2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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5. PRESENTATION: a. Dr. John Tomeček, President of the Texas Chapter of the Wildlife Society. He conducts research and outreach on issues of wildlife damage and emerging issues related to the management of feral swine and their associated damage and disease challenges – presenting “Wild Pig Problem in Hawai’i”. JT: Well, aloha, good morning, thank you for having me today. LT: Aloha. We’re gonna give you – we’re gonna give you presentation time. I’d just like to read this off and introduce you. We have presentation by Dr. John Tomecek, President of the Texas Chapter of the Wildlife Society. He conducts research and outreach on issues of wildlife damage and emerging issues related to the management of feral swine and their associated damage and disease challenges – presenting “Wild Pig Problem in Hawaii.” JT: Thank you very much. Thank you. Ah, just a couple of quick corrections – so I’m the past president of the Texas chapter of Wildlife Society, I, I, cycled off a few years ago. Ah, but I’m the current chair of the National Wild Pig Task Force and then also serving various capacities for the, the state and federal government advising on pig issues, so, I, I always says I never wanted to work this much on pigs but it seems to be a needful item and so here we are. So, I’m gonna try to share – got a quick PowerPoint but I’m gonna be brief with my PowerPoint and mostly talk and have some pictures and some bullets to look at. You can ignore the PowerPoint if you want to and just listen to me – it’s up to you, ah, so I want to talk a little bit, you know, some people say wild pigs, some say feral swine, where I’m from we say feral hogs but it’s all the same animal, right? Ah, in, in Hawaii you’ve got the descendants of pigs that were brought by voyagers from Polynesian, you’ve also got the descendants of pigs that were brought by Anglos later, ah, in Texas we’ve – it’s different in that we have pigs that were brought by the Spanish in the 1500s and then pigs that were brought by the Anglos in the 1800s and so it’s a little bit of a mix of things. I’m gonna talk about some general issues that are common to pig problems no matter where we are and things that are on the horizon and then plenty of time for Q & A from all of you – questions about pig management – what’s coming up on the horizon and however I can be helpful to you, and the things I like to talk about are things that are common to all of us and you’re going to forgive me because my photos are all from Texas because I work primarily in Texas. Our ecosystems are diverse here but we don’t have near here the kind of rainfall that you have in Hawaii so we go from swampy country to sub-tropical country to deserts and mountains and, and it just really depends but the unifying factor is that we have pigs everywhere and in the old days people used to say, well, pigs can’t live on the western side of the state because it’s too dry there – but we found that, that’s not true because we make the landscape good for animal agriculture, we spread water everywhere – but for us – water is life – water is the unifying factor that we all work under and the thing that I think it’s 7