In Hawai‘i, people, pigs, and ecosystems only have so much room to coexist, and the pigs exist a little too much.
Excerpt from this story from Hakai Magazine:
Francis “Bully” Mission Sr., president and founder of Mission Animal Control, is in a good mood when I meet him at a strip mall parking lot on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. He and his son Levi have just found two “squeakers”—pigs no more than a few months old—in one of their traps, which means US $100 in their pockets and another satisfied customer. Property owners all over the island hire the duo to remove problem animals, and Bully has invited me to join him as he collects the new captives.
“We had a big mama yesterday and three juveniles,” he tells me as I climb into his pickup truck. “The population is unbelievable.”
Inside the cab, I notice what appears to be Old MacDonald’s entire farm glued to the dashboard: a plastic cat, a couple of horses, a cow, and three pigs. These are all species that humans have brought to the Hawaiian islands and that the Mission family is often hired to eliminate. Feral pigs, once denizens of the mountains with intermittent forays to lower elevations, have become regular raiders of lowland farms, upscale neighborhoods, and members-only golf courses. “Some of them look like you could put a saddle on them and ride them,” Bully says of the pigs he’s seen.
Pigs can now be found on six of Hawai‘i’s seven inhabited islands, and their impacts are especially profound on Kaua‘i, the lush “Garden Island,” which has so far retained much of its native character. Its mountains are home to 255 unique native plant species and 208 native birds, including 11 found nowhere else on Earth. As the pigs tear up vegetation, they encourage erosion and muddy the island’s drinking water supplies. Their wallows breed mosquitoes that spread avian malaria, contributing to 10 of Kaua‘i’s 16 native honeycreepers going extinct. They also spread the seeds of the strawberry guava tree in their dung, contributing to what one group of researchers has referred to as an “invasional meltdown.” The guava shades out native plants and smothers them in its leaves.
The pigs’ presence in the populated lowlands has grown over the last couple of decades. Sally Rizzo, who was running an organic farm during my visit, told me that the pigs broke through her fence this year and “shit all over our baby greens.” On the roads, drivers frequently have to swerve to avoid pigs, leading to several hundred accidents every year. Beaches aren’t safe either. Three years ago, a tusked boar made headlines when it went for a swim and thrashed a surfer in the lineup off Oahu, another island. On oceanside bluffs, meanwhile, the pigs are preying on the chicks of migratory seabirds, so completely trashing their burrow nests that the birds never return to them again.
Despite the damage that feral pigs are causing, you can’t just shoot them on sight as you can in many other US states. In Texas, home to more than one-third of the seven million feral pigs in the United States, hunters and landowners target them from helicopters or with poison baits. On Hawai‘i, however, pigs occupy a more complicated position, as their populations are managed for both recreation and subsistence. Along with West Virginia, Hawai‘i is one of two states with bag limits on public land. This means that while conservationists are trying to reduce or eliminate pig populations inside protected areas, the Hawai‘i Division of Forestry and Wildlife manages the animal as a limited resource just about everywhere else.
