Every once in a while, feral hogs make international news. This happened in 2019, when one man’s tweet about seeing “thirty to fifty” in his yard blew up and became one of the internet’s more enduring memes. It happened again this week, when dozens of hogs were caught on camera rampaging through holiday-decorated yards in the Houston suburb of Sienna, in Fort Bend County. For Texans, hogs aren’t exactly big news. Our state has at least 2.6 million of them, and they cause an estimated $52 million in agricultural damage every year. They’re everywhere, and to see feral hogs in the wild is to be shocked by how many more of them there are than you expected. There’s no stopping them. You can shoot them all you want from a helicopter, but you won’t put a dent in the population. The Fort Bend County news was worrisome, though, if only because it offered further proof that hogs aren’t confined to our state’s rural counties: they’ve breached the ’burbs.
Original Article: https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/twelve-days-christmas-texas-edition/