Feral hogs can cause significant damage to farming and ranching operations
across the United States.
Those types of damages range anywhere from
rooting on agricultural cropland,
rooting on agricultural hayfields
to water contamination,
competition with native wildlife
as well as disease potential transmissions to livestock.
Conventional trapping techniques that you can find
at any of your neighborhood farm and ranch stores
include the type of traps that we refer to as conventional traps.
Those traps are box traps and corral traps.
We found through research at the Noble Foundation that these kinds of traps are very ineffective
at capturing populations of feral hogs at the sounder level.
Some of the shortcomings of conventional trapping techniques are things like
non-target captures getting into the traps.
White-tailed deer or raccoons may enter the traps,
trigger those traps and once those door are triggered,
whether the animals stay in the traps or not,
feral hogs don't typically push the doors open and enter those traps –
even though some of those doors are marketed that way.
Another shortcoming of conventional traps like box traps and corral traps
is the fact that you really only capture a portion of the sounder that’s using those sites.
Imagine a site where you have 20 feral hogs using the location.
If only five of those animals walk into the trap and hit that animal-activated trigger inside the trap,
you only capture those five and also educate 15 others.
The Noble Foundation has been using drop nets since the early 1980s.
We use these drop nets to capture white-tailed deer for various research projects.
When we were using these traps to capture white-tailed deer,
we had problems with feral hogs consuming the bait underneath the nets.
When we had those problems with feral hogs consuming the bait,
we decided to one day to drop the net on those hogs,
get them off site,
so that we could continue on with our white-tailed deer research.
It worked really well.
We caught the entire sounder.
We dropped on 20 pigs and removed those pigs off of the location.
And then we were back to trapping white-tailed deer for those research projects.
So at that time we decided, well, maybe this trap deserves some merit.
Maybe we ought to -- this drop net --
maybe we ought to take this drop net, and implement a research study and look
and see what potential it has to be included in our tool belt for capturing feral hogs.
In 2010 and 2011 we implemented a two-year research project
to look at the potential for drop nets as a tool for feral hog control.
We compared that drop net to a conventional trapping technique.
We compared that drop net to corral traps.
In that two years of research,
we found that we were able to capture 86% of the identifiable population with our drop nets,
where we were only able to capture 49% of the population with our corral traps.
That 86% is very significant because it meets that threshold of 70%.
70% of the feral hog population needs to be captured on an annual basis
to keep that population level -- to keep that population from growing.
So our conventional trapping techniques just weren't doing it at 49%.
The biggest advantage to drop nets was the fact that it was an overhead canopy-type trap.
Feral hogs don’t associate that overhead canopy with any danger --
it’s like walking underneath another fence line or underneath a canopy of pecan trees.
Feral hogs also don't have any overhead predators,
so they don't know to look up.
Drop nets were also human activated,
so an individual sitting on a trap site would only trigger that drop net to fall when it was appropriate.
So when the entire sounder entered the vicinity of the drop net,
that’s when they would hit the trigger -- drop the net
not when a portion of that sounder got in the trap.
If there was a portion of the sounder inside the net and a portion outside,
we would risk educating animals;
so a human-activated trigger was very, very advantageous.
In this two years of research comparing corral traps with drop nets,
we found that a really good trapping technique was probably a combination of these two techniques.
So we've actually developed a hybrid of these techniques and we're calling it the BoarBuster.
BoarBuster takes the physical attributes such as the suspended nature of drop nets
and couples those with the rigid structure of a corral trap.
When feral hogs enter the vicinity of the BoarBuster,
they can see all the way through the trap from one side to another.
They can enter from any direction.
They can leave in any direction.
They feel more comfortable.
They don't have that trap-shy behavior
associated with other conventional trapping techniques around the BoarBuster.
After doing some testing with the BoarBuster hog trap,
we found it could be a very effective technique.
So we decided to implement another two years of research on BoarBuster.
In that two years of research,
we found that we were able to capture 88% of the identifiable population of feral hogs.
Very similar to that of drop nets.
However, the difference between that and drop nets was the fact that we're able to manipulate
this trap from at home, while only spending a third the amount of time out in the field.
The BoarBuster features a trail camera that uses 3G internet -- uses cellular data.
So as an animal enters the vicinity of the BoarBuster,
a text message would be sent to their cell phone or an email to their email address.
That user can initiate a live video stream at that time.
If it was raccoons or white-tailed deer, they might hit the snooze button, go back to sleep.
If it’s a group of feral hogs --
when all the hogs from the sounder get inside of that trap,
they hit a button on their cell phone, capture the hogs, and worry about them tomorrow.
Users could carry on trapping feral hogs from the convenience of their own living room.
They could carry on their workday and trap feral hogs at the same time.
In our experience with using BoarBuster, we’ve caught as many as 39 hogs in one drop.
And I’ve caught 30 hogs from the ballpark in Arlington watching a ballgame.
In order to make BoarBuster market-ready,
the Noble Foundation took on the task to further develop the traps.
We wanted to make these traps very effective.
We wanted to make them user-friendly.
We wanted to make them safe and we wanted to make them cost-effective.
We didn’t want them costing a whole lot of money,
so every landowner can have one of the traps to use on their operation.
The Noble Foundation has teamed up with two local manufacturers:
Tactical Electronics out of Tulsa and WW Livestock Systems out of Thomas, Oklahoma
to bring this product to market.
BoarBuster will be available from WW Livestock Systems in summer of 2015.