A 725.8-pound hog taken in Southeast Texas recently created quite a stir.
The sheer size of the animal was enough to get people’s attention, but something else quickly became the center of the discussion. The huge hog was black and white, with coloration more commonly associated with domestic swine than the stereotypical image of a Texas feral hog.
That prompted an obvious question.
Was this thing really feral?
The answer opens the door to a much bigger and more interesting discussion about feral hogs in Texas—and their domestic origins.
Here’s the latest video.
First, there are a few things about this particular animal that aren’t in question. It was free-ranging when it was killed, and the 725.8-pound figure wasn’t a hunter’s estimate. I reviewed photographs of the hog on the scale along with video and other documentation surrounding the animal.
What we don’t know is its complete history or ancestry.
And that’s where this story gets interesting.
A lot of hunters picture a feral hog as a black, long-snouted, razorback-looking animal. See a giant spotted or belted hog and someone will inevitably say, “That’s a farm pig.”
But the history of feral hogs in Texas is far more complicated.
Domestic swine are a major part of that history. Pigs brought to North America by European explorers were livestock, and escaped and free-ranging domestic animals helped establish feral populations. Later, Eurasian wild boars were introduced for hunting and interbred with free-ranging hogs.
Texas Parks & Wildlife Department has noted that feral hogs can look basically like domestic hogs and occur in numerous colors and coat patterns. Texas A&M describes feral hogs as domestic hogs that escaped or were released into the wild and notes that original breed and nutrition can influence both size and coloration.
That history becomes especially interesting when discussing exceptionally large hogs.
Texas has had domestic hogs escape or be intentionally released into the wild for generations. And there are some particularly interesting stories involving large domestic hogs and Southeast Texas that I have been investigating.
That doesn’t prove anything about the ancestry of this particular 725.8-pound animal.
It does, however, put its appearance into an entirely different context.
An animal doesn’t cease being free-ranging simply because its coloration reminds us of livestock. Neither does a black hog automatically have some genetically “wilder” pedigree. The animals roaming Texas today represent a complicated mixture of domestic swine, feral populations and, in some cases, Eurasian wild boar ancestry.
That’s one reason Texas hogs can look so radically different from one another.
And it’s why I wanted to dig deeper into this particular story.
After the original video about the 725.8-pound Southeast Texas hog generated considerable discussion, I started connecting some dots involving the history of domestic hogs in this region. What I found doesn’t establish where this particular animal came from, and I’m not going to make a claim I can’t prove.
But it does demonstrate that the domestic side of the Texas feral hog story is probably much more important than many hunters realize.
And in Southeast Texas, that story has an especially interesting twist.
I explore that part of the story in the accompanying video.
The 725.8-pound hog may or may not have any connection to that history.
But once you understand where Texas feral hogs actually came from, a giant black-and-white hog roaming the Southeast Texas woods doesn’t seem quite as inexplicable as it did at first glance.