Feral Hogs: Working With Landowners
Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Sport Fish Restoration Program
Exotic game species compete with native animals for food and habitat. Landowners have developed strategies for managing these creatures, including working with Broken Arrow Ranch in Ingram.
The agreement that we make is that these ranchers have an overpopulation that they need to get rid of – and we’re one of their options.
Chris Hughes runs this family business, which harvests and processes the wild game.
We pay them [landowners] based on the carcass weight of the animals that we harvest. So, it’s really a win-win-situation all around. They help put their land back into an ecological balance, they get paid for it, and we get the meat, we process it, and we can sell it nationwide.
Hughes says a state meat inspector, one to two shooters, a skinner, and a mobile processing unit are deployed into the field.
The time of day that we go depends a lot on what we’re hearing from the ranchers. A lot of our harvests are at night, because that’s when the animals are active. But from ranch to ranch that varies. And some of the ranchers find that their animals are more active in the early afternoons. And so we’ll go out there during the daytime.
Learn about the humane harvest of these animals when you log onto www.brokenarrowranch.com.
We receive support from the Sport Fish and Wildlife Restoration program … funded by your purchase of fishing and hunting equipment and motor boat fuels…
For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti
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