Hunting feral hogs may not be as popular as hunting deer or ducks during the holiday season, but with an estimated three million wild hogs in the state, the sport is helping to control the nuisance.
There's no mistaking the damage done by feral hogs. Only one hog probably was responsible for a lot of rooting at Marshall Creek near Grapevine Lake.
Neighboring homeowners in Southlake have spent thousands of dollars repairing the wild hog damage in their front yards.
"The wild hogs are using the lake to travel," said Matt Falkner, a park ranger with the Army Corps of Engineers. "They'll get on a creek bed, and they'll follow that creek bed plum to downtown Dallas if they could find a path to go."
That's one reason the Corps allows hog hunting on their property. The Grapevine Lake Wildlife Management Area is 2,500 hundred acres of free range.
"We basically allow people to hunt them year round on our property," Falkner said. "And there's no bag limit."
The program is only a year old, but there are already plans to expand.
"Feral hogs, we're going come up with some creative ways to probably open that up a little bit more to folks in the future," Falkner said. "Possibly some trapping, permitting. We'd like to do some youth hunts."
But in the short term, park rangers are preparing for the weekend holiday hunting rush.
"We're right down the road from two million people, and it's a quick hunt," Falkner said. "You can get a quick hunt Thursday morning before Thanksgiving."
So hunt as many hogs as you want.
E-mail dmiles@wfaa.com
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