One reader was kind enough to reach out to me and provide a recent report on the damage they cause, so I decided to dig deeper into this feral hog conundrum.

Feral hogs are actually one of the biggest animal threats to…everything, really. Not only do they present a danger to crops, flora and fauna, people, and the economy, but they're causing damage to all those aspects of life right now as you're reading this sentence.

How does it happen, though, and what can you do to protect yourself and your property? Those are the questions I'll be answering today.

Why are feral hogs a problem?
Feral hogs are omnivorous, opportunistic animals, and it's presumed that every single state has at least one large group of feral pigs at this point. Some states have millions of hogs, which make up thousands of groups.

Their natural territory was nominally everything north of the 36th parallel (draw a straight line from southern California to the Florida-Georgia border), but they went far beyond that line, as they're currently found in southern Canada as well.

The State with the fewest feral hogs? Idaho, apparently. The State with the most feral hogs? Texas! There are about 3 million feral pigs in Texas, according to a 2016 study, and Texans are having a lot of trouble dealing with them.