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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores feral hogs in the twentieth century US South. Both hunters and wildlife officials intentionally released European wild boar, yet overtime wildlife biologists reframed feral hogs as an invasive nuisance species as both economic and environmental damage increased in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Feral hogs occupy a unique position in the popular imagination of the US South. On the one hand, they are a familiar feature of the southern landscape, with some universities even adopting them as mascots. On the other, they cause an estimated two and a half billion dollars in damage annually. Remarkably, despite this broad cultural familiarity with the animals, feral hogs remain understudied, and their transition from desirable game species to invasive species has yet to attract the attention of environmental historians.

That story is an inherently transnational one, beginning in the early twentieth century when sportsmen began purchasing European wild boar to place in private game reserves as a big game species that offered a thrilling and exotic hunting experience. Over time a mixture of unintentional boar escapes, the intentional relocation of boars by state wildlife officials, and private citizens’ trapping and dispersal efforts led to an explosion of feral hog populations in the region. As the economic and environmental damage inflicted by feral hogs increased, wildlife departments shifted from hunter-centric policies to a position that discouraged further dispersal of feral pig populations. By the 1980s, wildlife biologists had begun framing feral hogs as an invasive nuisance that created a number of environmental problems. Yet hog hunters continued to lobby for hog hunting and continued to trap and release hogs in new areas. This reframing of feral hogs underscores the significant role wildlife agencies and hunter advocates played in shaping the contested modern categorization of feral pigs.