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RD: John, ah, District – 1, Duerr again. Our problem here seems to be that the large <br />landowners, ah, Hawaii does not have a tradition of small farms and small landowners – <br />so we have large landowners that the national government and national park, for <br />example, and they team up with NGOs and other large landowners and fence large <br />acres – hundreds of thousands of acres – to keep pigs out – pushing pigs into populated <br />areas. How do you deal in a populated area with, with eliminating the animals without <br />using weapons? <br /> <br />JT: OK. Great questions, so I’m gonna give you a few different ideas on that and, again, <br />everything I say is always with the caveat of your local laws or your local laws and I don’t <br />necessarily know them, so, we, we have the same problem here too in urban areas <br />where there’s a lot of pigs and it’s a growing issue. So what we typically do in those <br />areas is they trap them and they will get them out of the traps in to trailers and then <br />they will take them out of town somewhere where they can be either released into a <br />pen and then shot in that pen or some of the operators will shoot them in the trap with <br />a suppressed 22, or in the trailer with a suppressed 22, which I personally wouldn’t want <br />to do but some of the operators will do it. It’s very limited options in those scenarios – a <br />few municipalities here have proposed using a toxicant but I don’t think they’re going to <br />just due to the optics of pigs dying from a toxin in an urban area. Ah, I will say… <br /> I was going to say at a point there was another option that had been suggested and I’m <br />gonna say it and it sounds terrible as soon as I say it and we, we advise them against it <br />so once upon a time if you read research papers, somebody developed the euthanasia <br />trailer for pigs to where they could be loaded out of a trap and then the trailer would be <br />sealed and, filled with a gas that would kill the pigs or, or suffocate them. That is really <br />bad optics and it’s, it’s also impractical and very expensive cause the gas is not cheap <br />and it’s a humane way to die but it’s a big area and so that may come up at a point, ah, <br />we had a private pest management company that wanted to know about using that and <br />we advised them against it mostly due to cost but also optics in an urban area. <br /> <br />?: I had another question \[unclear\] pigs in. Ah, as far as the cultural aspect that you had <br />mentioned I seen it pop up in a comment as well, right, ah, with feral pigs, especially <br />from the Polynesians back in the day – having some significance in their cultural <br />practices – here in Hawaii I do farming myself as well, yeah, some cultural practices they <br />actually use the pigs into for a tilling mechanism into their culture, into their – to help <br />mitigate the ground – is there a viable number that pigs can be used in a good sense to <br />help naturally till grounds for, you know, future crops, or, you know, ah, is there a <br />number that would make sense in the environment, x amount of acres to be actually <br />viable to live in ecosystem purposes – zero? <br /> <br />JT: I think it’s a good question, right, and this is the balance of, of people and their culture <br />and what they want versus the environment – obviously, the environment did not <br />evolve with the pig. And so any number of pigs is detrimental to the environment that it <br />takes away from native animals, right, and the same can be said for the cattle that I <br />have out grazing on the prairie – that prairie didn’t evolve with them but it did have <br />16 <br /> <br />