OKLAHOMA CITY – “Lots” of landowners in Cotton County have experienced property damage from feral swine, state Game Warden Michael Taylor of Randlett said recently.
“Just about everybody” who owns land in Tillman County has coped with the ravages of wild hogs, echoed state Game Warden Jeremy Brothers of Devol.
Matt Clemmer of Grandfield, an agriculture lender with BancFirst in Frederick, concurred. So did Brandon Bowman, an Oklahoma City attorney whose family owns property in southern Cotton and Tillman counties.
Clemmer’s mother owns approximately 2,200 acres along a three-mile expanse of the Red River, land that has been in his family “since the early 1900s,” he said. The Clemmers run a cow/calf operation on the property.
Feral hogs are “a menace” to him and his neighbors, he said. “They tear up fences and they tear up hay bales.” Hogs “love the grain that’s in the hay” and can “obliterate” a round bale, Clemmer said.
Some farmers in the area used to raise peanuts, but feral swine “would go right down the rows, rooting for the plants,” he said. Wild hogs “wreak havoc on peanuts.”
Some Tillman County landowners set traps “even in bar ditches” to capture feral hogs, Clemmer said. As for him, though, “I carry a rifle with me when I’m out feeding my cattle,” and if he encounters a wild hog, “I shoot ’em when I see ’em.”
Bowman takes it a step farther. He was reared in southwest Oklahoma and raises wheat and cattle on Burton Land & Cattle Co.’s Deep Red Ranch approximately four miles northeast of Randlett, along Deep Red Creek just above its convergence with West Cache Creek.
“We host what used to be a big hunt for deer” on the ranch. “But now we hold an annual pig camp, usually in February.” Hunters bagged 143 wild hogs during a three-day hunt earlier this year, he said.
“My ranch manager was planting wheat this fall,” Bowman recalled. “When he looked over at an area he had already planted, he saw hogs rooting up the furrows and eating the seed.” Besides “tearing up” Bowman’s wheat field, hogs have created wallows in his pecan orchard “and they walk right through our fences,” he said.
Bowman’s father farms around Devol and Grandfield “and hogs come up in his pastures” frequently, Bowman said.
“We do everything we can to eradicate them, but we don’t seem to make any headway,” Bowman lamented. Feral hogs “sometimes have 20 piglets following them,” and the sows can have up to three litters a year, he said.