We always love to hear from Karl Hansen of Hensley.
A prolific author of salty letters to this newspaper’s Voices page, Hansen contacts me privately about almost everything I write. Hansen has a lot of life experience, and I always learn something from him. Sometimes it’s about practical things, like putting a tarp under an outdoors repair project on an outboard motor or a four-wheeler to prevent indispensable little parts like specialty screws and springs from getting lost when they inevitably fall to the ground.
Our feature story on Oct. 11 about the 600-pound feral hog that Grant Cox killed in Hempstead County prompted Hansen to write a longer note than usual. The paragraph about the hog not exhibiting the characteristics of an ordinary wild hog, and the photos that illustrated that theory, particularly caught Hansen’s attention.
“I’m sure that was a domestic hog at one time,” Cox said. “I don’t know if it got turned out or got out, but it had been running wild for a couple years. He had started going back feral with growing the cutter tusks and all that, but he wasn’t a full-blood wild hog.”
Hansen solved the mystery.
“That hog appears to me to be descendant of old stock Landrace, which were generally whole body white and had a long body with relatively short legs,” Hansen wrote. “I’ve never known one that developed the tusks he’s (Cox) referring to in the first generation in which it was ‘feral.’ But the second generation have been known to show some bodily differences such as longer snouts and tusks as well as slightly heavier hair coats as they get older.
“They were found to be feral in a few cases in Cashre Bottoms in Oklahoma (near Poteau and Spiro watersheds,” Hansen continued. “Cashre Creek runs through that area and as a kid I hunted and fished there. There were some wild ones near Sallisaw in those years as well.”
Hansen said he collided with such a brute one night in a truck while hauling spinach to Allen’s cannery in Springdale in the 1950s.
“Ever hit a hog?” Hansen asked. “It’s like running into a sack of cement.”
I Googled “Landrace hog.” Only domestic Landrace were pictured, but they looked remarkably similar to Cox’s hog, minus the tusks.
That takes us back to Oct. 8, to a story we wrote about a giant alligator that Ricky Hamilton killed at Bois d’Arc Lake, also in Hempstead County. It was a big week for killing big animals in Hempstead County. I hunted deer with Hamilton about 15 years ago during a controlled muzzleloader hunt at Lester Sitzes Bois d’Arc Wildlife Management Area. Hamilton was my companion during the three-day hunt. Sitzes himself arranged the whole thing.
While Hamilton and I skulked through the bottoms, a massive pig emerged from protective cover and casually strolled away from us. Like Cox’s pig, it had an unusually long white body. They might well have been related. I was sorely tempted to shoot the beast, but Hamilton convinced me that the time and effort it would take to drag the thing a very long way out of the woods back to the truck would wreck a perfectly good day of deer hunting.
I have not hit a pig in a vehicle, thank goodness. However, I have seen a couple of massive road-killed pigs. The biggest was outside Starkville, Miss., while driving to a turkey hunt in Alabama with Glenn Clark of Vilonia. The other was on U.S. Highway 67 between Glen Rose and Malvern. Bloating magnified the size of those pigs to some extent, but they were monstrous when they were alive.
Serious clashes have occurred over the killing of feral hogs on public ground. A former Arkansas game warden told me about a hunter that killed a couple of free-ranging hogs at what is now Moro Big Pine WMA. They had notched ears, which meant that they had been private stock that had been released on the property. As luck would have it, a local man who the warden described as being quite feral himself showed up, claimed that the man had killed his property and demanded several hundred dollars payment on the spot.
Fortunately, the warden arrived in time to avert what he said would have probably resulted in a homicide.
That perked my ears because I, too, killed a free-running, castrated hog with a notched ear while deer hunting at Moro Big Pine WMA many years ago.
Bryan Hendricks has been the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette outdoors editor since 2005. He covers hunting, fishing, camping, and all other outdoor activities in The Natural State, as well as the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Bryan has won 30-plus awards for his work, including the Arkansas Press Association Freedom of Information Award, Service to Freedom of Information Award (Associated Press Managing Editors), Reporting on Freedom of Information Issues Award (Society of Professional Journalists), the John Robert Starr Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Arkansas Wildlife Federation Conservation Communicator of the Year Award.