by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
The National Rifle Association (NRA) likes to clutch its pearls and panties and fine Italian suits as it whines on, ad infinitum, about America's long and proud history of hunting wildlife - with guns. And since today is Thanksgiving, and because the earliest Thanksgiving feasts in America undoubtedly featured plenty of freshly killed wild game, I thought that a blog about hunting might be appropriate.
Last night I was reading a story on the internet about "super pigs," the by-product of feral swine in Canada who have maliciously cross-bred with domestic pigs and are now roaming the prairie provinces of Canada doing great damage to the land and attitudes of our Canadian cousins. These "super pigs" are spreading across the prairies in large herds (or "sounders") and increasing in numbers despite efforts to keep them in check through hunting, trapping, and poisonings. Now, after ravaging large swaths of the prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, many of the sounders seem to be turning south and heading toward the grasslands of Montana, the Dakotas, and even Minnesota.
The article that I read referred to the incoming hordes of feral pigs as the current most invasive species of animals moving across the planet.
I am not a hunter, but I know there are already problems with feral swine here in the United States. My own state of Missouri has had issues with wild pigs over the years, and they have been a major concern in Arkansas, just to the south. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the increasing presence of wild javelinas in the desert communities of Arizona and some of the western states, and while javelinas are not technically swine, they are closely enough related to hogs to be recognized as such. Wild pigs can pose a direct danger to human life and well-being through their aggressive foraging for food, and they also spread disease among wild and domestic animal populations.
The article that I was reading about the "super pigs" coming down from Canada mentioned efforts to control their numbers and the spread of their populations, things like hunting, traps, and even poisons. But it was just one small sentence in that section of the article that really jumped out and caught my attention. Texas, it seems, has passed a law which permits the hunting of wild pigs from hot air balloons!
When I read that my mind immediately circled back to the old news stories of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from helicopters. Somehow, it did not sound very sportsmanlike, or safe. So I took that statement about the law in Texas which allows hunting wild pigs from hot air balloons, and did a bit of research. It turns out that while the statement is true, in practice that type of hunting only happens rarely, if at all.
The Texas legislature, which seems to believe that every Texan has a right to carry guns anywhere he or she damned well pleases, did pass a law in 2017 which permitted individuals to hunt hogs and coyotes from hot air balloons. Legislators were apparently most concerned about the burgeoning numbers of feral hogs that were roaming the Texas prairies in search of food, and they saw hunting from balloons as one more way to help curb the menace that nature had inflicted upon the Lone Star State.
But there were - and are - problems with an airborne assault on marauding pigs. First of all, people who insure hot air balloons did not want the added liability of firearms being carried aboard the balloons - and fired from the balloons. Also, it turns out that hot air balloons do not make the best of hunting platforms because they bob and weave and vibrate in the wind - and they go where the wind takes them rather than where the game is necessarily headed. If the sounder of hogs goes one way, and the balloon goes the other, oh well! And then what happens if the hunter gets incredibly lucky and actually kills a hog from a thousand feet in the air? How does he or she claim their trophy? Or does the carcass just lay on the ground and rot - or serve as food for the other hungry hogs?
The Texas law was not very well thought out, and is apparently seldom used, but, no matter, pig-headed Texans are keeping it on the books anyway. During another Trump administration it might even get incorporated into their border security program!
Happy Thanksgiving - and God bless the earliest Americans who gave our ancestors sanctuary!
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