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MONDAY, JULY 27, 2026   |   SPECIAL REPORT & ANALYSIS

SPECIAL REPORT  |  FERAL SWINE & ANIMAL HEALTH

The Six-Million-Hog Problem

Feral swine now overrun at least 35 states and cost agriculture billions a year — and a flesh-eating parasite now creeping inside the border could turn the nation’s wild-hog glut into a far more dangerous threat.
 

Analysis  ·  July 27, 2026

Wild pigs have become one of the most destructive invasive species in North America. An estimated six million feral swine now range across at least 35 U.S. states, rooting up farmland, fouling water, spreading disease and breeding faster than hunters, trappers and federal crews can cull them. In 2026 a second menace arrived: the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite eradicated from the United States nearly 60 years ago, turned up again in American livestock — and the country’s sprawling, unmanaged hog population is exactly the kind of hidden host that could make it far harder to stamp out a second time.

Figure 1. Two feral hogs (Sus scrofa) at a control site. Feral swine descend from escaped domestic pigs and released Eurasian wild boar; the two interbreed freely, producing the muddy, bristled animals seen here. Photo: USDA (CC BY 2.0).

“If screwworm were to gain a foothold in wildlife, including feral hogs, eradication would become exponentially harder.”  — Tracy Tomascik, Texas Farm Bureau

How many are there — and where

Nailing down an exact count is impossible; feral hogs are secretive, nocturnal and constantly on the move. The working figure used by most researchers and USDA is roughly six million animals nationwide, though some state-by-state tallies push the total higher. What is not in dispute is the concentration: Texas alone is home to an estimated three million wild hogs — about half the country’s population — followed by Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia and Florida.

Figure 2. Estimated feral swine population, top ten states. Sources: USDA APHIS; World Population Review (2023–26 estimates).

The geography is also changing. As recently as the early 1980s, feral swine were largely a problem of a few southern states. USDA now reports established populations in at least 35 states, from California and Hawaii to Michigan and the mid-Atlantic. Much of that spread was not natural: hogs were trapped and hauled across state lines and released to create new hunting opportunities, seeding fresh infestations far from the original range. The federal control program has since pushed the number of infested states back from its peak, but the animals remain entrenched across the South and are probing northward.

Figure 3. The number of U.S. states with established feral swine populations climbed from about 17 in 1982 to a peak near 38 before federal control trimmed it back. Source: USDA APHIS distribution records.

Table 1. Feral swine at a glance. Sources: USDA APHIS; American Farm Bureau Federation; university extension services.

Why they keep multiplying

Feral hogs are, biologically, built to boom. Sows can reach breeding age at six to eight months and produce one to two litters a year, averaging five to six piglets each. In good conditions a population can effectively double in a matter of months. They are omnivores that will eat almost anything, they tolerate a wide range of climates and habitats, and outside of the occasional large predator they have virtually no natural check on their numbers in the United States. Biologists estimate that landowners must remove roughly two-thirds of a local population every single year just to keep it from growing — a bar that hunting and casual trapping rarely clear.

Figure 4. The math of a “feral swine bomb.” Left unchecked, a single pair can balloon into scores of animals within a few years; only aggressive, sustained removal holds a population flat. Illustrative model based on the ~66–70% annual removal biologists say is required.

Figure 5. Feral hogs move in family groups called “sounders,” and coloration ranges from grizzled gray to black to red-brown, as in this trio. High reproductive rates and early maturity let sounders rebuild quickly after culls. Photo: USDA APHIS (public domain).

Why they are so hard to stop

Fast reproduction is only half of it — the other half is that hogs are remarkably hard to catch. Feral hogs are intelligent and quickly learn to avoid danger: shoot at a sounder and the survivors turn nocturnal, scatter and grow trap-shy, which can splinter one group into several. Recreational hunting, once seen as a solution, can actually make things worse by dispersing animals and creating a financial incentive to move and release live hogs. Their range is vast and often spans private land, public land and rugged country where control is difficult. And the toolbox is limited: a toxic bait based on sodium nitrite has shown promise but remains tangled in years of testing and federal registration, leaving trapping, aerial gunning and snaring as the main options.

The damage those hogs do is why the effort matters. USDA puts feral swine damage and control costs at about $2.5 billion a year, and a 2026 Natural Resources Conservation Service estimate runs as high as $3.4 billion. They root up crops and pasture, prey on lambs, kids and calves, foul water sources, collide with vehicles, destroy wildlife habitat and can carry more than 30 diseases and parasites that threaten livestock, wildlife and people.

Figure 6. National damage estimates vary by scope, but even the narrowest run into the hundreds of millions; a 13-state survey found Texas farmers alone absorbing $871 million in losses. Sources: USDA APHIS; USDA NRCS (2026); American Farm Bureau Federation.

Figure 7. A hog wallow and rooting damage in a pasture. Searching for roots, grubs, water and mud, feral swine churn up fields, pastures and levees — ruining forage, eroding soil and fouling water. Photo: USDA APHIS (public domain).

A common question — can you eat it

Can you eat it?  Yes — feral hog is edible and widely eaten; it is the same species as farm pork, just leaner and gamier. The catch is disease. Feral swine are the main U.S. wildlife reservoir for swine brucellosis (Brucella suis), and they can also carry trichinellosis, hepatitis E, toxoplasmosis and tularemia.

Handle with care.  Wildlife agencies advise hunters to wear latex or rubber gloves and eye protection when field-dressing hogs — most human brucellosis infections come from handling blood and organs, not from the meat itself — and to cook the meat thoroughly, to an internal temperature of at least 160–170°F, which destroys these pathogens. Two absolute rules: never eat an animal killed with a toxicant such as sodium-nitrite bait, or one showing the open, infested wounds that screwworm leaves behind.

What is being done

The centerpiece of the federal response is USDA APHIS’s National Feral Swine Damage Management Program, launched in 2014 to coordinate control across state lines. The agency credits the program with slowing the invasion and cutting the number of states with established populations. On the ground, the workhorse tactic is whole-sounder trapping — using bait, cameras and remote-triggered corral traps to capture an entire family group at once, rather than picking off a few animals and scattering the rest — supplemented by aerial gunning in open country.

Money is following the problem. In July 2026 USDA announced $35 million in new partnership funding, part of a roughly $105 million push, through the Feral Swine Eradication and Control Pilot Program run with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. It funds landowner trapping, training and land restoration across 14 states. From 2020 to 2024 the pilot assisted more than 6,700 landowners and covered nearly nine million acres. Researchers, meanwhile, continue to work on the sodium-nitrite bait and on fertility-control methods that could one day slow reproduction rather than just cull animals.

Why the screwworm changes the stakes

For decades feral swine have been treated mainly as an economic and ecological problem. The 2026 return of the New World screwworm reframes them as an animal health problem too. The screwworm (Cochliomyia hominivorax) is a fly whose larvae burrow into and feed on the living flesh of warm-blooded animals, causing agonizing, often fatal wounds. The United States eradicated it in 1966 using the sterile insect technique — flooding the landscape with radiation-sterilized male flies so that wild females mate but produce no offspring, collapsing the population.

That triumph is now under pressure. Through 2025 and 2026 the parasite advanced north through Mexico, with tens of thousands of reported detections. By April 2026 a case was confirmed within about 62 miles of the U.S. border; on June 3, 2026, the first U.S. case in nearly 60 years was found in a calf in La Pryor, Texas, and within days at least five cases had been confirmed across Texas and New Mexico. Washington shut the southern border to livestock imports and, with Mexico, moved to build new sterile-fly production capacity. USDA on Friday announced a phased reopening of the U.S./Mexico border beginning Aug. 24. 

Table 2. The screwworm’s march north. Sources: USDA APHIS; American Farm Bureau Federation; American Veterinary Medical Association.

Here is where the hogs come in. The screwworm will infest any warm-blooded animal, and the country now has roughly six million feral swine — nearly three million in Texas alone — that no one vaccinates, inspects or treats. Managed cattle can be monitored and doctored; a wild sounder in the brush cannot. If the parasite established itself in that vast, hidden, free-roaming host population, it would gain a reservoir that undermines the very logic of sterile-fly control, which depends on wild flies struggling to find enough hosts to reproduce. Feral hogs also travel widely and ignore county and state lines, giving the fly a mobile way to leapfrog between regions.

Table 3. Why feral hogs complicate screwworm control. Source: analysis of USDA APHIS and Swine Health Information Center guidance.

The historical stakes are a warning. Before eradication, screwworm cost Southwestern livestock producers an estimated $50 million to $100 million a year in 1950s dollars; by the mid-1990s the eradication was delivering roughly $796 million in annual benefits to producers. A re-established screwworm — especially one with a wild reservoir — could inflict billion-dollar losses on the modern cattle industry and require a costly, years-long campaign to beat back a second time.

Bottom line

Feral swine are a slow-motion disaster the United States has never managed to get ahead of; the screwworm is a fast-moving one. On their own, six million wild hogs already cost the country billions of dollars a year and defy every easy fix. Layer a flesh-eating parasite on top, and the hogs stop being merely an agricultural nuisance and become a potential biological reservoir that could decide whether screwworm is contained at the border or dug in for a generation. That is why sustained investment in coordinated hog removal and disease surveillance — unglamorous as it is — looks cheap next to the alternative.