My first experience with an invasive species of wildlife was when I was a young boy of around 12 years old and Norm Earhart’s boars broke out of his pig farm when a tree trunk came crashing down on his fenced-in area.

A wire fence is no match for a mature hardwood tree and the damage was done.

Several hundred hogs were on the loose and all the area residents learned first-hand what a swath of swine can do to an environment. For those of you that don’t know much about swine is that they are omnivores, which means that they can and will eat about anything flora or fauna.

It took a long time to trap those hogs back into the farming operation and then when that process was given up on, the swine became fair game. The longer they were in the countryside the wilder or more feral they became. A litter of piglets born in the wild is not anything you want to deal with and many hogs ended up as supplemental meat supplies for local hunters.

Years later the only hogs that I heard of were in the southern states and had been hunted for generations during regular hunting seasons. The stories of wild hogs, razorbacks and feral boars became legendary as hunters in the Keystone State expanded their hunting experiences to feral swine while on out of state hunting trips.

That all changed when hunting preserves began to offer hog hunts right here in Pennsylvania and even in Butler County.

I really didn’t pay much attention to these hunts until a few of my friends started talking about feral swine hunts. Some were at game farms but the discussions also covered sightings of feral hogs in the wilds as well.

My interest piqued when I actually spied a nice sized hog scampering across a pasture field and hillside above my father in laws place. We didn’t have too much knowledge about feral swine and the laws that might cover them in the first place. Apparently the Pennsylvania Game Commission was interested in the containment of feral swine breeding populations.

According to the PGC the areas in Pennsylvania that they are most concerned with are those counties with evidence of reproduction (e.g., Bradford, Bedford and Fulton counties), as well as all counties which contain swine shooting operations. Fenced swine or wild boar shooting operations are a known and significant source of current feral swine populations in Pennsylvania. Some of these boars can be over 400 pounds of pure meanness.

In Butler County there are feral swine in the wild as I recently came across a PGC Executive Order that closed Feral Swine Hunting in Butler County. PGC Executive Director R. Matthew Hough announced the temporary closure at the end of muzzleloader season last Saturday. Wait one minute, did anyone else know that there was feral hog hunting in Butler County to this degree?

However, the executive order was made to place a hold on the hunting of feral swine so as not to interfere with special trapping operations in Butler County. Hough has enacted this authority.

Trapping by the authorized professionals only can occur from the end of the flintlock muzzleloader deer season to the start of spring turkey season, then from the end of spring turkey to the start of archery season. When the special trapping effort comes to an end, feral swine again may be hunted in Butler County, the PGC will announce the change by news release.

Dr. Matthew Lovallo, PGC Wildlife Biologist presented this information on the feral swine problem; Many states with feral swine problems have created an open season for feral swine with no season or bag limit restrictions to help control the population. The PGC does not promote swine hunting on a recreational basis, and has therefore not created regulations to set seasons or bag limits for swine.

While hunting may reduce feral swine populations at a local scale, hunting activities often disperse swine into other areas making them difficult to locate and control.

If you encounter feral swine or observe damage from feral swine, please report your observations by contacting the NW Region office of the PGC.

Jay Hewitt is an outdoors columnist for the Butler Eagle