Hogs Are Trouble on a Texas Highway

On the night the fastest highway in the U.S. opened, police in Lockhart, Tex., rushed to the 85-mile-an-hour road to deal with three collisions. Drivers typing text messages or putting on lipstick weren’t to blame. The problem was wild hogs. The black, bristling beasts—which can top 400 pounds—roam the ranchland that surrounds the 41-mile expressway connecting the towns of Seguin and Mustang Ridge. While nobody died in the pig accidents, police worry that eventually somebody will. “It’s like a racetrack,” says Michael Lummus, Lockhart’s police chief. Captain John Roescher adds, “We’ve had a bunch of hogs killed.”

Feral hogs were already the scourge of Texas farmers and golf greenskeepers. More than 2 million root around in all but one Texas county, wreaking an estimated $50 million in farm-related damage annually, according to Billy Higginbotham, a Texas A&M University professor and ag extension agent who’s made a career of studying the pigs. The state is having trouble keeping the pig population down despite incentives like the $2-a-tail bounty offered by Lockhart’s Caldwell County and contests to bag the varmints sponsored by sporting goods stores. That’s partly because the animals have caught on to old-fashioned traps lined with corn. Says Higginbotham: “We’ve eliminated a lot of the stupid hogs from the gene pool.”