John Oliver addressed the destructive nature of feral hogs on his HBO show, detailing how they have become an almost impossible problem to solve.<\/p>\n
On Last Week Tonight, the host said that the creatures are \u201cactually a massive problem\u201d at the moment, with some as big as 400lb.<\/p>\n
He called them \u201cone of the most destructive species in the country\u201d, which was \u201cgenuinely shocking\u201d for something that \u201clooks adorable\u201d.<\/p>\n
They are \u201cspreading at an alarming rate\u201d and not just in rural America. Oliver said there were now more than six million of them in the US and they cause about $3bn of damage to agriculture each year.<\/p>\n
Hogs have \u201cdevastating effects on food production and the environment\u201d and have also killed slightly more people than sharks in the last 20 years.<\/p>\n
Oliver did explain that many animals kill more people than sharks though, including cows \u201cand yet the cowards at Discovery Channel refuse to do Cow Week\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Oliver explained that pigs aren\u2019t native to the US yet have been brought to the Americas by people such as Christopher Columbus and various game hunters.<\/p>\n
Hogs have very few natural predators and they are incredibly resourceful, having complex social relationships.<\/p>\n
A major problem is \u201cthey cannot stop fucking\u201d leading to rising numbers even in urban settings. Oliver said it must be \u201cpretty alarming to see them in your neighbourhood\u201d and they can be \u201cvery dangerous\u201d on the road, causing damage to cars and even fighter jets.<\/p>\n
They also eat farmers crops, destroy seedlings, break up irrigation lines and cause major holes in fields.<\/p>\n
They will eat almost anything from corn to soya beans to peanuts to various creatures including sea turtles. \u201cNo wonder some of those who study them describe hogs in apocalyptic terms,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Oliver said they have been \u201cannihilating\u201d most living things they come into contact with, with 300 native plants and animals declining as a result, over 250 of which are threatened or endangered.<\/p>\n
They can also spread disease at a fast rate, with 30 pathogens and 40 parasites making them \u201cincredibly difficult to contain\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said that there had been \u201cvarying degrees of success\u201d in the attempts to control them with loosened laws within sport hunting. He said authorities have been doing \u201ceverything they can to encourage hunters to kill as many hogs as possible\u201d.<\/p>\n
But it has been hard to outsmart them and the industry surrounding hunting has often made the problem worse as they have been transported to new states just so they could be hunted there.<\/p>\n
Oliver said hunting \u201cisn\u2019t going to be the sole answer here\u201d with trapping also being used as well as poison yet a way to do this \u201chumanely hasn\u2019t been discovered yet\u201d as it means inviting a \u201ctoxic ingredient into a whole ecosystem\u201d.<\/p>\n
There has also been contraceptive bait which would \u201cneutralise the ability to reproduce\u201d yet it\u2019s female hogs that drive fertility.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs it stands, no single method is going to be able to control our feral hog population by itself,\u201d he said. \u201cInstead, it\u2019s going to take a bunch of tools and the key thing is to use them wisely.\u201d<\/p>\n
States like Iowa, New York and Idaho addressed the problem early on so have no hogs yet Texas now has a huge problem.<\/p>\n
Oliver said they were \u201cprobably always gonna be with us in some capacity\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Oliver addressed the destructive nature of feral hogs on his HBO show, detailing how they have become…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-652734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}