The Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute (NRI) encourages Texas landowners to report wild pig sightings and damage using a new first-of-its-kind online tool.
“Landowners throughout Texas are constantly seeing wild pigs and their damage,” said Dr. Jim Cathey, associate director of the NRI. “Unfortunately, until now, we didn’t have a good method of collecting the information on where the pigs were sighted and what type of damage they were doing.”
Cathey said the new easy-to-use reporting tool, developed by the institute’s data analytics team, provides a unique portal for Texas landowners and homeowners to note and quickly report such sightings. It can be found in the “Report Wild Pigs” section of the institute’s Wild Pigs website at https://wildpigs.nri.tamu.edu/.
“The site has a location feature with a GPS map interface, so you can click and show exactly where the wild pigs or the damage they had caused was sighted, and it gives the longitude and latitude of that location,” Cathey said.
“The electronic fill-in survey allows the landowner to notate specific information, including the number of pigs seen, the class of pigs—whether male, female, younger or older—the kind of damage, such as wallowing and rooting, and what type of damage there is, such as crop or landscape damage or torn fencing.”
The portal is designed to be used with your smartphone. Cathey said it takes only a few minutes for a landowner using the tool to capture data on the wild pigs and includes an option for submitting photos of the animals and/or their damage.
“Now instead of hearing wild pig reports by individuals, this new tool will allow landowners to capture the information so it can be used in a statewide database that will allow everyone to really understand the breadth of the wild pig problem across Texas.”
Cathey said data from the submitted reports will be used to support the institute’s outreach efforts and help locate areas of high activity to guide both land management and educational efforts across the state. He said $52 million annually in damage is tied to agricultural damage.
“Wild pigs are one of the greatest invasive species problems in the United States, having a negative effect on agricultural crops and livestock, water quality, wildlife populations and their habitats, and more recently, suburban landscapes,” he said.
“There are an estimated 5 million wild pigs throughout the U.S. with an estimated 2.6 million in Texas alone. And the wild pig crop damage and control costs are reported to be greater than $52 million annually in Texas.” — Paul Schattenberg, Texas A&M University Extension
(Editor’s note: This piece has been shortened from its original form.)
