An area town has gone high-tech in its fight against feral hogs after the critters came too close to the school’s ball fields.

Queen City, Texas, recently discovered it had hog rooting damage at its water plant site, not far from the high school. “One night the pig damage got close to the baseball field, which fortunately had its gates closed and blocked them,” said Mitzi Francis, an animal control officer.

“Our video cameras in the area revealed as many as 37 pigs They’d leave and come back, but this time they got to be too close,” Francis said.

That close-call led the city, 25 minutes south of Texarkana, to lease the Boar Buster, a cellphone-controlled hog trap, from a local landowner.

The Boar Buster, a 35-foot diameter trap, can be set up rather easily and then baited to bring the pigs inside. A video camera monitors the scene and responds when it sees motion. The live video then appears on a cellphone, which is monitored by the landowner. With the press of a button, the overhead trap panels twist and fall to the ground, surrounding and trapping the hogs. If used properly, the device can capture entire families of pigs and thus keep ones who escape from becoming trap-savvy.

“We’d catch three in a box trap and four in a corral trap, but when we added the new Boar Buster Trap — it caught 11 all at one time.”

The town sold some of those pigs to a hog buyer and gave others away. City employee Dylan Hunt took eight and stayed up all night processing them.

“They make good food,” he said.

The problem has receded recently, but Francis said she expected that “they’ll come back.”

In Avinger, 30 minutes from Queen City, the Eagle Landing Homeowners Association has been meeting for more than a year to discuss its feral hog problem.

“We had had home property damage and were concerned that hogs might hurt areas such as our grass airplane landing strip or weaken our earthen dam, which forms Simpson Lake,” said resident Roger Geiger.

Geiger said the association did its research, attended seminars and finally decided to put out some small traps on their own.

“We caught six to seven at first. When that dried up, we found we could lease one of the modern, computerized (Boar Buster) traps. The company would set it up, and we’d hire a site manager at not too much cost because there wasn’t too much to do.”

Geiger said the Boar Buster caught 25, but not at the same time, before that dropped off, too.

“We finally decided the modern trap didn’t work well enough to justify its $7,000 cost. We’re simply a homeowners association supported by dues. We don’t have the money a city would have. We’re thinking about designing something ourselves, something we could build for around $1,000.”

Thus far, the trap seems to work. It can capture 30 to 40 animals at a time, hold them for disposal or loading and transporting as a group to the hog buyer or processing plant.

“We were glad to hear about this business model of selling to live-hog buyers,” said Geiger, who with others of the Eagle Landing community, were attending the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service’s recent program on Wild Pig Abatement in Cass County.

“We think it’s definitely a growth industry. The numbers of pig are growing and encroaching. There will be a market for the meat, so why not have the landowner get something back to help solve this problem.”

In the next installments, the Texarkana Gazette will look at other methods of hog control and visit a hog buyer’s farm.