The head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s feral swine program on Guam said his agency captured a record 2,600 pigs in the last two years.
But Chad Richardson said tens of thousands of pigs are still roaming the island, carrying diseases and leaving a costly trail of damage.
“I'm estimating that we have between 20,000 and 50,000 pigs on the island,” he said. “It's a lot of pigs.”
Richardson told the Mayors Council of Guam last week that to make a real dent in the population, about half the pigs need to be removed.
“So we're looking at 15,000 pigs that I should probably be taking if we're going to really have an impact,” he said. Other models say that by taking a quarter of the pigs, the population can be contained.
Richardson said that would involve 6,000 or 7,000 pigs.
Right now, with his department and other federal, local and private entities removing pigs, they get rid of no more than 3,000.
And while he supports hunting contests, he says they won’t have a meaningful impact.
“Please do not try to tell people that a pig derby is going to solve our problem, because we're never going to barbecue our way out of this one.”
Instead, he said the island needs stable funding from federal and local sources, and he said agencies and landowners need to work together.
“It's going to take a lot of effort to organize a lot of people together, put all the funding together,” he said. “But the idea is we need to unify all of our efforts to make this happen. We can do it. I've done it elsewhere, and we can do it here.”