Helicopter...

No sweat guys, calm down. I hope what I write here eases some of your anxiety over helos and hogs. I have over 1,000 hours in helicopters doing all kinds of wildlife work. Just Google my name and you will see some of it, videos too. I also do helicopter hog control. I know the Texas USDA helicopter team has taken out over 250 hogs in a single day. Private helo contractors maybe more. I have done a lot of wild boar live captures from helicopters, shooting, bird captures, wildlife surveys, moose, brown bear, seabirds, marine mammals, etc. and I am currently researching the use of helicopters for ultra low level marsh bird surveys. I also use night vision and thermal imagery to shoot hogs. I have been at this since the 1980's.

I know helicopters and I know hogs. In spite of the massive numbers a helicopter shoot team can knock down in some situations, they cannot get them all. For a comprehensive wild pig control program, you need all the tools you can get. Helos, traps, shooting over bait, snares, specially trained dogs and more.

I have killed and caught/tied enough hogs over the last 35 years to say I stopped counting at about 5,000. But guess what? If I learned one thing, I have learned that feral pigs can adapt through behavior and maybe genetics and natural selection faster than any creature on earth. They do learn to avoid helicopters very fast and then will breed and perpetuate their own kind. Helicopters are not a panacea to pig control by any measure. Anyone that has been in the military knows you can hear that rotor chop a long ways off well before the people in the helicopter can see you. Ask thousands of vietnamese and afghans. Hogs figure it out and rather than run out where you can shoot them, they crawl under a bush. I have had big boars in excess of 300 pounds hide in a clump of marsh grass no bigger than they were and no amount of rotor wash would flush them. We either dropped a cur dog out the helicopter on them or when safe, we nudged them with the helo skids to make them run.

In Florida I was priveleged to run dogs on ranches east of Okeechobee Lake where few people have run dogs on the hogs. The hogs were just standing in the pastures and would move off if your truck stopped in to what the cowboy with us called "brakes" (lines of brush, palmettos and cabbage palms). We ran our dogs on these poor suckers and had 17 tied and moved into a trailer before noon. The ranch owner hauled them to a sale barn in Miami. That got old fast, great for training pups, but work. I would rather go in where they have exhausted all other methods and there are only a few remnant hogs left and use trained dogs. My experience is that many of the last few are the big "coyote" boars. That is the real test of your knowledge and your dogs.

Buddy Goatcher