The hunter and the scientist: 2 views on wild pigs in Saskatchewan

The hunter

Tyler Smits has been hunting wild pigs (or boars) for years. After spending time living in Alberta and hunting wild pigs there, he moved back to Saskatoon and is now offering his services as a hunter to farmers or others who are having problems with wild pigs.

Smits said he is willing to go province-wide. He put the word out on Reddit, Kijiji and other social media.

Part of his post reads: "Absolutely willing to share the meat after processing. Nothing will be wasted, and we will remove all our brass and mess when finished."

He hasn't had anyone get back to him yet but he said it's generally difficult to reach farmers on social media and that many farmers will simply kill the pigs on their own so they can use them for meat.

In Saskatchewan, permits are not required to hunt wild pigs. You only need a valid gun license.

"They're very, very difficult to work with. They're quite intelligent," Smits said of the pigs.

"[Knowing what to do] comes from experience."

The scientist

One University of Saskatchewan (U of S) researcher says while wild pigsaren't a huge problem for Saskatchewan right now, there very well could be more pigs than people in the province in the future.

"What we've found from our tracking so far is that the increase [in population] is exponential," said Ryan Brook, associate professor at the U of S.

Brook and his team work to track the number, location, and habits of wild pigs in Saskatchewan.

He also said the region in which the pigs live is expanding rapidly as well.

This isn't a new concept to Brook. He has been advocating for better management strategies for years.

The dilemma

Brook acknowledged the damage wild pigs can do to crops, how they harass livestock away from their feed and water and how they can be "reservoirs for disease".

"They're not a grazer. Deer and elk will come in and they'll graze and feed on grass and other vegetation, whereas pigs they rip up the ground. They get their nose in that ground and they just tear it up like a rototiller," Brook said.

"And they feed on anything."

Brook said he has found pigs with bellies full of canola or frogs, he has known them to tear up cattails from the roots and he said they'll feed on the eggs of birds at this time of year too.

But he also said there are lots of people out there who want to keep the pigs around.

"We also find that there are people in Saskatchewan and across Canada that love having wild pigs around because they can hunt them," he said.

Brook said that while working with hunters has been beneficial for him in his research, the actions of individual hunters can actually increase the overall pig population.

If a hunter does not kill an entire group of pigs, they will become more wary, be pushed into new habitat sectors, and continue to reproduce freely, allowing them relative safety.

'Filling my freezer'

Smits said he knows about the effect hunters can have on the wild pig population.

"I had heard that ... hunting hogs in small numbers is detrimental to the problem," he said.

"My main focus is not necessarily to be a huge help to the overall hog problem as a whole. My main goal was more towards helping an individual farmer as well as filling my freezer hunting for hogs."

Smits also said he would like to partner with Brook, as Brook and his team often get samples of wild pig from hunters.

Smits said there are other ways to eliminate wild pigs, one of them being binary targets. That's essentially explosive putty that explodes when shot. Hunters can place it near a nesting area and it can take out a whole group of the animals, but that eliminates the possibility of using those pigs for meat.

"If people just wanted to eradicate hogs, that would be certainly an avenue they could go about it," he said.

"Our goal as hunters is to make as much use of whatever we kill as possible."