Carol Acedo just wants to scare the hogs away from her house. The artist, who lives next to a nature preserve about 15 minutes from downtown Fort Worth, was letting her dog out one evening last year when, she said, "I heard a snort."
Days later, she heard rustling in the bushes, "like something was coming at me." A few days after that, she heard snorts again and summoned the courage to shine a flashlight. She saw 10 pigs in her frontyard.
"They were just tearing up my land, looking for acorns from the oak trees," said Acedo, 42. "It was like a tractor tilled it up."
She tried to hire hunters, but they were wary of firing in a residential area. Eventually the boars left, but she believes they'll be back now that acorns are dropping again.
She hated to do it, but she got a shotgun.
One woman's swine is another man's free-range pork, however. In Jermyn (pop. 75), about an hour and a half from Acedo's house, seasoned trapper Kim Rife is making six figures selling hogs to meat companies, which in turn sell the "lean and nutty" wild boar cuts to high-end supermarkets and fashionable restaurants.
Rife, 72, runs a booming "animal control" business across 18 counties, trapping skunks, raccoons, coyotes, turtles, rattlesnakes and other critters ranchers deem pests. He sells raccoon furs to rug makers and snake blood to Korean women who believe it will make their men sexually ravenous. But the big profits come from the hogs. "Look as far as the eye can see," Rife said, sweeping his hand across an expanse of mesquite trees and golden ragweed bushes once owned by a cattle baron who inspired the novel "Lonesome Dove." "You can't see 'em, but every acre's crawling with hogs. For eight years, I've caught a hog every day."
He pulled up to a wire cage at the edge of a wheat field, and a smile overtook his face. Five young boars were inside, screeching.
"Hey boys! What you doing in my trap?" Rife said, adding, "I've caught enough hogs in this one alone to buy me a new truck."
Wild hog sellers say their trade is a capitalist solution to Texas' pig problem. "If it wasn't for the market to sell this stuff, hogs would be thicker than mosquitoes," said Danny Sturness of Frontier Meats, the company that buys Rife's hogs.
Wildlife experts disagree.
"Do the math: When you have 2 million pigs having three litters every two years, you're not going to eat your way out of this," said Mike Bodenchuk, the U.S. Department. of Agriculture official in charge of Texas wildlife problems. "These pigs are an ecological train wreck."
