You really need to spend some time and bring yourself up to speed with reality Jaycee:
Only tourists pay to hunt on most leases now...
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Back then, many landowners who leased land considered hogs on their place as an asset. Hunters were willing to pay good money for the opportunity to hunt them in addition to deer, turkey and quail. Hogs were often considered a “bonus” on hunting lands and leases “with hogs” gleaned a higher price than those without.
We soon discovered that hogs were very proficient at reproduction, even in the wild. Roving sounders quickly followed creeks and rivers and their numbers spread to areas where they had never previously existed in the wild. Truth be known, some hunters also helped this population boon by stocking trapped wild hogs on their hunting leases. Hunting alone could not begin to keep up with their numbers. What began as a positive thing quickly became a plague.
Wild hogs began ripping up hay meadows, demolishing the nests of ground nesting birds, rooting up row after row of newly planted corn, and fouling stock tanks.
Farmers and ranchers from across much of the state screamed, “We’ve got a hog problem!” And indeed they did have a problem; wild hogs were literally eating them out of house and home and creating millions of dollars in losses statewide. Something had to be done and quickly.
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The 3,000-acre ranch, in McMullen County, has been in the family of Lloyd Stewart’s wife, Susan, since the mid-1900s. Stewart and his hunting and wildlife manager, Craig Oakes, began noticing wild hogs on the land in the 1980s, and the animals have become more of a problem every year. In 2002, Stewart began selling hog-hunting leases, charging $150 to $200 for a daylong hunt and $300 for weekends. But wild hogs have become so common around the state that it’s getting hard to attract hunters. “Deer hunters tell us they have a lot of hogs at home,” Oakes says, “so they don’t want to pay to come shoot them here.”
In fact in a lot of areas they PAY bounties to remove the hogs :
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“The residents of the county keep asking ‘When is the county going to do a bounty program?’ So I think this is a proactive way that we can look at our county and say we’re doing something to help our farmers and ranchers abate the hog problem,” he said.
The bounty opened on Monday, and it’s available until August 28. Every tail brought to the county as proof of a dead hog is worth $5. "
So what attracts the tourists willing to pay...
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There is no closed season on feral pigs. They can be hunted any time of the day or night, using silencers, spotlights, night-vision scopes, AR-15’s, or AK-47’s. Thanks to Stephenville representative Sid Miller’s so-called pork chopper bill, they can be hunted from helicopters
Hunters changed from a being a solution to being part of the problem...
Interesting read on how ignorance and greed created the mess...
https://www.texasobserver.org/turning-tail/
