It’s two AM and my phone is buzzing — the hogs are back.
I have a few game cameras placed around the property, but I set up this particular one to keep an eye on some farm equipment. I soon discovered that the site was popular with the local deer, but that was somewhat expected — this ranch is rife with white tails, along with plenty of wild turkeys and coyotes.
The feral hogs were a surprise. In the three years since I bought the place, I’ve rarely caught any hogs on camera. I see their wallows and the disturbed soil where they’ve been rooting, but not often the animals themselves. I startled a group of them in the brush one morning, and was thankful they ran in the other direction.
A group of hogs is called a sounder, but I usually just call them a herd, and a herd of feral hogs can kill a man.
I could carry a sidearm, but by the time the situation was desperate enough for me to need it, I doubt it would be of much use. Besides, I’ve never found a holster I liked for my .45 Colt, and frankly, when I carry a pistol I feel like I’m either being paranoid or cosplaying as some kind of Texas gunslinger.
Unlike my Colt, the cameras are motion-triggered, and they send pictures to my phone in real time. The first clear shots I got of a hog were of a single, large boar. I saw him on multiple nights, in between deer sightings, but he never lingered.
Then I decided to put out some hay; we’ve been in a drought for months, and the deer were starting to look pretty lean, so I thought I’d supplement their rations to carry them through until the rains return. I went down the highway a few miles and paid about eighty bucks for a round bale of some of the worst hay I’ve ever seen. When I unrolled it off the back of my truck, I expected an immediate spike in deer activity.
That spike never came; deer traffic remained steady. What changed was the hogs. Within a few weeks, I stopped seeing solitary boars; an entire herd showed up instead. They nosed through the hay, even playfully tossing it up in the air. One night the camera sent almost two hundred pictures over a six hour span; other times the herd moved on more quickly. But for the past few weeks, they’ve returned nearly every night.
And one of these nights, when I’m more settled and I’ve had some time to prepare, I’m going to trap the entire herd.
I don’t hate feral hogs. They’re survivors. Pigs typically struggle in arid climates and extreme heat, but feral hogs thrive in South Texas, where we’ve had no significant rain in months, and where my first summer here saw more than eighty straight days above a hundred degrees. The hogs I’m seeing every night, and the dead ones on the side of the highway, are healthy and fat, at least before they meet the front end of a truck. The only impact the drought seems to have had on them is that there are no piglets in the herd, only adults and adolescents. That’s a common physiological response to drought, and we’ll see plenty of babies once it starts raining again.
I have to admire their ability to survive, but wild hogs don’t belong here. They’re the remnant of domestic pigs first brought to this continent by Spaniards some five hundred years ago, their population built from escaped and abandoned animals, and later modified by the deliberate release of Eurasian wild boars to be hunted for sport. What has resulted is a landrace — an animal now perfectly suited to this environment, and being continuously honed and improved by the unique set of pressures inherent to this place.
Texas has a time-honored tradition of releasing exotic wildlife for short term amusement, with little thought given to long term consequences, but no invasive species has had so deleterious an effect as the feral hog — a creeping ecological destabilization, echoed across the American South, and inching its way ever northward.
To cope with the problem, the state of Texas has devised a very Texas solution — there is no bag limit on hogs, and no limit on when and where they can be hunted, or on what methods and hardware can be employed.
Years ago I read an article extolling the virtues of hunting Texas hogs from the back of a moving Jeep, with a spotlight and a machine gun. That would not have been my first choice. Most of the hogs escape and become more elusive. Those few that are killed are full of bullets, with meat already degraded by their hormonal response to being terrified and injured. Of course, it was never about making a meaningful dent in the hog population, or even about meat. It was about spectacle.
I recently spoke to a contractor whose brother-in-law hunts with dogs. Indeed some exceptional canine bloodlines have been developed specifically for hog hunting, but the ultimate result is that you can only take one hog at a time, and in the process, dogs are maimed and killed. The impact on the hog population is not so much negligible as beneficial — the system simply selects for greater strength, speed, and explosive violence. Even as hunters breed increasingly better dogs, they’ll never match the hogs’ reproductive rate.
The hogs are winning.
As for my role, I’ll continue to observe them, and when the time is right, I’ll trap the whole herd at once, kill them humanely, and use every part of every animal. It isn’t pretty or clean, but it’s the best response to a problem with no comfortable solutions. In harsh environments, waste and excess are anathema, and half-measures come back to bite you.
____
“Prolonged periods of drought punctuated by heavy flooding” — I don’t remember where I read that description of our local climate, but it stuck with me. This is a place of extremes. Nearly every plant that grows here is covered in sharp thorns. The area is famously rife with rattlesnakes. Since moving here I’ve been stung by scorpions, attacked by Africanized bees, and mobbed by countless colonies of fire ants.
It’s a place where wildness reigns, where coyotes yip and yowl at all hours of the day and night, and from every direction. For ranchers, near-constant pressure from predators makes raising anything smaller than cattle a challenge.
And then there are the bail-outs. Having been tasked by the governor with enforcing federal immigration laws, on top of state and local codes, the cops are always vigilant. When a plate number doesn’t match its vehicle, the lights come on and the chase begins. The pursued go bombing down ranch roads, crashing gates and flattening fence lines in a desperate effort to evade capture.
I share an access gate with a couple of neighbors, and it’s designed with bail-outs in mind; it breaks cleanly and predictably, and is easily repaired. One neighbor who’s been here longer than the rest of us jokes about putting a sign on it, telling people to hit it in the middle, so it breaks in the right spot.
All that, and herds of ravenous wild hogs in search of an easy meal …
But I chose this place, not in spite of the challenges, but largely because of them.
____
A few years back, in the midst of significant social turmoil around American policing, I noticed a common theme emerging — that being a cop was a dangerous job, and that we should therefore be grateful to those who choose it, and cut them some slack. There were troubling implications, but I also wondered, how dangerous is policing, really?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics published that information. “Police Officer” didn’t crack the top twenty most dangerous jobs, with occupations centered around logging, trucking, construction, and farming carrying significantly higher fatality rates. It’s not a competition, and it doesn’t minimize or rationalize the tragic loss of a loved one, but it does provide context.
When I tell someone I’m a farmer, I’m rarely asked if I worry for my safety. And yet, as I scrolled through the list of America’s most dangerous jobs, I found that not only did I have one of them, I was regularly engaged in nearly half of them.
I realized that it was statistically more dangerous to be me than a police officer.
That was an important realization. I needed to confront what it was that drew me to dangerous work. It wasn’t a fluke. I had a pattern.
I don’t have a death wish, and I’m not an adrenaline junkie — for me, adrenaline signals very real danger. I dislike the rush when it comes on, and I hate the fatigue that follows.
Still there is something viscerally satisfying about driving a 105,000-pound truck, knowing my way around a chainsaw, or working with a large animal that wants to kill me — not seeking thrills, but rather, competence. Feeling the weight of the work without being crushed by it.
Doing dangerous work safely isn’t about exerting power and control, it’s about recognizing where real power lies, where control is an illusion. It’s about working within natural systems instead of against them.
A lot of people want a house in the suburbs, a manicured lawn, a regular nine-to-five. They want security, predictability. But most security is merely theater, and predictability is overrated. Prisons are predictable.
There is clarity in obvious danger. In the suburbs, danger is random and unexpected, but on the farm, I know what kills me. I can see it. I can mitigate risk in a meaningful way.
The suburbs are chaos posing as order. Wild places are order that only looks like chaos, and once you’ve internalized that, systems that disrupt that order become psychologically untenable. They feel false, disconnected.
So I choose connection, to put my hands into the dirt, but why I chose South Texas dirt came down to something less ethereal, more utilitarian.
____
I had spent a few decades in the Pacific Northwest, much of that time in the nonprofit sector — a system of undue constraints and unfair expectations. I was always fighting, always exhausted. My successes were ephemeral; my failures were catastrophic.
In the background, as it all played out, my joints began to ache. I began to tire of being cold and wet. I craved real food. And slowly, those things became more important to me than winning battles.
Energy became a resource worth protecting. Priorities shifted, and new goals emerged. Superficial relationships faded away as I nourished only the ones that truly mattered. I picked up the guitar I’d put down a decade earlier. I took up woodworking again; I built a cabin. And I started raising chickens.
With chickens came systems. Better feed meant better eggs to eat. They had to be housed in a way that aligned with their biology. They had to be protected from raccoons, hawks, and stray dogs. Their behavior had to be studied, understood, not merely accommodated, but stimulated.
After chickens came ducks, then turkeys; Guinea fowl; geese; pigeons. Each new addition brought new complexity to the system. My passel of aging rescue dogs made mixed-use facility design challenging. The unplanned arrival of a pet pig complicated things, but she also became a companion for misfit roosters who fit poorly into other parts of the system, and a fierce guardian of baby ducks and their hyper-vigilant mothers.
A feral cat moved into the barn and provided rodent control in exchange for the security my rescue dogs afforded her. I trapped her, had her spayed, and when she eventually stopped killing rats, she became a pet.
As my beloved rescues succumbed to old age, Livestock Guardian Dogs — LGDs — took their place. They educated me, and they awoke in me a thirst for more knowledge about their behavior, their origins.
When the first sheep arrived, the eldest of the LGDs had just passed away. One of my great teachers and greatest friends, he also exposed where I was lacking and demanded my accountability.
Animals, and dogs in particular, changed me at the near-molecular level. They changed the way I spoke; the way I moved through space and time; the way I processed information; the way I dealt with anger. They reminded me that most things worth doing are hard, but that well-designed systems make hard things achievable.
With new knowledge and skill sets came new interests, and travel opened up new possibilities. I began developing systems that integrated farming, forestry, and animal welfare; construction, conservation, and culture. It became my goal to implement those systems someplace farther south, where my joints didn’t ache and my clothes weren’t always damp.
I wasn’t seeking a change of scenery, mere relief from discomfort, or the satisfaction of my entrepreneurial urges — I was searching for a radical lifestyle change.
It was a trip to Central America that ultimately brought me to South Texas. I had saved money by flying out of Vancouver, but that also meant that between the extra driving, hotel stays, and border crossings, I’d added nearly two full days to my trip. So as I sat on a plane in Houston, having already cleared Customs once, and knowing I’d have to do it two more times before I could go home, a thought occurred to me: “If you lived here, you’d be home now.” And at that moment, Texas became part of the plan.
I started exploring outside Austin, but it wasn’t long before I began to drift south, where the climate, the price of land, and the culture were all a better fit. Austin tries too hard, while San Antonio doesn’t care what you think, but down here, in the middle of South Texas Brush Country, those distinctions are irrelevant.
It’s small town life that’s big city-adjacent; an hour to the beach and an hour and a half to the border. It’s remote, but it’s convenient. There’s isolation when I want it, and connection when I need it. This place has everything I require, until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it’s easy to get away. I’ve flown in and out of six different airports here, and there are others I haven’t tried yet. For my forays into Central America, one of my best options is to cross the border and fly out of Monterrey.
I have good access to labor, with a strong resident workforce and guest workers from Mexico. It takes some local connections to tap into those resources, but I’m finding my way.
Finally, I could not describe this area without mentioning that the Mexican food here is very good. Elsewhere in Texas, Tex-Mex prevails, and I’ve always preferred less Tex, more Mex. But here, the dominant flavors come from Jalisco, and for me, that means it’s comfort food.
Severe climate. Relentless biological pressure. Inhospitable soils. Socioeconomic friction. These things make the South Texas Brush a perfect laboratory to stress-test regenerative systems.
It is precisely its less-than-ideal conditions that make it ideal for me, at this exact moment in time. I’m unlikely to live long enough to see all my work pay dividends, but my intention is to make this land productive — not to restore it to what it once was, but to allow the land to tell me what new thing it should become.
If that sounds abstract or silly, let me explain.
There was a time when this place was a savannah, much like you picture when you think of the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara, and it was shaped by similar forces — periods of heavy rainfall and drought, massive animals, and wildfire cycles that thinned the brush, but left the largest trees intact.
Some forces that still exist across much of the African continent are no longer present here. The woolly mammoths are gone. The bison are gone, too. Our natural wildfire cycles are suppressed. And as a result, we are dominated by thorny brush.
The situation wasn’t helped much in the mid-1800s when Richard King drove more than 100,000 cattle here from Mexico, with their bellies full of mesquite pods. A local legend, slave-owner, and war profiteer, King isn’t solely to blame for turning South Texas into Brush Country; governments, armies, other ranchers, big game hunters, climate change, and even a Mexican volcano played their parts.
Regardless of the specific mechanisms involved, the bison herds and the wildfires won’t be back anytime soon, and the systems we create here, if they tried to mimic those ancient forces of nature, would not be sustainable — not on my seventy-five acres, and certainly not at scale.
What I do here must be new.
____
Texas has always been different from other places, in oftentimes confounding ways, among them a long history of ceding civic responsibility to a private sector that tends to prioritize profit over public trust. Historically those abdications have led to things like weak power grids, a dearth of public lands, and the near-total displacement of indigenous populations.
Wildlife is managed mostly by private landowners. One of my neighbors culls deer with the health of the herd in mind, while another shoots anything that moves. Imbalance is inherent in a system where management means very different things to different people.
To some, it means shoving nature into boxes; extracting resources for short term material gain; approaching biodiversity as a shooting gallery instead of the natural consequence of healthy land.
For them, management means releasing axis deer and blackbuck into the brush, and shooting coyotes on sight. It’s forcing the illusion of abundance, and never achieving the real thing.
But for others, management means having more questions than answers; accepting that not everything can be fixed. It’s learning to divert threats, not eliminate them.
It’s recognizing that the most inhospitable soils can be made fertile with a few, simple interventions, and understanding that the most productive site on your property is meant to be a forest, not a cornfield.
Management is listening, observing, taking lessons from unlikely sources. It’s banking the countless, small failures that teach us how to succeed.
It’s accepting that feral hogs are here to stay, and regarding them as a valued resource: genetically, a landrace perfectly adapted to this place; structurally, a test of our systems; economically, a source of protein that requires virtually no inputs.
When we stop bending nature to our will, abandon extraction for regenerative investment, accept that we have much to learn, and let the land tell us what it wants to become, even feral hogs are teachers.
It’s two AM, and the hogs are back. School is in session.