding and it's rooting it all up and it just turns into a mud. They're just wallowing and rooting. And now all that that mud and sediment is running in to that stream, which runs into a larger stream which runs into a river, so it's sending all that that sediment down river. Um, the crap damage is just hard to explain. It's unbelievable. It looks like somebody went in with a brush hog. Sure, yeah, yeah, they can, they can do a lot of damage in in a very short amount of time. And that's something that is more common maybe in in in the South than it is in Missouri. Missouri is more uh, they're more in the ozarks. We do have some damage UM and the guys that have it wouldn't don't take it lightly. But you know, we have UH state and federalistic species that are stored Hines emerald dragonfly, they have a um they lave their larva in in a specialized little I forget the name of it. Uh, I don't know, it's an eco term, you know. But the hogs go through and and rude up and and eat the larva and and they don't reproduce UM. Meads milkweed is another UM Species of Concern listed species that hogs go through and trample and and and eat and and destroy and they don't come back. So you know, you look at it's it's not just we still have deer and we still have turkeys, and you know they ate some of my corn. But we're talking about you know, threatened and endangered species. That's you know, there's only very few of these left in the world. They're being consumed or destroyed by an exotic, invasive that shouldn't be here. You know, I don't know if the you know, if hin zem will dragonfi flying around this room, I don't know if I could identify it, but I know that you know, it's a it's a species that once they're gone, they're gone. Um and and that's being and that's uh happened to because of because of these Ferrell swine. And that's an example you use. It's you know, whether sea turtles or shore birds or whatever. You know, we haven't exotic doing damage and removing federally and stay listed listed species. So how many how many Ferrell pigs? Well, let's let's take it this way. How far back in time would you need to go to when there were probably no Ferrell pigs and in Missouri? So um, I wasn't here then. But they're relatively new. You know, if you went back fifteen years, I don't know that you could find too many people. You guys might know this better than me, but but you couldn't find too many people that knew where where a Farrell hog was. You go back twenty years, they're very very rare. You know, they were brought in and it's like I said, they're incredibly for coon. And you gotta see the terrain we're in. Man, you turned some pigs back here they go undetected for forever. So this is a pretty this is like a fairly new issue here. Absolutely. And how many is there an estimate on how many there are? No, we're doing some work on on that now, but there is not an estimate. Well, how about you put it this way, how many of you guys caught and killed? So the last year, um, we caught and killed just over six thousand, five hundred in this state. In the state, Yeah, just in Missouri. Now the other states to take you know, numbers many many, many more than that, Texas, Oklahoma. You know those guys, Um, they take a lot, a lot of pigs and multiple thousands of hawks. And in that time when you've taken them, have you guys gotten a sense of where exactly they're coming from? Well, we know, we know where they are. Um. And as much as it's it's a relatively new when you say fifteen years, it's a relatively new problem. Uh, the Missouri Department of Conservation has really rolled up as sleeves and out to work and ask their ball just and their people in the field and done a lot of work, and we know or we feel like we have a pretty good handle on on where those populations are. And it's it looks like uh, it's it's not a blob, of course, like natural sip. It looks like a zebra or a checkerboard, or it's it's patchwork um. And so across the entire state, across the entire state, mostly in the southern half and mostly in the ozarks, and mostly on public land. Yeah, of course, why do you think that is? I have no idea what because people can hunt it, really And so if you were to turn if you had a truck a little pigs and your neighbor is a guy you don't get along with, and you know he's not gonna let you hunt those pigs in the back of your truck on his place. You're gonna turn the loose on his place, of course. Not, You're gonna go yeah, yeah, all right, You're gonna go where you can hunt them. So if you lay, if you lay the map of where Ferrell swine um are in Missouri over public ground, it almost marries up perfectly, No kid, Yeah, I thought it was really interesting when I was showing Parker yesterday pictures of the feral hogs I got on my property. He's like, well, that's a Springfield hog. And I mean they've they've got it drilled down with your property is like up against the large chunk of public property, one of the one of the largest contiguous pieces of public property in Missouri. So they're definitely getting released back in there. But he's able to tell you, like distinctly where this hog has been shipped in from and where this hog has been Well, I gotta I know, they look a little different in different parts of the state, and so yeah, I don't know that I would go as far as into I know exactly where they're from, but yeah, but they are. They differ, um, depending on where you're grab them from from, you know, different parts of the state and different parts of the country. They look completely different. So you know, it's so so they're not homogenized me and there's like different ones that have different backgrounds, got them from different places. And and something that um people do a lot of times is they introduced domestics into those wild or feral populations to increase the size body size. Um. You know, so Zilla came around, well, some of those. I remember one of those giant pigs. It turns up like a hog Zilla. I don't know, like the it was, like, not the original one, but one of these giant pigs. It turns up where a guy exupposed to killed some stomp or wild pig. A few days later, a guy comes out with photographs of the thing standing in the back of the truck. Is he sold it to the guy? Of course, Yeah, that's not a wild pig, that's ostella and provides photo documentation on it. You get it. If you get two hundred fifty three hundred pounds, that's a serious wild hog. That's a big one, you know. And they're all born right yeah, I mean they're they're not eating their nat eating corn from from the bucket, you know, They're they're eating akrons and and whatever else they can get down in and out in the woods. So you know, two hundor fifty three hundre pounds is a great big and now they get bigger. But you know that's that's a great big adult. So I want to get into talking about the process of um how it all works. Meaning you identify a here, here's a new blip on the map, Okay, you identify a population of these things, how does it come to your attention? Okay, how do you verify the presence? And then what are the steps that take as as you sort of walk through, Like, wow, now we got a new gang of pigs we gotta deal with all right, that's kind of a that's a that's kind of a two part question. Number one, Um, how do we deal with the new populations? What do we do? So? Um, like I said, the Missouri Department of Conservation, Mark Twain, National Force, Army Corps, engineers. We have a group of eleven land management agencies that are all out on this. On these public public lands, now public lands and private lands, we differentiate. We do not go on anybody's land that does not invite us. So people, so farmers are people who who have fero swine or wild hogs. They want help, they give us a shout, right. So, so you can't go even you can't go on someone land the same way you'd be able to go onto their land for you know, emergency purposes or anything like no way, no way, no, no, we can't trespass. We have a we have a form that we have to get them to sign. That lets us be on their property. Yeah, I mean that that that's good. Obviously, it's not surprising me by me. I know that there are certain things like you're cooking up some meth on your land, for instance, people can go on there and get that, while services can because we're non regulatory. Yeah. So, um so we have got it at times we have not that I'm not I know that you don't set the positive, but that that at times has the really problematic and it always will be. So if you're trying to do an eradication, there's three things that have to happen. Right. You have to have a uh control that works right, you're you have to have something that gets rid of whatever you're trying to get rid of. If you're doing rats, you have to have a toxic that kills them, right, and it has to be effective. Number two, every individual has to be exposed to said control measure, right. And number three, you have to have one per cent uh that was number two. Number two, everybody's got to get exposed, which is the problem. And and number three, you can't have any immigration in from from outside sources. So if we get rid of all all the all the pigs in southern Missouri and somebody brings them back in. Well, by god, we start over. So those three things, that's why it seems like eradication can happen on small islands right successfully, it doesn't happen on large land masses. It happens in large land masses when everybody gets united and and recognizes these are bad. But you were right, and it's a it's a fact. It's going to be very problematic in the future. Yeah, there's a fight going on right now legislatively over Farrell hawks. You actually have legislators down in this part of the state in support of Ferrell hawk hunting, very upset with the Department of Conservation for trying to do the right thing and eliminate not only the desire to hunt them, but the entire population. So it's a it's a political bat there's an actual political conversation about whether or not you want wild pigs or not. The only reason you can hunt wild pigs on uh Mark Twain National Force right now is because a certain politician has threatened, you know, retribution if it were to be stopped. All right, So back to how does a problem become like, how does the new population become identified and then what steps are taken to to just to go address the issue. All right, So we have a strategic elimination plan within Missouri with within our patchwork. We know where they are, we know the terrain, the habitat, the accessibility, um, and then we put those resources in that area. Elimination areas one one is our lowest population UM. We have the most accessibility to it. The terrain is most conducive for elimination, and we're being very very successful. UM. We are repetitively successful on If you think about a fire and a little ember goes out in your yard and starts that those are popping up, that's what you're talking about. When those pop up, we drop what we're doing and we make sure those populations do not become established. So we have, like I said, eleven partner agencies and all their people are out there all the time on all of these public lands, and when new sign or sightings happen, it gets to us pretty quick, um, and we've been very successful at at suppressing those those new population. You look in there's a new blip on the map that takes priority over some established population that you've been struggling. It does yeah, and and what you guys do, like how do you going and even begin Well, it's and it's a it's a once we get land access, it's it's no different than than any other the control worker do. We set up cameras, look at the sign, put out bait, get them on bait, and trap them and remove them as quick as we can. So you use trail cameras to try to verify the presence. Yeah, we use trail cameras. And you know, the thing about pigs is you kind of know when they're there. You know, that makes such a mess, and in our they're rooting and tracks and rubbing on trees. That's it's not hard to figure out when there and something identify a population of like one, oh yeah all the time. Oh yeah, And you can come in. Someone could be like, hey, I saw a wild pig and you can go in and usually you're like a good enough tracker or whatever that someone could go in there and be like, yeah, it's true, No I'm not that good there. It's a big You dump out corn and they come to it. That's like you verify or that's a way to do it right, yeah, yeah, And then what are the ways in which you guys catch them and kill them. Um. We do mostly. Probably nine of ar take is is trapping, a smaller percent is night shooting, and then another percent is aerial gunning. So talk about the night shooting. How's that work? Um. Night shooting is used in in specific situations. UM. A lot of times when we have single uh bowl wurs. Uh. We don't spend a lot of time trapping boars. Uh. We target females because that's our population control, the sounders, the big groups. UM. So we're targeting them. If we have some some boards that are hanging around, sometimes we'll do that. If we're having crop damage. UM. So if you have a field of corn, right, if you have a hundred acres of corn, it's hard to go pull pour out a bucket of corn and get them to come in your trap. Uh. And every night you know that corns in the dough stage and the hogs are wrecking it. You know, in the landowner the farmers just beside himself pulling his hair out. We use a lot of night shooting then to keep them, um, keep them out of the out of the corn. UM. When we get down to the last few animals, that is generally how we remove them through night shooting. So I was able to go out on one of these night shooting excursions with some of Parker's people, and uh, not to diminish the noble work, but man, that was pretty fun. Like we actually were in the bed of pickup truck and I was the guy with a thermal imaging scope and we're cruising the corn fields on the outside of Fort Leonard Wood Army Base and you're just on farms that you have permission to be on, driving their farms in the winter, using thermal imaging to locate these hogs. And the driver's driving. We're sitting in the back scoping. When you see him, you tap on the top of the truck. They stopped, the shooter gets out. Pile pile, just one field had thirty in it. Probably that was the biggest one we saw. And then working to assist a farmer who's trying to protect the crop. Yeah, the general rule we on those big groups, we really try not to night shoot, and we try not to shoot where we're trapping because it really messes up our whole system, makes them much more difficult to trap. These situations are like we said, when a farmer's just beside himself in a and you know he's just getting so much damage that that's really one of our only options is to do night night work like that. Okay, So talk about trapping so um sort of like the high of it right right. Well, like I said, there's a process, UM, and it varies how successful we are by by common year, by location, UM, a lot of variables. It can be very frustrating or very very UM efficient. We had a guy last year that works with us, Jameson, He caught sixty two pigs in one trap, and then I think he had over a hundred just that week. UM. So when you when they're coming to your corn where they're not being pressured from outside sources, UM, without being run with dogs, people shooting at them, their pigs, they're they're pretty easy to catch UM. And so you gotta train them up on the corn. UM. With the system that we're using right now, whenever they get on the corn, we set the trap in in a matter of two or three nights. We generally have you're not like prebating them for weeks together. Sometimes we do. And it depends on the type of trap, and it depends on the time of year. UM. So you know it varies. It's it's a it's a wild animal. You know, it doesn't read the same books that we do. So you know, you can get them all the first night, um or it could take a month. So you're kind of going by You're you're going by how many you know to be in the area and how many you figure are hitting the baby. And we use cameras a lot for that. UM. So what we want to do is catch up. You know, we're we're working for elimination, so we don't want to catch the first two pigs that run run in the trap. You know, we don't catch the twenty eight others that are outside. So UM, we take steps to make sure that we get all of those uh animals in there to remove the whole group. You know, you know one of one or two animals doesn't do us any good. It educates the other ones that UM. You know, it's a lot of investment for a very little return. So, so describe the trap and how it sort of relates to the bait pile. Well, I'm gonna get in trouble for this because each trapper is very specific about how he likes it. As you can imagine. But the long and short of it, um is we use around corral trap. Um with a with a drop door in the front. We use around corral trap that's elevated off the ground. Um, we use the whole crawl is the whole corral? What's the diameter on that thing? Uh? Five sixteen foot panels? Four or sixteen foot panels. So whatever the math works out of that, it's pretty big. Um. You know there's a sixteen by sixteen krawl. Yeah, yeah, Um. We use some commercially made ones spending it on what Uh it's a it's a it's real hard to explain with us. There's there's a cardinal pole that goes in the in the middle and some arms will go out in the slide that goes up and down. It's kind of a reverse yeah umbrella type mechanism there walking under the bar of the suspended trap. It's really neat. You know. The Noble Foundation developed a trap uh called the board buster, and we use it a lot and it's, um, it's really effective and I don't know, but somebody needs to do with study. It's not that hogs don't look up, but they if they can see through something I think, Uh, they they go in, they go in a lot faster than they do like a regular door, uh six eight foot wide door. I don't know if they don't like going through it or what. But the thing this the guys that came up with the with that uh technology, many they revolutionized UM. Hog trapping as far as getting hogs to go underneath started out years ago. I think with the drop nets. You remember those same concept. Um, this is just just just a hog trap and a metal hog trap that drops down and and so you know, it just varies. You know times a regular door they'll run right in. You just it's variable. So so the drop trap are they monitoring it through some kind of camera? Right? So? Um, the commercial ones are monitored through some kind of camera RS or not, because as you can tell this week by your cell phone they're absolutely useless. You might as well throw it in the river out here, no cell service whatsoever. So RS are triggered uh, manually by by a hog. And you know it's as interesting. We we came up with all different um sort of trigger mechanisms and in different ways of doing it to try to maximize our our catching. And one of the guys that that worked work with us now and said, hey, guys, let's let's put them the trigger the height of the biggest pig that we have on camera instead of right down on the ground. Yeah, and you know, we kind of looked at each other like, well, we haven't been doing that for ten years, you know. So the first ones in, just like any thing, you know, the young dumb ones run right in, you know, the smaller animals, and generally the last animal to go into the most the biggest, most mature, and so the goal is to have that animal inside, and generally when that animals inside, then all the rest of them are caught. Yeah. So how many did someone get in one trap? Sixty two? Sixty two inside of a sixteen by sixteen they were packed in? Yeah? Yeah, did it get them all? Every one of them? It was Yeah, it was super neat and that was it. And it might have been sixty eight, but I think it was sixty two. Yeah, that was it. Gone. I mean sixty two pigs gone, you know, in three nights. One guy, what does what does what would it take to do that? With dogs, with stand hunting, with sport hunting, I mean, it's it's that's how you get there, You're not never Yeah, that's what you're saying. Now, explain the other kind of trap. The corral trap is not suspended got trap doors? Sure, just trap doors. And there's all different uh different styles and and they and they all work, you know, their own in their own uh uh way. And you know, some are very effective and and some of them not so much that you know, there's a whole another other discussion on the trap doors. Some some guys are super you know, it's trappers, man. They're all got their own thing and and uh so, but they're all effective. You know, once you train that animal to go inside. Um, they're effective. There's multi catch doors and then the ones you can um trigger from your cell phone or ones that are manually triggered, and you know, all variations in in through there. When does aerial gunning come into place? That's gonna be expensive. Well, aerial gunning comes into play, um in Missouri. In in other areas they do a lot more of it, but the terrain is a lot better for it than than in the ozarks. You know. Um, aerial gunning comes into play when we're trying to protect a very remote area. UM. You know, as you can imagine getting some traps way back in some of these areas. We also use aerial gunning for the last few animals UM, particularly of trap showl ones are ones we can't find, we'll use that helicopter UM to do that. We we did it most recently UM down in southeast Missouri when the when the water came up, and when the water comes up and the river floods and all of the UM pigs get on the levee systems, you can be very very effective. UM. So you pick it, yeah, you pick and choosing. And we also use aerial gunning, not just aerial gunning, but aerial surveillance. So when you're thinking about elimination, you have to detect everybody. So we know we may have some pigs in this area, We're not sure, So you can go up and look down in the wintertime and see if there's fresh rooting and or not. Like, hey, we we flew this whole area and there's no fresh rooting and we're taking us months to scout it out by by ground, you know, or by foot. So it's used for other things other than just aerial control. So we're like take a place like where we're sitting right now. Right, there's pigs up there. I think we uh, we took a picture of a track today, So where is it on the list right? Like, like, where is this spot? How do you got how would you typify this location? We are We're in a big chunk of public land right in the Ozarks, is pretty heavily rolled it up. There's a lot of recreation goes on. Um, it's it's bordered by small farms and recreational properties. And there's some number of wild pigs out there. All right, So is this spot like on hold or is it like on monitoring or is it active control? It's active control. So this is Elimination Area Zone four, I think. So Elimination Area Zone four calls for X number of people. I'd have to look in the in the plan, but um, there's guys in this zone that that are working this area NonStop. This is one of our areas where we take the most iron and Reynolds County. You have trappers that are working here now Oh yeah, yeah, I'll see I'll through this area sure, okay, yeah, And they're using all these different things that you've created where we where we were talking about that creek there's a trap down there, oh government trap. Yeah. Okay, when you talk about someone trapping, I thought when you mentioned that, I pictured that someone wanted to catch that pig, to bring it up, to eat it or move it somewhere or whatever. I got you. So that was like a removal plan because it's clean. Now. Yeah. Um, you mentioned to me some work on some some work has been done on the disease vector issue and how it might apply to people. All right, can you sketch out some of the because because it's the thing people say, right, Oh, pigs and full diseases. Sure? Um, like what uh trichinosis you mentioned you got a dose of that, right, yeah, they have trickin nosis. Um, they have pseudorabies. People can't get pseudoabies, but your your dog can get cedarabies. And you hear about that happening a lot. Brucellosis. People can get brucellosis, cattle can get cattle can get bruce brucellosis moved from a pig to a coward. You know. Um, I think there's brucels brucellosis uh siuus and brucellosis um for the bovines. And I'm not sure the veterinarian guys explain it to me and and UM, I don't follow it so much, but I know UM that you that I don't know if the sious maybe the sewers can go to the cantals, but it can be passed on or something like it could definitely go to the domestic pigs. Yeah, that's probably one of the words they would not get into the right, right. And so those guys are all the egg industry is always testing their their heard right, and they're always clean, clean, clean clean, And if they get a positive that that whole thing gets quarantined and and transport, you know, stops, whether it's in state, out of state, whatever the rags are, you know, transport stops. So yeah, So so for listeners, if you if you follow her every year, you'll hear a big story about um people fighting over whether bison they're leaving yellowsto National Park. Um. The issue there comes down to the scene we're talking about with brucellosis, depending on who you ask. And I'll actually lay this whole thing out real quick as much as I can, so when the snow's pile up in the late winter, you'll have buffalo migrate out of Yelosto National Park, and they'll come out into various private lands, national forest lands and and go about their business. Uh, there's a fear that these animals will re will will reintroduce a Eurasian cattle disease back to cattle. So cattle that were brought here to the US had a disease called brucellosis. Brucellosis was passed two buffalo and there's infections in the park. But then in the meantime they eradicated it from domestic house So now the cattle producers in Wyoming and Montana enjoy what's called brucellosis free status. They don't need to do the constant, rigorous testing because there's no cases and they haven't had a case in a while. What they're very afraid of is the minute one of these buffalo comes out rubs noses or no it's actually passed, they'll drop a fetus and animals, we'll lick and eat each other's uh after birth. One of these things is gonna pick the disease up, and all of a sudden, the cattlemen of these states will no longer enjoy brucellois free status. And I think that it actually this is something that should be fixed. Really, it actually goes state level. So a guy in the south, you know, the the guy in the extreme south of Montana or the extreme north of Whealming could get brucellosis and his cattle herd, and it affects the guy four miles away open some other corner of the state. Some people say that the brucellosis thing in terms of buffalo some people say it's all bullshit, And what it really comes down to is a conversation about grazing rights. So that's just and they say that this brucelloisis thing is sort of a proxy in place of this other argument about is this grass belong to cattle or does this grass belonging to these wild ass animals? And so people fight that out all the time. But until sitting here with you right now, I had no idea that there's with and and so they're as they're a reservoir, right. We can get it out of domestics, but you cannot get it out of the wild population. So it's always there. It's always a threaten it's not always innitie. Can you explain, Uh, you mentioned something yesterday that there's like a closed system with domestic pork. Sure, yeah, so, um, you know, back in back in the day, everybody raised uh their hogs out in the pasture or woven wire fence, you know, hog wire, we called it lecture fencer, the whole thing. And you you heard as a kid a cookier cookie pork, cook cooking pork or whatever, cook a cook a cook it. Well, you don't hear that so much anymore because in order to meet that demand, those pigs have been brought in inside and in raised in confinement. Um. There, there, it's it's much it's much easier. You don't have to worry about the disease. You don't have to you know, you could monitor it and measure it and and move your animals of course, yeah, the whole thing. Um. So, so when they're in there, they they're not you know, rubbing noses or whatever with Ferrell swine, you know, transmitting disease out there on the ground or picking up those different nematodes or whatever it is. Um, we can get it out now. Um. There's kind of a movement to go back to more of a free range, pasture fed type of of pork, which is you know, kind of a kind of a neat thing, I think. But but those you know, those diseases are gonna start popping back up. You know, we're gonna you're gonna get trick nosis. Um, people are gonna get those different things because they're not cooking their pork. Um. So that probably incentivizes people, especially well to control the wild, to control the Ferrell swine. Sure, yeah, you know it increased chance of exposure. Yes, yeah, absolutely, you know the US not uh right now, I can't remember what nineties some percent of trick noosis cases are transmitted through black bear meat. Yeah, yeah, let's way to get it out of black bears. No. No, So that's that, you know, those disease issues or a reason that we we often get the get the question why don't you guys donate the meat? Um. You know, there's a number of reasons we don't donate donate the meat of the of the hogs that that we capture. Um. Number one is a disease issue. You know, we worked for the federal government. Could you imagine if we donated uh sure to to somebody and they eat up trickon nosis. I mean, that's that's that's a nightmare. Plus you don't want to be giving people trickon nosis. She whiz. What are the handling risks, you know, the each each state game and fish puts out handling risks. You know, wear gloves, you know, if you have cuts on your hands, and you know, wear gloves, don't clean it, wash your hands good afterwards, cook your cook your pork thorough if it's if it's a wild hog, you know, cooking. I'll kill most all this stuff. But a hundred percent of the people are not going a hundred percent cook uh cooked at pork. Another reason we don't like to to donate them, so to speak, is it gives them value. And and once someone starts receiving free pork, what's the incentive to get rid of that pork or want it gone? You know, No, I could see that it would create like earlier talking about Mischian confusion, and create Mischian confusion. Yeah. So do you feel that you know, I know this is like that this is going on all around the country. Um, but do you feel that it's plausible that that in ten years will be like wow, Uh turns out you know, Missouri, for instance, no longer has wild picks. Yeah, so in in ten years, I don't know if we'll have wild pigs or not, but I will say, um, it's relatively new and as you know, ten fifteen years, so they're the populations are not as dense as they are in other parts of the country. Uh. Once again, the Missouri Department of Conservation rolled up their sleeves and said we're gonna fix this, and they've put the resources in into fixing that. And I believe our population, even within this short infancy of the program is starting to shrink. So what's gonna happen in ten years, I can't tell you, but I know that we're doing good in the areas that we're working. They're getting harder to find. Um, we're we're getting more opposition from the people who want them, which is in my mind a good thing because they're going, oh oh, you know, it's it's harder for them to hunt them. They're not able to do what they have and move them and transport them and and all those things they've done for uh, you know, untouched for the last ten years. So um, yeah, I think I think in ten years are our six elimination areas are gonna or maybe four elimination areas. Yeah, how much is all this costing everybody. I mean, like these decisions by people to take these you know, decisions by people to break the law and cut loose Ferrell swine right winds up being sort of an enormous burden on people. So, um, the starter say that the starter money was from the aphis uh Ferrell Swine Initiative, and it was to the tune of twenty million dollars. And so that has been like I said, uh, seed money or starter money. Each each state runs a little bit of different program depending on on how how the state wants it handles or what they do. But so starter money was twenty million. Now people have to heloped cooperative relationships like we have in Missouri. Um, you know, the Mark Twain National Force puts in a lot of money. Um, Missouri State Parks, Um, like I said, the Missouri Department of Conservation, Army, Corps of Engineers. They're all throwing money into a pot for uh the U s d A APHIST wildlife services to higher trappers and and do that work. So you know, all across the state, just you know, just governmental agencies. There's no talents to the multi multi multimillions of dollars not to mention the private um people who are doing those types of things. You know. So I remember years ago looking at a map of the US and it showed where you could raise cattle without supplemental feeding. And it was surprising, surprisingly the places you can't raise cattle about supplemental feeding. Have you ever seen a map? Has they one drawn up a map of where is it possible that wild pigs could get established when you factor in climate issues. I have a hard time picturing that Northern Wyoming wouldn't phase them, the brutality of that when they're in Quebec, you know, they they're they're all in Canada. It doesn't phase in their toughest nails. That's why there's such a bad invasive. Yeah, wouldn't phase them because I've seen pictures of them in in you know, in Siberia, in the running around the snow, which looks crazy. Yeah, you feel like the Wyomings I remember, I remember that Colorado feels it's plausible. I think they've already had it in there. Yeah, But there's there's a difference, and maybe you can speak to this, maybe Parker speak this, because there's a difference like the Michigan ones, the Michigan cases might not be in these like isolated cases where some guys running some little fake hunting place where you go and pretend that you're hunting a pig and he gets some escape, like he doesn't get away. So I was like, oh my god, Michigan's got wild pigs. But it's kind of like very isolated gets mopped up pretty quickly, you know. It's not sort of this where you just have these populations that are naturally reproducing going on for many generations, spreading around. You just get these like isolated blips. And so yeah, I have I don't know, I'm not like a pig wild pig guy. I'm not. I've enjoyed hunting them in quite a number of locations, but yeah, it's hard for me to picture that. In Wyoming, it's open country, tons of snow, extremely cold. Uh, it's just hard for me to picture that you would that that it's possible that a that a sounder would get a foothold and start naturally reproducing and not just be well it was wiped out. What's the question, can you wipe him out? Or could they live there? Yeah? You're right, I could. I did. I asked two different things. Sure, sure, you know. So the northern Wyoming I have never been there. Um, I'm guessing it's open, a lot of rolling prairie. I don't know. Aerial gunning would be extremely extremely effective and and yeah, it would be so easy to eliminate. But I could live there, I perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah, as evidence by the fact, like I said, they come from Siberia, right, you know, I I know they uh, my counterpart in North Dakota. Um, they do Farrell swine work coming in from Canada. Yeah, it's coming from the north, yeah, coming. Yeah, the influx is from the north. North Dakota gets Farrell pigs coming from the Yeah, yeah really yeah. What are they doing up there? Some money put them there? What are they eating? They're pigs only anything, you know, roots, tubers, eggs, you know whatever, wild pigs, international borders. Sure, yeah, huh, all right. That answers that question regularly. So that's how we're gonna give him in Montana too, right next door. So you keep tabs on kind of what's going on in the whole country, Well, no, I don't care. I I know what's going on, you know, just by my counterparts in the projects they're do when Yeah, So in the States, I only know one for sure, I think on top of my head. But like Indiana has outlawed the hunting of the pigs. Do they feel over there like that's working for him? They do? And it states that outlaw hunting have recognized that hunting is and I wish there was a different word than hunting. I don't even like to say hunting, but it's pursuit of barnyard animals eyes, I don't know. Yeah, they've recognized as that is what exacerbates the problem. That's why they're there, that's why people move them, that's what they want to do. Now, those states that don't have that culture, they can go we've banned wild hog hunt. Everybody goes, all right, whatever, we don't know what you're talking about, you know. So it's it's a very effective way to um get some really important legislation introduced. Everyone I know that used to move fish around from lake to lake and river the river, if you told them it was illegal to fish that species, to fish in that lake, even though it didn't have it yet, they would have been completely de incentivized. Of course, to dump them in there. What would you do it? Sure? Unless someone's like, I'm just a rule breaker anyway, man, and a rule breaker. I'll break the rule of putting them there, and then I'll break the rule of hunting them. Yeah. It goes back to the public land saying if you got a bucket full of whatever fish and that guy's like, don't ever come to my pond. And this neighbor over here says, everybody can fish right in pond. Man, you know same thing. Where are you gonna go next? Where am I gonna go next? I'm going home to finish my turkey season. No, but I mean what's your next? Like what like in a career, Like, here's what happens next? You did New Hampshire, Florida. Yeah, yeah, No, I'm I'm digging Missouri. I'm I'm I'm pretty mad at the pigs right now. So um, we'll stick it out here while and see what happens. And how many guys do you have out right now? Not right now, but I mean how many guys are working the pig problem? So like we go back to the partnership we and it's uh, it's being looked at nationally as a as a good model on on how to eliminate Ferrell swine and uh, those different agencies, about half of them actively have people out on the ground doing doing a hog trapping and we work together seamlessly. M d C, UH Jury Partment, Conservation, U S, d eph IS, Wildlife Service, Mark Twain, National Forest Army Corps engineers. All those trappers know each other, they're all communication. They're working around. So I, you know, I have twenty five or so going in in MDC. Has however many they have in Mark Twain. So you know as far as people doing actual trapping in the state, there's quite a few. So you have twenty five trappers right now. What's a good year for those guys? Uh? Good? I guess to get bad the higher the numbers to be the worst year. But let me so you got one guy, you got one guy. If they kill three pigs, they're they're high five and going to get beers because hey, they killed three pigs out of ten and thirty percent of the population. The other guy and they cross the state kill six hundred. Uh, he has no idea, you know, he's just he's just working as hard as you can. So, yeah, it depends on where you are. Man. You know, hey, there's there's legendary pigs. Hey, we finally got her, We finally did and the word spreads, you know, like some female y like like how long has she been a legend? You know, cople years you know, and and um, you know you you you'd kill her offspring and she'd still be knocking around, you know, and you can't shoot or can't tramp her. Yeah, yeah, super super smart. And then finally you get her, you know, and it's yeah, and once you get them, you know, you got them. And and that's that's why it's so important not to just remove a few, because of the fecundity of hawks. Man, you gotta get them all, and you've gotta be relentless, and you gotta stay on them. And you know, of our effort goes into five percent of the population, it's not last five percent. That's the same thing. Remember when Steve Kendron was talking about getting rid of those nutrients. Yeah, same things, Like, man, it was easy to get the first ninety five p cent, but man, the last five percent. Man, they had to come up with all kinds of different techniques. Yeah. Yeah, people are talking about off the wall stuff, and you're gonna try it, try it, yeah, Yeah, we gotta get her. What's like one of the most off the wall strategies you can think of that someone used to get a pig. I don't. There's been all sort of bait, lure, a tracting concoctions made up. Um, they're generally they're killed by night shooting and and generally it's the guys that make the decision I'm going nocturnal and I'm not. I'm not going to see the light of day. And until I do, and they stay up all night and they just become the night predators, you know, and those guys are the it becomes personal with them. You know, it's like I've been after this animal for you know, and wanting to do a good job. And and some of our people are so super dedicated and generally that's generally that's what gets in the nocturnal you know, guys being able to scratch area off the map, scratch it off the map. There's something to be said for that. You know, Hey, that that dot's gone. Now are that blobs gone? And the blobs are shrinking and we're doing uh, we're doing stuff statewide and and and the feedback you get from the from the landowners. Man, it's just it's awesome be able to help them with that problem. Can I see something has nothing to do with pigs. Yeah, you're saying that you grew up along a segue into it because you grew up with pig dogs. Oh yeah, yeah, I did. I but that's not that's not a tool. That's not an effective tool to even use in these situations. I say this, Uh, hogdogs are the most efficient way to wake up in the morning and say I'm gonna go catch one pig. Now. If you show me a pig dog that can catch sixty two, it once by guy, I'm singing the singing the song of the dog dogs. But but no, but even when you got it down to that one, that's if you were looking at it like, that's not really the way to go about it in Missouri. That's that's something that that we've decided not to do. In in other areas, they do utilize that too, And it can be effective when you got one. You can when you're down to the last one, right, you can use it. So but you al said you grew up with squirrel dogs. Yeah, and then you imported squirrel dog technology. I did and do a place that isn't using it right and and it is. Um, I'm did you bring your squirrel dogs in New Hampshire? No, I call them by surprise. They have those you probably know about the red squirrels. Man, like, those things are no good. They're red squirrels, and yeah, pine squirrels. You wouldn't want to take a good Southern squirrel dog on a red squirrel. So we stayed. Wife. You know, they you can eat them. People say they, you know, tastes like turpentine or whatnot because they eats a lot of pine. It's just it's just it's basically it's a squirrel that just happens to be very small. Yeah, it's just a small squirrel are Yeah, but there are guys in Alaska that will go out in the winter and hunt pine squirrels to eat. Pine squirrels have at times had fir market value. So there's been times when um for paintbrush and other usages when you could get like a buck for a pine squirrel. And there'll be guys, you know in the old days, not the old old days, but you know during the night, you know period during the ninet hundreds when they're worth a buck of peace and people go stack up hundreds of them. That's good money and make money on buck of peace pine squirrels. But food wise, even where I grew up, when you if you were out hunting squirrels, we hunted gray squirrels and fox squirrels. You would when you saw a pine squre you wouldn't go after it. But they'd be intermixed, you know. Yeah, Yeah, I don't know the out would differentiate between. I don't know how they'd respond to it. I don't know either. But you know the pine squirrels are feisty. Yeah, like they prey on snowshoot hair leveretts. Yeah, they did a mortality study on snowshoet hairs and I think they found that uh of the twenty like they of the ones they lost, they found twenty seven of them or some. I'm sorry they did this mortality start. You know, the ones they were able to put tracking devices on, percent of them turned up in snow in uh, squirrel middens, pine squirrel middens. They hammer them. I did not know that. Yeah, bird eggs, snowshoet hair, babies, all kinds of stuff. They're Yeah, they're they're kind of like a c. I think them as a cross almost between like a mink and a squirrel, like in their sort of ferocity and then the beep and chirping they do. Yeah, yeah, they'll come get right in your face. Yea they do. Yeah, they'll come right down and get in your face and get in your house. Yeah, there's a whole They a different temperament man. Yeah, they're not kind of they're kind of like electric with energy, you know, not as majestic as a gray squirrel. Well, no, not as majestic. But tell me about bringing so you in Georgia. M hmm. Everybody has a squirrel dog, you're saying, Yeah, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, you know, East Tennessee. There's a lot, you know, a lot more squirrel hunting with dogs that goes on there. I think squirrel hunt is probably pretty common, um, all up and down the east coast, you know where the gray squirrels are, But not with dogs, not with dogs so much. Bring squirrel dogs. Yeah, so you make a lot of friends, man when you bring squirrel dogs in Missouri because people want to go hunt with you. Oh yeah, it's great fun. But are the squirrel is not used to it? Like, did you find a difference, Like, Man, these squirrels are just not expecting this. So the squirrels are responding to the dogs the same here than they do where they've had many, many years exposure to dogs. I don't know that they know it's a dog or a fox or a kaya. They just know that it's something that could eat them and they want to get away from it. So it wasn't like the It wasn't like the Land of Milk and honey when you first showed up with your dogs. Well, it's the land and milk of milk and honey. And as much as there's a lot more fox squirrels in Missouri than than in Alabama or or or Georgia, eastern grays mostly yeah, some of those big southern fox squirrels. We call them cat squirrels, you know, those great big ones. You know, all varied colors. Uh. Well, the fox girls here mostly red, and they seem to be I don't know if they're not as intelligent as the gray squirrels. And they sit out where the dogs can can see them. Man, And they hang their tail down like a flag and it and it drives the dogs nuts. Yeah, yeah, they can see them, so I man, and never thought, have you ever thought that like a like a sort of like this difference between grays and fox squirrels was delicate on that there's a difference. There's a distinct difference of cagness, of cag nous. Now it I know that, like the micro habitats they like are different for sure. Then there's areas I've hunted where it's all one. There's areas of hunter where it's all the other. But where I grew up there was intermixed. And it might be that down in the ravine bottom or whatever. You get down there and it would be a lot of grays down in there. Then an up top, you know, open the beach trees up top, you see a lot of fox squirrels, But you wouldn't think anything of looking up tree and seeing one to each. And I've never detected like that one was. I used to think we like the fox girls better because they're huge, and the gray squirrels at times we like them better because they're more of a novelty. But over my life gray squirrels became far more prevalent. You could, I don't I have no idea what that's attributed to why you just watch that shift t happened to become in that area where I grew up to become like not nearly the fox squirrels, as we had great squirrels. And I don't think it's just because people were selective pressure from hunting something that has no I don't think it's very very negligible on squirrel populations if any. But up here you're hunting where people aren't hitting them hard though, right yeah, you know, I Um, I hunt and have never seen another squirrel hunter in there. I don't know that. I think parts of the state people people hunt them a little bit. But where I am in central Missouri, I've never seen another squirrel hunter, let alone a dog squirrel hunter. Now you have got you public on public land, both public and private. You know what's a good day? Um, a good day. I think our best day this year was maybe eighteen or so. How do you guys cook them? Well? I killed two hundred and eleven this year and so I've cooked them every way I can. My wife has had it with me and squirrel meat. Um, she's done. And you know, my my my children, Grace and Brodie, they got the twenty gauges and they following around to do a great job. But like I told you, guys, I've eaten a lot of lead shot this year, a lot. Uh. You're waiting for the kids to get old enough to be I am. I am. And when your wife bites down into the into the number six, it's not kind. When you do, you buy, then spit it out and go shot. You know she looks at you. You got to kiss the Yeah, yeah, mama gives you the evil look. So yeah, but unlead, it's not bad. It's like, you know, I know half people I know have lost teeth busts of teeth on steel shot. Lead. You know you don't want to be eating it, but it's not It's not as horrible for your teeth as it is eating waterfowl. Right, but what you guys fry it? Yeah, we fry it. Yeah, we cook it down and pick it. Um man, you name it. Make gumbo, uh, jambalaya. We make everything barbecue. Oh, sure of course you have barbecue. Yeah, you have two hundred squirrels in the freezer. You're coming up with different ways to cook them. And it's what are your kids feelings about it? As far as eating it? The Scarford down taking my little girl Grace. She she knocks it down. They love it. I think it's one of the most underrated meats. Dude in the woods. It's delicious and no, there's no one who eats it. When it's properly prepared delicious, people are blown away by it. Sure have you, suevi et any No, might be honest something maybe, So I'm gonna send Parker on airy membership to the Rocky Mountain Squirrel Foundation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you gotta start. You have to start the Eastern branch of the Rocky Mountain Squirrel Foundation. Yeah. Do you do you like the fox squirrels or when you go out and hunt them if you shoot a couple of each, like stoke that you got a few fox squirrels. I want the gray squirrel. No, I like the gray squirrels eating the dogs. The dogs like the fox squirrels. If you think a gray squirrel eats better than fox squirrel? Oh yeah, oh for sure. Yeah, you guys don't because you can't enough. You can't argue the size, man, what what are I know? But the flavor and the toughness issue. I think, huh, that's another question for you because what I've been starting to do, uh is I'll try to grade them, which I think from what I think are young squirrels. And if I have a pile, I mean I only have three, then whatever, they're all going the same bag. But if I've got ten, I'll be like, all right, those are like the four old tough bastards with you know, nuts as big as your thumb. Those are going into the crock pot. And then I'll try to be like, all right, those are looking younger, and I'll cook them hole on the grill and they can be eating that way. I'd almost trade you a man of head shot young gray squirrels for almost anything else in the woods. I mean it's those are the primo those other stuff to receive those sure, Oh yeah, what you here a turkey breast? Um? Yeah, probably a turkey breast. I checked a turkey breast furl for a limit of head shot gray. I'm just saying with the chef, uh are you with the chef? Jamie Oliver English kid, I'm not kid. I don't know how old he is. Well, he just got this marinade some recipe book I had of his. He's got this marinade where it's like lemon and thyme and pulped up time and lemon juice and olive oil and whatnot. But I started it was taking the squirrels and taking a fork, so so skin and squirrel right, piece it out, and then take a fork in that back leg. I would jab that fork, yeah, times in that back leg, just completely perforate because once you're eating you never know that. Like it's not like it's full of holes, right, it comes back together perforated a bunch of times. And then take the back the backstraps and prick them a ton of times, and then marinate them and just cook them on a grill. It's unbeatable, so nothing like slow cooking. Just cook him on a grill and then and then eat the meat off. That was I've never done a fox squirrel like that though. You need to and then report back. Yeah, because once I got onto doing that recipe, I was only in gray squirrel areas. Yeah, because I was doing that when I was hunting in New York State. In New York State, a lot of Eastern grays. Yeah, you have no Western grays? Are you a step on the tail and uh, yank them off? Skinning tail skin No, I don't any from the American South. I am. I know a lot of guys who do. I um do the pants and shirt you yetta do the passing shirt. But I think as I get older and my strength goes, I'm gonna have to tail skin. But I pass and shirt him. I can. I can go right there them pretty good. And you use a fights to a cur dog. Um, I use a cur dog. It's a smaller cur um. Just one dog. I just have one dog. Now. I have some friends who I've introduced into it that we hunt together. So they're getting dogs too. Oh yeah, there, it's it's total. And I was telling my friends at the Department of Conservation that there's the three squirrel dog man. Now I'm sure there's others. I just don't know him, you know, in Missouri. And I'm coming for him to extend the season, yeah, a little bit longer. So do you think you're gonna grow to regret introducing that piece of technology and not just keeping quiet about it? Of course not. And you know why? It's the kids. It's great grea eight kid hunt. I mean you don't have to be quiet. You can walk around, you can teach them, uh gun control, walking through the woods, crossing fences, um, safety, all of those things. It's enjoyable. They're not freezing. Their pet is there so they get to pet their dog. Um. I got my squirrel dog. I grew up doing it and and I got it for the children, and it is. I won't regret that as a house dog or outside dog. Well, I'm ashamed to say. And the people that know me are gonna are gonna it. It gets in my wife's bed. It follows her around. Now not my bed. We sleep in the same bed, but I don't claim it as our bed. She Uh, I get that dog out of my bed. I've got it. You know. When I am going to get a squirrel dog, I went and picked it up from a buddy and Alabama that grows them. Uh has some nice squirrel dogs. Had a pen built, you know, the whole thing ready, nice kennel I thought was good. Even put it up off the ground so the dog wouldn't be on the gravels. Had a hay bale. I was gonna pitts. And that's not been in the pen once. Our friend Kevin Murphy is telling me that he recently heard of a squirrel dog selling for twenty dollars. Al must be a good squirrel doll, you'd like to think. You, Yeah, I don't know that I've seen one that good. So you just got yours. When you have a squirrel dog, what's the minimum out you can hunt it and still have it know what's up. I still haven't know how to do it. And it depends on the dog. But you know, the more you hunt any dog, the better it is, for sure. But when you let's say you live in a state where you can't hunt squirrels for for five months out of the year, you can still put them up. Can't you just not shoot him? The dog get tired of that? No, it's in I mean, it's like a retriever. If that that dog went on the floor there, if you took a tennis ball, probably you throw till bring it back to you till he died. He doesn't know why, He just likes. He just wants to do it. So so you can train, you can run, You can run squirrels, and if you don't shoot the squirrell out of the tree, the dog doesn't get mad. He still thinks he had a good time. Oh, loving it. Yeah, Yeah, My dog particularly doesn't care to. Some of the dogs really want to get the squirrel my dog. You know, Um, once the squirrels dead, you could care less it the drive is the tree another squirrel. Yeah, I can tell you something graphic right now. Okay, our friend Kevin Murphy, uh, his squirrel dog. One of them ate the head. That's very common. I had a dog Jack that only wanted with golden head juice. They only wanted to eat the head. I don't know what what that is. They just want to crunch their head, all right. Yeah, I thought that dog was sick. Now I think it's just a normal dog. And then did it just come out of the box wanting to hunt squirrels or did you have to try to teach it something. No, they Um, you don't have to teach it much. Now you mess with it and and show a squirrels and and bring it along and and but yeah, it's in them, you know. It's like a retriever or a pointer whatever. You know, they're they're bred to want to be tree dogs, and so that's what they do. The hard thing for me is to differentiate between yards squirrels and woods squirrels. So, uh, you know, mom and the kids, like seeing the squirrels in the yard. I gotta wait for for him to leave to then those then those down you know, the dogs looking out you know, looking out the window, just quivering, you know, you know, going crazy and you know so but it's fun. And then do you keep a dog for hunting ducks too? I don't know, just the squirrel dogs. And let's go over and pick up dogs yourself. Yeah, if I'm if I'm lucky enough to hit one. You know, do you view you're because you grew up hunting and grew up around that. Do you view year work now as like an extension of that or is it just feel like completely different. It's like it's just there's work and then there's what you do for fun. It's completely different. But the reason I have this job is because of my love for the outdoors and hunting and fishing and and so what what I do now, Um, the enjoyment I get is seeing that my work is going to the benefit of of the outdoors or benefit of native washer, the ecosystems and those those. Yeah, so this's just just an extension of of liking to do that. Do good trappers? When do you have a trapper working for you. Do all the good trappers have a hunting and fishing background or can you just or do you find people can just get it and figured out even though it didn't grow up doing that kind of stuff? Both? Yeah, yep, yep, there's no um uh lot of times the guys who grew up and gals grew up doing it are a little bit more familiar with it. But you know, we've had some people with no background whatsoever and we introduced them and trained them and if turned out really top notch. And then you mentioned that, so you found that, Um, you have men and women that work on the trapping teams, right, yeah? And then uh, do the people that trapped do they want to stand with it for years? Or is it like summer technician kind of jobs? Both? It's uh, it's um, it's kind of like you love it or you've you after you get a belly full, you kind of want to do something else. There's people who have have done it their entire career and that's all they want to talk about, and it's it's it totally consumes them. There's people who do a good job and say, Okay, you know I've I've caught enough hogs or or whatever. Okay it's or whatever where it is, and they move on or they move up into you know, in a more of a biologist role, you know, and they work on on different things, and you know, it's just natural progression. Is it hard to fill the positions? The reason I'm asking all these questions that I could picture a lot of people that listen to this would be like, man, that's the job for me. Yeah, it's it's not hard to fill the position at all, um, but it's very hard people want that work. It's very hard to get people to stay. Everything turns into a job, right, um. And so so they think they're gonna be all just yeah, a good times. And if you hunt it, if you hunt it, if you hunted and then we don't hunt them, we we do control work. If you hunted pigs every day, you got up and you went to work at eight o'clock and came home at five o'clock, and you hunt pigs all day long, you're gonna get real tired of that real quick. Yeah, not nearly as fun. Yeah you got any more questions? Yeah? I did have one. Just now, Um, shucks, can't come back to me because I'll tell you one. Uh. I started trapping muskrats and my brothers. We were young. I was ten when I called my first muskrat, and I that I got an all manner. You know. I trapped everything for trapping and stuck with it till I was twenty two. I set my last you know, when I set my last trap with the intent and making money on it now and then I'll go catch something for making you know, for half mere my wife or whatever. But when I found out about that there was such a thing as like animal damage control work, for a while, I thought that that was the job I was going for. Like I would have been would have been some other version of events. I would have been one of the people sending it an application to check pigs trap pigs. It would have been like immensely appealing to me with the with the I was a private guy working in Colorado and we started just chatting. I was working in retail. He's like, you know, we want to you know, have pizza or something that there's a pizza point right next door. So I then it for lunch a few days later, and I was jacked up. I was like, yeah, dude, this sounds great, you know, I'll learned all about this. And he's like, yeah, it's you know, most of it's during like September, October, November, and I was like, hold on, that's on the season. I can't be doing that. You know. After it was probably mostly a lot of beaver work, you know, beaver's messing up, you know, chopping down people's pretty aspens in their backyards along all the creeks in Colorado. A lot of that, probably some coons. What kind of retail are you doing? Selling retail? Closed outdoor cloten shop? But I remember my question. Kyletes are kind of a new animal here in Missouri, right, No, they've been around for quite a while, like more than a couple of decades. The new the nude tons of other places. I didn't know that. So they've been they've had a foothold here for a long time. Yeah, yeah, they've been here for quite a while. So people there were kids here in the uh sixties, seventies, they were they had coyotes. Yeah, they've been here a long time. Kind of figures as part of the what the Eastern migration. But I can still follow that up with do you have many conflicts with coyotes that you guys deal with. We do have, um some some conflicts, not as not as many as some of the um Western states, the sheep growers and and some of the cattle places. A lot of ours or urban conflicts. UM couple get cats getting namt. Yeah, you know, um seeing them running around and and you know, coyotes can live anywhere, and they do pretty pretty good every anywhere they are, so um So yeah, most of ours would probably urban. You know, they like to for wildlife services anyway. They like that the airport environment. So we take some off of airports and those type of things. But not as big of an issue in Missouri, UM as it is in other states. The Missouri Department Conservation does some kay at work. Um, it's not really our arena. Yeah, Brandon, you must have been hanging out. But do you have any concluders? Any final things you wanted to ask about? Nothing to ask about. I think just as a concluder, I wanted to just kind of emphasize how complicated conservation is, and people always attribute hunting to conservation, but I think in the case of the feral hog, that's the opposite. And encourage people, especially here in Missouri too, to not embrace that culture, because it puts in jeopardy the cultures that we truly should embrace, like deer hunting and turkey hunting and squirrel hunting, our native species that belong here on the landscape, and these hogs don't. And if you participate in that um, you're abiding by something that is, you know, having a negative reaction on those heritages that we hold so dear, you're throwing away or jeopardizing like some deep traditions. Yeah, and a functioning landscape. Yeah, it's it's hard to manage these forests, you know, we don't we don't just let the forest go anymore. There's a lot of work that goes into keeping these habitats healthy. And when these hogs come in and you know, root up spring creeks and and destroy uh species like the dragonfly you were talking about, Parker, and ruined habitat for other game species that we you know, have such immense value on not only recreationally in this area, but economically, it's a bad thing all the way around. I wish it was possibly to get a better sense of what kind of dent they put into turkeys, you know, as a ground nesting bird. You know, we hear, we hear. People are hard to look at that making the claim that you know that they eat a lot of the eggs. Um. But I don't know if there's parkers have been a study done on that the year where I'm sure, yeah, there's probably uh several studies. But it's let's face it, it's it's a hog. It's an invasive species that doesn't belong here. So if it eats one turkey nest, it's it's too many. Yeah. Sure they're a negative impact on on all of our ground nesting birds. I mean they root on the ground and you know they take those They totally not only you know, you think about it, not only turkeys or or quail for instance, or or some of those other small you know birds that that nest low in the lands, you know, in the forest understore, understore, you know, hogs are having an impact on those as well. So, like I said, it's an exotic invasive so ones too many doesn't belong here. It's not it's not from here, you know. Yeah. What's funny is that the people that are trying to bring pigs in and promote pigs as a hunting thing. Usually sell it as how they're helping with the pig problem, right, and you see all the time. Man, you can go online and they'll be like, you know, places advertising Texas is overrun with hogs down, Come down. Then he realized it's a fenced operation and they're actually buying pigs. But but people like that narrative. I think it's well, I think I got a bunch of theories on it. The thing I found is that this is my precluding thought. The thing I found with people people who become curious about hunting, not people who grew up in hunting culture and hunting community, with people who didn't grow up around it, and they become curious about hunting and they want to find a way to know it's okay, Like they desperately want to go, but they need to be told it's okay. Those people are drawn to pig hunting because they feel like, oh, you mean I can do this, and no absolutely certain that I'm doing the right thing, because they're not. They're not already educated on the fact that by participating in licensed hunting you're contributing immense amounts of resource into wildlife habitat management enforcement. You know, disease control. They don't. They don't get that right. They need to know that like that they're gonna go like by taking a life, they're helping everyone out. And so again and again when I've spoken with people who are like, man, come on, go hunt and think about doing a hog hunt because I understand how they're like a non native. You just hear all the time. Man, it's really gotten out there in my lifetime as this like as a thing. Yeah. Yeah. And the first time I ever stepped foot, the first time I've ever hunted into place that had the possibility of having a pig. We're hunting deer. But I sat up on my tree, staying the whole time, praying a pig came by. Sure, Sure, I was way more interested in that than I wasn't a deer. I was like, my god, a pig running around in the woods, How wonderful that would be. Having no idea about the bigger picture, right issue? Right, And you know, you know we're helping, we're helping, we're helping. But you know it's I go back to the tv UM deal, and you know, they passed up three styles and in fourteen little little shows to shoot one mature bore, which does absolutely nothing as far as population control goes. You know, it's it's just it's it's uh, it's in some instance it's just uh, it's uh, it's far as you know. In some instances, I think. I have a friend whose family runs cattle in northern California, and uh, one day I was asking her father, who lets me hunt wild pigs out there, and he complains about them. But one day I was asking her father. I said, if you could wave a magic wand and have them all be gone, would you wave it? He thought about it for a minute, and he's like, no, not all of them. He wants He wants it his way. He wants just not quite so many, but not all of them. Right. So, as much as he curses them and shows you where they're all hanging out and shows you what they did bad here and what they did bad there, there's some part of them that just you know, well, I think for a lot of people, he just comes down to a natural empathy to animals, right, Like you just can't look at it and be like, oh, yeah, even though I know all this about how bad they are, wipe them out. It would be great if they weren't on this continent anymore. Yeah, there's maybe something, Maybe there's some little nugget of goodness residual like like some kind of nugget of goodness, and people that just a thing we've learned is that wiping things out isn't generally like and it's true, generally speaking, not a good idea, you know, And I think people carry that in and they don't and they're not interesting the nuance of it. But it was funny to watch and wrestle with it for a minute. You know. He's like, you can't be greedy. Ye, But in Missouri, the goal is clear, it is, it is gone. And then what's the what's the most likely source. Let's say no one brought one in. That's my last question. No one's trucking them in. No one's trucking in. They're still walking from somewhere from where. Um, we have them in Oklahoma, so they can we have them in Arkansas. They can walk in from Arkansas in Tennessee. Um, Illinois done a good job, so our southern Southern brethren. Before I was born, my old man was hunting wild pigs in Arkansas. Mine too, So it's never gonna be that this is not a problem. It's just gonna be something that could requires constant monitoring. And you know, and and some states there they're a game animal and they even embrace that. So you know, it varies all over, that's right, That's right. So I don't even say there's a limited Hony tags, but you gotta buy a tag. Limited. Chances are they're not ever going to be all the way going from California. But you know, may I'll tell you what. People there love them hunters, and it's kind of like a it's been going on a long time cooping hunting pigs there a long time. There's people that that's kind of their main thing they hunt. And so one of the funnest pig hunting, I hate say this to you, but some of the funnest pig hunt I've done, it's been in California because you can spot in stalk wild pigs. Yeah, you glass them off. It's it's fun. Yeah, it's it's there's no arguing that, you know. All right, Well, thank you very much for joining us. Good look, Steve, Steve Jones is all here the whole time, concluder because he hadn't said anything, I know, because he never need were introduced him, but I think he's a game chef. Steve Jones has been joining us listening in. Well, I had not by plugging you. You you post materials about wild Game. Yeah, I got killer nams dot com. It's just kind of a small, little, uh hobby website. Nothing, nothing monetized or professional. But I just started kind of recording the things that I was learning about cooking wild game and I just enjoy I checked it out. It's good. I'll vouch for it. There's some good information on their killer Killer stock. Uh, thank you very much. Food. Well, you've got an opportunity to come and sing karaoke for Pavaratti here, so I couldn't pass that up. So okay, you gotta did you have Did you have a thought or question for our guests? Yeah, I don't. I don't know as much about the hog problem is as Parker and Brandon, but I have been reading about it, and I write about it. I'm an outdoor writer also, uh, And I would say even though I've enjoyed a few hog hunts, I've had some of my actually best hunts I've had my life have been hog hunts. But there is no doubt in my mind that this is absolutely the only, uh correct way to deal with a serious conservation problem. If you approach it from a concert conservation or land ethic perspective, there is no other choice but eradication. And you're able to look at it and and hold both ideas in your head at once. Absolutely, it's nice to hunt them, just just nice to eat them. But they gotta go. Absolutely, they got to go go hunt them where they're natural. You know where they're where. They're not an introduced exotic. But if I could change one thing, because I talked to a lot of hunters, the the the everything that the U. S d. A aphis is doing is great. Everything that the Missouri Department of Conservation is doing is great, except they haven't sold or explained the idea about why they have banned hog hunting on their own MDC lands Missouri Department of Conservation, and that people that that aren't fully coached up on all the details, it is counterintuitive. They do not get it. Brandon and I talked to a pilot a couple of weeks ago who was coming in for a landing there with a couple of Farrell hogs on the runway and he was railing at us about why would the Department of Conservations say you can't shoot the pigs. You know, that's just counterintuitive, he was, It's the right thing. I just wish they were doing a better job of explaining and selling it to the public, because well, you know, they've had several of these podcasts and webcasts and and call in I put things and and I think getting the word out. I disagree with you and as much as they they're trying, but to get everybody educated, people have to educate themselves to some extent, you know. And and you're right, it is counterintuitive, and it's difficult, um thing to sell. But you know, I think we're the programs in its infancy if you think about it. You know, we've been trying to to eliminate for US swine for really three years, you know, hardcore. And I think as time goes on, it'll I think the word will get out. Everything takes time, and that messaging and you guys know this probably more more than I do that the messaging you just hammered over and over and finally it takes hold. You know, it's like putting your seatbelt on the kind of thing put your seatbelt onto. Your kids, put your seat belt and put your seatbelt. Finally they're putting their seatbelt on, and and you didn't tell them. They're telling you they put your seat belt on. Hey, hogs are bad. Hogs are bad. Hogs are bad. Yeah, I think it probably would eventually lead to a certain amount of kind of like public shaming. Like the more it gets out, the more guys that are engaged in their bodies might be like, you know, many, we've probably cut it out. That's that's that's working both ways. Though. There was just a propaganda meeting down here led by a local state representative bringing together people, you know, talking about the arrogance of the Department of Conservation and the fact that they would ban hunting. Look at our Department of Conservation is now siding with anti hunters. I mean, the propaganda machine is another huge roadblock to making this happen. And now, of course everybody with social media can spread just complete half truths and mistruths, and you know, it's it's fighting two battles. It's fighting the ecological battle and it's fighting the social battle and trying to get people to buy into what needs to be done to protect the resources. Good job, Steve. Thank you stirred up a whole them. You're like a like a big wall stirred off silt mud. All right, man, thank you very much for coming on. I know it's probably uh taking away from your main thing you'd like to be doing. Not too much. Not right now. We can't turkey hunt afterwards. We gotta get that change. Yeah, after one o'clock and squirrel season should go on after February fift for how long until the day before turkey season. Well that would mean it's only closed for a month, right, correct, Let's just go all your squirrels. Yeah, alright, so joining me. Thanks,