It's a war on boars, but pork's winning

Edom, Texas

It was a cool Saturday night in East Texas, and many men were surely someplace warm, swilling beer and watching football. That was not Joe Paddock's idea of good times.

Covered in camouflage and carrying an AR-10 assault rifle, night-vision goggles and enough ammo to outfit a small battalion, Paddock was wading through weedy bottomlands, eager to "get up on some hogs," as he excitedly put it.

Two packs of wild boars on a retired fire marshal's ranch had eluded his scope for weeks. This time, he promised, the clever pigs would pay.

"It's become like a vendetta to me," Paddock whispered. "These hogs have got my number. It's like they're tracking me."

Paddock, who looks like long-haired rocker Ted Nugent, is a pig-killing hit man who calls himself "The Dehoganator" and advertises his services.

If a band of feral swine is laying waste to your land -- an increasingly pervasive problem in the Lone Star State -- The Dehoganator and his fellow riflemen will happily shoot 'em up to hog heaven, as long as you help cover the cost of the bullets.

California and other states struggle to rein in feral swine, but nowhere are the pigs more populous than in Texas. It's home to about 2 million wild hogs -- and they're multiplying.

Of the 254 counties in Texas, about 90% have a wild hog problem. Surly pigs have been spotted in urban parks in Dallas and San Antonio, startling joggers. Mobs of ravenous porkers are munching crops and tearing up hayfields, causing $52 million a year in damage, state officials estimate. They also are eating the eggs of endangered sea turtles on coastal barrier islands, forcing biologists to scurry nests to safety.

"The feral hog population in Texas is completely out of control," said Kevin Ryer, founder of a website called Texasboars, where hunters and trappers share photos and bravado-filled tales. "There's not a big city in Texas that doesn't have a hog in it somewhere."

Texas' plague might be a menace to landowners, but for Paddock, who makes his living trimming trees, it's a chance to have a little fun. He's spent more than $20,000 amassing a stockpile of swine-killing weapons, and admits that playing The Dehoganator is a money loser. But that hardly matters to him.

To many country-bred men like Paddock, 47, hunting wild hogs is the ultimate blood sport: a battle of wits against an ugly, wise and unpredictable foe. Anybody can shoot Bambi in the woods, they argue, but bringing down an angry 300-pound boar takes bravery. Wounded hogs can turn vengeful. Men have been gored to death by their "cutters," or razor-like tusks.