2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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even if we wanted to – I live in one of those – but also my part of the country has a desire to have some of the pigs for cultural practices so the public doesn’t want to get rid of them but we can all agree that there’s damages that need to be managed. And so, what we talk about is this integrated approach to damage management using the tools that make sense in a time and place,and then for folks wanting to manage pigs the thing I always harp on that I have to be clear about is there is no such thing as a silver bullet. I’ve personally used every pig management tool there is including the toxicants that exist and none of them are a silver bullet. They all take work and they work in some situations and not in others, but really the answer here is that without some kind of coordinated effort across a broad area you really can’t be successful with pig management it has to be something that folks in an area really want to buy into. For us, we talk a lot about eradication, but obviously it’s not realistic where we live and it’s not desired in a lot of areas either. But building that public and private partnership is tough. There’s a lot of folks here too that just don’t trust the government, especially the federal government and they’re not sure that they believe that government has its best interest at heart – that’s part of the world up I grew up in here as well and I understand that so for us the critical thing is understanding public opinions and what people do and don’t want and then also messaging the reality of the damages we’re facing and the risks we’re facing and trying to find a place in them that’ll where we can reduce pig numbers to keep everyone safe but still allow them to do the things they want to do with pigs. We talk about incentivizing eradication and that’s a, that’s a mainland US thing to talk about eradication but really it’s about disincentivizing not managing pigs, right, so for us folks who are making money off of pigs and they like having them around, how do we take that incentive away to not manage your pigs, and, again, just talking about – it really has to be across the landscape where all properties or at least most of the properties are on the same page about how can we be good neighbors and try to manage pigs – and we always try to provide landowners and managers whose tools that are both practical, useful and effective and the joke I always tell people is even if I had a silver bullet but it cost a million dollars a pig, you wouldn’t use it because it’s not practical for anybody to use. All right, so I’m gonna wind down, I’ve blathered on a little longer than I meant to there, I apologize, I am a professor so I tend to rattle on and talk about fun facts all day but I, I’ve had a lot of time working on pigs and I never say I know everything so if there’s anything I can share, answer questions, give insight, I’ve been privileged to work all over the planet on pigs, but I also like to learn from situations you guys are facing, so… By all means, how can I be of help? DP: I have a question. Ah, Dixon Pacheco, with the whole \[unclear\] situation I just wanted to have it on the record, yeah? Did you believe that pigs are the main reason of the problems that we face in our ecosystem? Or are there other mitigations other, well I was gonna say mosquitos are worse. Do you think that the pigs are actually number one on the list of the problem? JT: Yeah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off. LT: No, no – go ahead. 14