My area is having big success with deer over population by using sterilization, and they’ve been able to use the process to impact tick populations as well. They basically built these bait stations where the deer have to stick their heads through rollers/scrapers to get at the food. Those scrape the ticks from their necks, dropping them into a tank of rubbing alcohol. And the food/bait is laced with birth control. Since its not an eradication program like you use with an invasive species they use reversible methods instead of totally sterilizing the animals. So it relies on repeat visits by breeding age animals throughout mating season.
Very small pilot program, but the test area saw larger reductions in the population in one year than 10 years of culls produced. And it cost waaaaaaay less.
The thing that bothers me about this 30-50 hog scenario is the simple fact that if hogs are close enough to threaten your kids, you should not be firing at them!
The children of good, patriotic gun totin’ Texans are immune to a hail of bullets. Heck, daddy sends them out in the yard on purpose, covered in ketchup, just to bait the hogs in.
I was going to post a drawn-out lament about “oh, if only there was some sort of chrck and balance to the population” but you beat me to it.
What absolutely sends me into a rage is that some folks STILL consider wolves the greater threat… headdesk
The Israelis seem to use these sorts of rounds (from .22 LR “too-too” rounds to 5.56mm rounds) routinely as sniper rounds to perform “crowd control” on protests in Gaza and the West Bank. So I think that they are, in fact, being used in military sniper rifles. Maybe you aren’t aware of that.
They also seem to be using the fragmenting rounds routinely against protesters in Gaza, according to some reports, regardless of whether or not they are banned by the Hague convention.
The IDF considers them snipers, and deploys them along with spotters to pick out and target individuals to shoot. They at one time claimed to know where every bullet landed, though later demurred when asked why so many women, children, paramedics, journalists, and even disabled people had been killed or wounded by live fire. Targeted fire… Not blasting away randomly with an assault rifle. But maybe you’re right, it’s not “military sniping”, for them I guess it’s just target practice.
Still, they seem to do a pretty good job of killing large (human) animals with single rounds using typically a 5.56mm round.
TBH, my first thought for the initial problem was a huge Hawaiian BBQ, but they would need a deep pit for that many hogs and a reliable way to herd/trick them into it.
