Proceedings of the Vertebrate Pest Conference

Traps are one of the most commonly used products for controlling wild pig populations, but every trapping product and process produces different results. Early sexual maturity, extraordinary reproduction rate, and high piglet survivability gives feral pigs the capacity to recover quickly from inferior control efforts which do not target all age classes at the same time. Many trapping efforts fail to accomplish whole-sounder success, creating an industry need to evaluate efficiency and effectiveness. The 2018 Farm Bill provided funding for pilot projects in 10 states to collect feral swine harvest data. Researchers did not collect data points to measure work production or product efficiency and missed an important opportunity to numerically analyze Best Management Practices (BMPs). Our research compared four different trap products using their individual trapping processes to determine which, if any, was more efficient. This project eliminated the total wild pig population from a 20.23 km² (5,000-acre) Flint River property in Reynolds, Georgia. A total of 771 wild pigs were removed by one 57-year-old operator from 70 miles away while working only weekends (two days per week). Four different trapping products were tested and the best capture success rate over 32 months was 97.18% while using a mobile corral trap coupled with an automatic feeder with digital timer set to disburse bait at dusk. This method resulted in an average capture time of 29.65 minutes after sunset by incorporating an innovative conditioning process whereas the population dynamics and education level of each individual sounder dictated the time period between feeder conditioning and trap building. We continually observed several different sounder behaviors change, including predictable dusk feeding times, compared to the remaining three trapping products and methods tested.