California has a lot of problems, and honestly, feral hogs are probably pretty far down the list. But the damage done by the rapacious porcines is proving to be increasingly problematic in some parts of the state, including the Bay Area. 

This week a Sonoma County school reported $150,000 in damage to lawns and landscaping after a passel of pigs used the property as a buffet, rooting up grass across much of the campus. 

It’s not the first time the invasive species’ presence has plagued the combined middle and high school. Last year, the wild pigs destroyed its soccer, baseball and softball fields, which “caused a lot of chaos with our sports programs,” Bertolucci said. School officials responded by erecting $50,000 worth of new chain-link fences around the property to keep out the intruders and called in a field repair company to restore the turf. 

But once they did that, “the pigs just decided to attack other parts of our campus,” Bertolucci said. They ripped up the grass lining both sides of the main entrance, trashed the periphery of nearly every building, and dredged up the drip lines in the school’s 2-acre garden, where students had been planting roses and working on a bioswale project to restore native habitat and attract pollinators to the area. 

They lured in the wild pigs instead. 

When my family left the D.C. suburbs and moved to the wilds of central Virginia in 2012, we bought three American Guinea Hogs to raise for food. They were super tasty (though the Berkshire/Tamworth mixes we got a few years later were by far the most delectable pork we've raised), but they were also incredibly destructive. We moved them around on a regular basis so we could keep our pastures mostly intact, but that's not an option when dealing with feral hogs. 

Hunting would help to keep the population in check, and California has taken some steps to increase the number of wild hogs that are harvested every year. In 2022 Gavin Newsom signed SB 856 into law, establishing a permission slip to shoot as many hogs as you want on private property, but the number of harvested hogs has slightly declined since then. 

Data from the CDFW shows approximately 3,950 wild pigs were reported taken during the 2020-21 hunting season, 3,704 in 2021-22 and 3,563 in 2022-23, though it’s worth noting those numbers are not reflective of population size because hunting license sales also declined, [CDFW information officer Krysten] Kellum said. 

Thousands more wild pigs remain at large, as the species is not only highly intelligent but can also run at speeds of up to 30 mph. They're excellent at hiding, quickly learning to avoid people they see as threats.   

Sounds like Sonoma County should add some helicopter hog hunts to the list of attractions in wine country. Sure, you could spend a day touring vineyards and doing multiple tastings, but you could also take to the skies and lay waste to these invasive omnivores instead. 

Well, at least you could if California were Texas. Unfortunately, while many Californians are uprooting themselves and moving to the Lone Star State, California remains just as nutty as ever, and that's especially true when it comes to its gun laws. 

California needs hunters, which means they need gun owners. Yet the state treats the Second Amendment with such contempt that its not surprising to see a declining number of hunting licenses. And when it comes to feral hogs specifically, the state has done its best to prohibit the possession and use of what I consider to be the most effective tool for feral hog predation; semi-automatic rifles. 

The state of California makes it so onerous, expensive, burdensome, and downright legally dangerous to exercise our right to keep and bear arms that I'm amazed there are any gun owners left. The politicians in California may not have been able to kill off a culture of lawful gun ownership, but they've made the state a more friendly environment to hungry hogs than Second Amendment supporters, and the damage done goes far beyond the destroyed landscaping at a Sonoma County school.