Florida writer Diane Roberts characterizes hogs in The Sunshine State as “the font of barbeque, the source of ham, sausage, bacon, chitlins, chops, ribs, souse, trotters, and lard itself.”  Another researcher says the importance of hog meat to the domestic economy of the South was “overwhelming.

 Today, a half-century after the closing of the open range in Florida, the legal status of feral hogs is at best ambiguous. Some animals, such as deer or alligators, are legally defined as migratory game, subject to regulation by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The commission establishes rules for hunting, including scheduled seasons, approved areas, bag limits, and gender restrictions of the target animal. 

Other animals, such as cows and chickens, are legally defined as domestic livestock and are not regulated by the Wildlife Commission. Individuals may harvest such animals on their own land as and when they wish.

Pigs, however, are defined by where they happen to be standing. 

The Fish and Wildlife Commission defines a feral hog as a migratory game animal when it is found in wildlife management areas, many state parks, or a wildlife refuge. The Florida Division of Recreation and Parks defines the feral hog as a nuisance species, and the U.S. Forest Service defines the wild pig as domestic livestock merely trespassing on national forests in Florida.  

The 2007-2008 Florida Hunting Regulations Handbook, an annual publication of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, states that on private property “with landowners’ permission, wild hogs may be taken year-round with no bag limits, size limits or licenses required.”

 

The Feral Hog; Feast from the Florida Wetlands

                                   - Written and Contributed by Thom Foley

    We are near Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest before dawn.  Light at this time of day, lost between a fading moon and a promised sun, brings to mind what Bruce Springsteen once described as a “lunar landscape” – a colorless countryside of infinite shades of gray. Our campground sleeps fifteen-minutes behind us, as we drive north through this forested, lunar-hued landscape, about thirty miles southwest of Tallahassee. Liberty County’s two-lane, black-topped County-Road 67 forms a thin conduit that cuts through this panhandle canyon of tree silhouettes. To the left of the highway an army of longleaf pines march on a frayed parade ground of wiregrass and bramble. On the other side of the road, eastward, a towering wall of shadowy pine trees, mixed hardwoods, snarled brush, briar, and twisted vine, tangle into a seemingly impenetrable barrier framing the edge of the highway.  The overgrown blockade of brush and tree occupies a steep narrow strip of land – perhaps a hundred yards wide – where ground elevation rapidly drops thirty feet or so, down to the flood plain of the Ochlockonee River.

    Our driver, Jim, spots the cut he’d been looking for and steers the vehicle off-road. “Here it is,” he declares, pointing to an open slice in the wall of foliage. During the previous month, as part of his preparation for this morning’s hunt, Jim twice drove the 330-miles north to Apalachicola Forest from his home in Pinellas County, to scout the area for a viable place to harvest wild hog. On the second scouting trip he brought along a few of his karate students, a group of hardworking young men, and together they used machetes to carve a narrow, winding, switch-back trail down through the tangled barrier. The entry is obscured. No sense advertising to other hunters.

    “There’s hog in these woods,” Jim stated, confidently, as the three of us zipped our jackets against the brisk November chill. With rifles in hand and packs slung, we made our way to the cypress forest below.

    Feral hogs are as much a part of Florida as tourists, orange juice, and Mickey Mouse. In common with that sanctified trio of Florida imports, swine are also not native to the Sunshine State. In fact, true pigs are not native to the Americas at all. Their New World presence dates to the period of first contact, in the sixteenth century, when Spanish, pig-toting, conquistadors made their way to this side of the planet. Descendants of those first pioneering pigs – an estimated population that in Florida today consists of some half-million snorting individuals that inhabit, to one degree or another, every county in the state – have become, for various Floridians, objects of either passionate love or intense loathing. To many environmentalists feral pigs signify an invasive blight on already threatened ecosystems, and to Florida hunters they represent the penultimate natural Florida food.

    Following the journey of a wild hog, from a rural hunting field to an urban pork-filled freezer, encompasses a fascinating slice of Florida history, and offers a glimpse into one of the oldest Florida foodways still in practice. Many of its adherents – such as Jim McCarthy, the Florida hunter leading our expedition – see themselves as carrying on ancient practices and maintaining vital connections between civilization and the “natural” world. Of course they also are aware that routinely harvesting wild hogs in Florida is the surest way to maintain an adequate inventory of the finest tasting meat that ever waddled across the land.

    During a series of interviews in 2006 and 2007, conducted both at his Pinellas County residence and in a handful of favored woodlands, McCarthy described himself as a “modern day hunter-gatherer,” and his long history as a Florida hunter, fisherman, and gardener, attest to the reality behind the label. Without being aware of the apparent contradiction, he defined himself as “just a redneck country boy” at one point during an interview, and forty-five minutes later declared “I’m really a city boy.” The two phrases may not be as contradictory as they appear. What emerged from the interviews is a profile of a man as complex and multi-faceted as the region that he calls home. His social and working life for more than six decades has alternated between the city and the country, and has at times embraced them both simultaneously. Like Florida itself he seems to have one foot in the natural world and the other in the urbanized, industrialized, realm of the city. During his sixty-plus years he has accumulated the skills necessary to be proficient in both worlds.

    Like feral hogs, McCarthy also is not native to the Sunshine State. Born in 1943, Jim was five when along with family he rode the Seaboard Coastline Railroad, from Albany, New York to St. Petersburg, Florida. He recalls “miles and miles of palmettos,” before the train finally stopped. McCarthy grew up in Pinellas County and later worked and raised a family in Kenneth City, a small urban enclave encircled today by the city of St. Petersburg. Through the years he has hunted, fished, hiked, paddled and camped most of Florida’s swamps, rivers, and woodlands.

    Over the years he has developed a respect – and taste – for the wild hog that resides in his favorite woodlands. “Ya gotta love the old Spanish conquistadors,” he once said, “They might’ve brought a world of hurt down on the local Indians, brought germs and disease and all that other stuff, but one fine thing they brought to Florida was those pigs.” Then he grinned and smacked his lips. “Yummy!”

    Hernando De Soto is often credited with introducing the wild hog to La Florida. The possibility that pigs arrived in Florida before De Soto, however, should not be discounted, since swine were common shipboard companions on most Spanish ocean voyages during the Age of Discovery. Recall that Christopher Columbus brought the first members of family Suidae – the true pig – to the West Indies on his second New World voyage, in 1493, some forty-six years before De Soto’s infamous Florida adventures.

    It is clear, however, that the pig was well established in Florida by 1560, because French Huguenots attempting to establish Ft. Caroline that year were supplied with pork from herds managed by local Florida native peoples.

 

    Surrounded by statuesque water-stained cypress trees, Jim runs his hand over a wide half-moon shaped grooved area on the trunk of a sapling pine. His companions are attentive. “Hog’s been using this tree as a scratching post,” he explained. “All of ‘em do it, but usually it’s not this wide, or above knee-high. This here was made by a big ‘un.” Close examination of the bark-free area, which had been rubbed so smooth it appeared polished, revealed small tufts of short, dark, bristle-like hair. “Pretty fresh too,” Jim declared. “They get fleas and ticks and other bugs in their hide,” he said, “and they like to spend hours just scratching and scratching on their favorite posts. This big-boy probably uses it every day.”

    Then in succession, within fifty yards of the misshapen sapling, Jim identified other hog signs. Churned, disturbed earth around a cluster of cat-briar vines was the result of hungry hogs rooting for dinner. Jim pointed at scattered tracks of the wild pig in the dark soil of the forest floor, and explained how to differentiate between hog tracks and the similar footprints of the Florida deer. He used a twig to dissect a lump of scat, exposing clusters of acorn shells and tiny bones. “You want to watch out for scat that looks like this,” he said, “but is a lot bigger and packed with palmetto berries—that’d be a bear.”

    Lesson concluded, Jim directed his companions to split up and head north and south of the hammock. Each of the trio carried a map, compass, and watch, as well as a rifle, ammunition, lunch, and water. As the two men hiked away from the hammock in opposite directions into the dark secluded cypress forest, Jim found a comfortable seat within the timbers of a decaying oak stump some five or six feet above the ground. He adjusted camouflage netting and laid his rifle across his lap. He had not explained his overall strategy to his companions. With two relative greenhorns tromping through the woods north and south of his position, he reasoned, there was a good chance that they would unintentionally spook people-wary hogs in his direction. Experience, he would later admit, is a wonderful thing.

    In their 2005 study, Ecology of Wild Hogs in Florida, Giuliano and Tanner report that the term “feral,” which usually indicates free ranging domesticated stock that has returned to the wild, is typically used in Florida as a synonym for “wild.”  Florida’s feral hog is a hoofed mammal, stocky, with short legs and a substantial snout. They are leaner than domesticated pigs, and have long canine teeth that can appear as tusks. Typically they are black, reddish-brown, or white, either entirely one color or with mottled patterns across their bodies. Boars are generally larger than sows. Boars may weigh over two-hundred pounds, stand three feet high at their shoulders, and measure nearly five feet from snout to tail, although individual hogs greater than twice this size have been recorded. They have poor vision, but a good sense of hearing and an extraordinary sense of smell. Feral pigs also have varied appetites. They are omnivorous, opportunistic feeders, generally eating more plant material than animal. Their principle diet can include grasses and woody plants, roots, shoots, stems, tubers, seeds and leaves. They also eat fruits and fungi, and, on occasion, many animals such as insects, worms, crustaceans, fish, birds, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. If it grows, crawls, wiggles, or flies, the hog will likely try it for a meal.

    The scratching posts Jim McCarthy identified in the Apalachicola woodlands are utilized not only to bring itching relief, but are also referred to as “scent posts,” used to communicate with other hogs. Boars will “tusk” small trees – usually pines – by scraping off the bark with their sharp tusks.  This behavior, thought to be part of some sort of dominance display, can damage or destroy the target tree.

    The negative impact of wild pigs in Florida extends well beyond the damage they inflict on individual scent posts. Hogs, especially in large numbers, degrade their habitat, prey on native species, and compete with native fauna.  In a 2007 report on management methods for feral hog control in Florida, National Wildlife Service researcher Richard M. Engeman and his colleagues describe feral hogs as a “particularly destructive exotic species,” responsible for a widespread negative impact on the Florida environment. Other researchers, looking at the impact of wild hogs on tree seedlings and agricultural crops, have called these free-ranging animals the “bane of the longleaf pine.” 

    Hogs make use of diverse Florida ecosystems, although due to the Florida climate, wetlands are their favored habitat. Feral pigs are found in flatwoods, upland pine forests, bottomland hardwood regions, as well as in wetland marshes and swamps. Alligators and bobcats can prey on an isolated young pig, but humans are the only real threat to hogs in Florida. Wolves and panthers, once the primary predators of feral pigs, are no longer a consideration. 

    The boar moves his broad flank back and forth against the coarse sapling, relieving a perpetual itch, and perhaps advertising to other boars how tall, and therefore dominant, he stands. Earlier the hog had been rooting the tasty underground portions of a patch of stinging nettle, nearer the river, when the smell and sound of a human – danger – sent him trotting west to this quieter zone. His belly is full of nettle root, gnawed grape vine, acorns, and a small frog.  Temperatures have fallen during the afternoon, and the cold November air makes pulsing smoke signals out of the animal’s exhaled breath. Relatively safe behind a curtain of saw palmetto, the hog is unaware that the rhythmic motions of his scratching post, as well as the vapor rising above him, have alerted a human to his presence. 

    Thirty yards away, Jim silently raises his lever-action Marlin to his shoulder and carefully takes aim across the iron sights on the barrel. The .45 caliber bullet, with its 70-grain load of black powder, strikes the hog on the side of the head, a little behind and below the animal’s left ear. An almost-perfect shot. A perfect shot would have gone right in the ear hole, severing the spine, instantly killing the hog, and sparing the meat from any bullet damage. An almost perfect shot allowed this hog to take one startled step before it collapsed dead on the cold ground.
      
    Pork is different than venison. Pigs are hot on the inside. You have to deal with them right away, in the field. Even a large hog can be carried out of the woods solo, once its guts are out and the head has been removed. Jim ties the empty, decapitated animal’s short legs together and slides the torso onto his shoulders like a satchel, with the bound hooves across his chest. 

    Back in camp the hog’s skin is removed immediately, leaving a layer of fat on the meat. A butcher’s meat saw splits the torso in two pieces along the center of the spine. The meat will keep at least five or six days in camp, with ice added every day. 

    Standing around the glowing oak coals of the campfire, with impromptu “pig-burgers” sizzling in a frying pan, the men discuss returning to the hunt in the morning, and the virtues of eating the freshest meat imaginable.

    “Hey Jim,” one of them says, “Didn’t you tell us you knew a method of cooking pork with bourbon?” Jim reaches into his pack, “Sure thing,” he said. The trio passes the thin bottle back and forth, sipping contentedly, as the meat cooked.