Texas teen encounters 400-pound feral hog destroying farm land: ‘One shot, one kill.’
A 13-year-old boy in Texas helped eradicate part of the invasive feral hog population with one massive kill on a recent hunting trip with his father.
The boy, Scout Neece, took out the hog after getting within 100 yards of it at a private cattle ranch in Colorado County on Feb. 28, his father told KSAT.
“(Scout) put a really good shot on it and that was all she wrote,” Steve Neece told KSAT. “You have a very small window to shoot a hog that size. One shot, one kill. it’s very uncommon. That size, you’re normally going to shoot and they’re going to run.”
The hog weighed nearly 400 pounds and was among the biggest the father has seen since he has been hunting, he told the Houston Chronicle.
Needless to say, it was the largest hog Scout has killed as well, his dad wrote on Facebook.
Feral hogs cause more than $50 million in agricultural damage each year in Texas, according to the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension.
A law put in place last year allowed Texas residents to hunt feral hogs on private property without a hunting license if they have “landowner consent.”
Steve Neece hunts hogs on the nights and weekends through his Dirt Nap Outfitters business, he told the Chronicle.
He told the newspaper killing hogs should be approached like killing a cockroach In your kitchen.
“That’s the way Texans should think about feral hogs,” the father told the Chronicle. “It’s a non-native, very invasive species. The numbers are staggering about what kind of damage they are causing landowners, and they are spreading toward the urban and metro areas.”
The hogs, which have long been a problem in the rural areas of the state, are now encroaching on the suburbs of Houston, according to Houston Public Media.
There are an estimated 3 million feral hogs In Texas, Texas A&M wildlife specialist John Tomecek told Houston Public Media.
Despite hunters killing 30 percent of the hog population In Texas each year, hog numbers continue to grow 20 percent annually, WideOpenSpaces.com reports. Hogs produce as many as “two to three litters of up to six to eight piglets every year,” the website states.
Scout killing the 400-pound hog was a “proud dad moment for me,” Steve told KSAT.