2024-11-19 GMAC Meeting Minutes DRAFT

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bark – and so it doesn’t take very long for the pigs to kill those trees. On the wildlife side I don’t think anybody is more impacted by, by loss of native wildlife than Hawaii is – but we see a lot of the issues with pigs being directly predatory on wildlife – especially any birds that nest on the ground and this is one of the things that we struggle with – in many of our coastal areas a lot of our birds that are endangered or they’re threatened are ground nesting birds and so this, this game camera photo I always like to bring up and I show it to students and I’ve learned over the last few years I have to start asking if they were born before 2005 or not because the photo may be older than they are, right? So this was an early game camera photo when we got the first digital game cameras we put them out – and this was a nest of a wild turkey and this an example for all of our ground nesting birds – the turkey was evolved with native nest predators, various things: snakes, racoons, possums will come in and eat an egg or two. But it’s hard to find that nest and there’s a lot of eggs and so that turkey is able to raise a clutch and that’s how the system evolved and works. But the problem with pigs is what their sense of smell they can find those nests quite easily once they learn what that smell is one time – they’ll find it again and they don’t eat an egg or two – they would eat the entire nest. And we had times in the past on studies with cameras watching these ground nesting bird nests – whether it was turkeys or prairie chickens which for us are critically endangered or a number of other birds – you would see the pig come in – eat the hen on the nest so kill her and eat her – eat all of the eggs – and then whatever the plant it was that the nest was built in turned that plant over and eat the roots out from under it to get all of that nutrition and then move on and just destroy the landscape. So we see predation, we see critical habitat, we see a lot of resource competition but one thing I’m gonna harp on a lot in the next few minutes is disease issues. So, as the years have gone on we – it’s classic issues of livestock diseases or human diseases – but we’ve seen an increase in disease transmission from pigs to native wildlife. We’ve also seen issues of pigs being able to pick up diseases that traditionally we thought were restricted to wildlife. And I, I’ll talk about that in just a couple of slides – some of the things that are newest on the horizon for us, but, I always refer to pigs as the gift that keeps on giving because it seems like every year we have some new problem that we didn’t know about and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with having a pig – it’s that because we have these free roaming, wild populations that we can’t keep under control they’re able to spread diseases – they’re able to have all of these impacts that we simply can’t, can’t take care of and I think it’s important also to remember – how did we get pigs in our home area? How did you get pigs? They were brought with the intention of being farmed and raised and free ranged and then collected up at times to make food and for us – that system is broken many years ago and those animals were just let to roam. You have an advantage in being an island state in that for us, we are the cause of most of the pig problems on the mainland U.S. People come to Texas, they load pigs on to a trailer and they drive them to other states. I’ve noticed, Mr. Ackerman you said you just got back from the East Coast – we had a time where -I think it was two years ago – somebody took a load of pigs from Texas and drove them all the way to Pennsylvania and let them out. The USDA has such a detailed genetics archive now that when pigs pop up somewhere they come in and remove them – they can usually tell what county 9