2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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contaminated vehicles, equipment, shoes, as well as food waste – so much so that it’s a growing concern that it will probably come into the mainland US on an international flight with somebody who has a food product that wasn’t caught in security screening or, or their person somewhere. And despite the diligence that we have tracking those things, it’s always possible. The concern is this and it’s been expressed in Texas as well – because these pigs are desired cultural activity hunting these pigs – it will kill all of the pigs when it gets here and so that will be an impact on traditional users as well as recreationalists – there will be ancillary benefit in the loss of damages but the problem is this disease – once it gets established – the pig to pig contact or the indirect transmission through carcasses is very difficult to stop. So the best way to do it is reduce pig densities so that it is less easy to transmit. I’d just like to point in fact if you haven’t dealt with Texas before we have every kind of goofy animal in the world here, so the last time I was in Hawaii a friend of mine said, oh, do you want to go hunt – we have this deer you’ve probably never seen – Axis deer – I said, naw, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of them – it’s, it’s cool but no, we’ve got those here too. We also have African wart hogs – so we have African wart hogs that live in, in our area part of our state. So if we get African swine fever it will never go away because it will stay as a reservoir in those animals. But what we’re concerned about in the near future for everybody, even Hawaii is – if you get African swine fever to your shores in a dense pig environment – all of your pigs will die. One thing I want to point out – just because Hawaii raises cattle as well, ah, so brucellosis, swine brucellosis is a big problem. There are multiple variants of it – and I apologize for this photo but if you’re ever hunting boars and you see a boar with gigantism of the testicles is a hall mark of being actively infected with brucellosis – so swine brucellosis is infectious to people, if you get it you’ll have flu-like symptoms every few weeks for the rest of your life, but in livestock there is a variant of it that has jumped to cattle and it presents the same symptoms as cattle brucellas does, so, Bang’s disease, Brucella Bordis, and, and that is a concern that we have is we’re gonna go back to the same situation we used to be in as a result of the pigs. Um, infections - it’s highly prevalent, brucellosis, ah, there actually was concern several years ago from the government about it being weaponized and turned into a more infectious agent and being released to, to hurt people. I – thankfully, we haven’t seen anything from that, but the close relatedness of humans and pigs and the ability for diseases to jump I wanted to highlight – that is a real concern for us long term, that’s, I’m just gonna skip over that. So, just to wind down a little bit, we, we have concerns and problems about the things that we don’t know – we talk about diseases a lot, we talk about direct damages – but for food supply and food safety in the future there’s a very real concern nation-wide and in every state that’s got pigs about what we’re losing that we don’t know about and our inability to continue to feed livestock if we get in to a drought period or there’s a time when it’s difficult to get feeds and forages – have we lost a security in our food supply due to pigs eating away at available foraging plants. So, for us, there’s always more on the horizon. This seems to be a gift that keeps on giving. We fight things like rabies and vampire bats, which thankfully, you don’t have to fight, but what will fix all of this? And really the thing that I harp on from my perspective being a person that does research and outreach on this is – there’s areas of this country where we’ll never get rid of pigs 13