2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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they came out of and so in our case they were able to identify what county in Texas they came from. So we have this issue of pigs being moved around to areas that don’t have them and creating these ecological problems. But one thing that is common is when you have a system where people enjoy hunting the pigs – by enjoying hunting the pigs in Texas they’ve been in some areas for 400 years and it’s part of the culture. It is not as long a part of the culture as things are in Hawaii, for sure, but I always ask the question, how many hundreds of years do they need to be there before they are a part of the culture and a part of the lifestyle. And so it’s tough to discuss managing the numbers we have in the context of making sure the traditional use of the pigs is till maintained. So one thing that I like to talk about when we talk about moving pigs around and we talk about incentivizing pigs and what not, in, in Texas we, we feed wildlife. Like it’s going out of style or like it’s something new, so, these kind of corn feeders are ubiquitous across the landscape, every pig knows what corn is. And the example that I would give here is so much so that they’ll pull the feeders over – and this is a sow feeding her piglets and some adult pigs, for us this is something we were curious about years ago about how do the pigs work with these food resources that are constantly out there so we had a study, we put GPS collars on pigs and we watched their movements and then we experimentally turned off feeders and once a feeder was off for a week or ten days they would quite visiting that spot. There’s not a cheap easy meal – they moved on to something else. Availability of food on the landscape as well as the availability of water can move and change their behaviors. And this is something you’ll know when you have food that’s coming up seasonally, but those animals will react to it, so we had to be conscious about – if we’re putting food on the landscape – how are we making sure that we’re keeping the pigs out of it. So, when I talk about impacts, and I apologize, I’ve got a few graphic photos, I try to minimize it – when I talk about impacts and I talk about agriculture – animal agriculture in Texas is sheep and goats and cattle for the most part – most of its rangeland operation, grazing operations and this photo is an old photo – this is from the late 1970s because pigs really blew up in Texas in, in areas other than the eastern part of our state – where they’ve been for hundreds of years. They blew up in the 90s and early 2000s. This is a photo from the late 70s of an angora kid goat that was killed by a pig and the reason that I had it in here – was that it was historic at the time – the, the goat raiser saw it – shot the pig and took these photos and man it went around everywhere – today the kids would say it went viral, right? Because in this time it was unheard of – it was a new thing and it was hard to kind of wrap people’s brains around damage from these animals in a predatory way, but we do see a lot of predation on native wildlife but we also see a lot of predation on livestock. Lambs and kids for sure – we see increasingly a lot of damage to adult goats and adult sheep – not really on cattle, right? Pigs and cattle, you don’t see direct predation, but one thing we really started looking out on the cattle side and, cattle grazing in Hawaii, cattle grazing in Texas are not all that dissimilar in the acreages you’re working in – when we have cattle in pens and they’re being fed, we see if you’re feeding them in the evening time – cattle are up in the pens – the pigs come to the pens at night, just like that corn feeder where they’ve learned food will be there – last weekend I was with a graduate student on a ranch sitting on the pipe rail of a pen – calves are in – we stopped counting at 250 pigs 10