At least as far as the southeast corner of the state down here is concerned I think you’re past the stage of trucks and trailers on the highway being the driving force anymore…….You’ve got one big huge pig population now residing within the watersheds of the whole area and the dynamics of that pig population is dictating an expansion push outward over time……The equation would be like…. “the speed at which the population is reproducing” minus “the amount people are killing out”……with the amount left over being run through the bottle neck of periodic drought to give you an expansion rate pushing outwards through the fingers of the watersheds. Kinda like mistletoe slowly over taking a tree……every so often you get the existing infestation pushing out poofs of seed outward onto new "limbs".

Immune

Well that's a real shame. No natural predators, crazy reproduction rates, and immune to the two viruses that help control most big game populations in the SE. I figured they'd developed immunity since introduction, with as much as they are around wallows, stagnant water and mud.

No natural predators??.......Unless piglets just really taste bad to coyotes then there’s no way they’re not using them as a food source……My tracking dogs catch them and kill them with ease and I’m talking about a lab, cur, and a kopov….which is basically a beagle…….If my dogs can catch them as easy as they do then I cant see any way a hungry coyote wouldn’t take advantage of it…..again, unless they just really don’t like pork.

So now we have coyotes helping to control our pig populations but also impacting the turkeys at the same time……The plot thickens……….

If a lone coyote comes into a field and hogs are in it, he'll be skirting the edge. Got tons of pics to prove it over the past 5 yrs. I'm certain and have no doubt that if a coyote catches a piglet away from the sounder he'll grab it. But if there's 12 piglets and 8-10 sows and a couple young boars together on an oak flat or in a field, that coyote isn't even going to think about it. Maybe a pack of yotes would bust up a sounder and catch a bunch of piglets but every pic I've gotten since we started running cameras years ago, with both coyotes and pigs in the frame, the coyote is slinking off looking over his shoulder and the pigs are all watching him leave. Maybe the yotes just weren't hungry that day???????????

I’ll present it this way and you can draw your own conclusions…….Its a pain in the ass for me to try to track deer in some areas because the dogs want to start having fun piglet killing instead of finding the deer. So that tells me that if piglets are that freely available to a dog like a beagle then the coyotes could easily catch them too.....Again, maybe they dont like pork.....A pig IS a filthy animal.

Your dogs didn't grow up from a young age potentially being lunch for a sounder either. Probably never experienced an angry 200 pound sow.

Also, I've seen hog dogs get run over by hogs and not bay them anymore. They may trail them and hang around at the bay if there's other dogs. Sometime it works out good and they'll loose bay one. Which to me is preferred, them don't get cut up as much.

Pssssh.......I could catch piglets with a labrapoodle.....

Here it is on a map……That red circled area is plum full of pigs and just to the point now of working toward saturation of the area…..In reality it probably extends a lot farther south than this…..I know I’ve been as far as Baker Hill with pig problems……but that circled area has them like a roach infestation……

They didnt show up real well but areas like where I marked the X’s on the top left of the map though just have landowners seeing those “poofs of mistletoe seed” shooting off from the main infestation….. The top right X had a small area we ran across where hogs were rooting and the guy says…..”Yeah we get some occasionally move in but I take care of them and their not too big of a deal.”…….I told him……”Cuz, you better kill them out like cancer every time you see a sign they’ve showed up again…..Dont let them get a foot hold”……

That’s different though than the property in Macon Co that’s in the epicenter of a huge pig population problem where there's areas so thick with pigs I can barely track deer because there’s so many……. Trapping is a different thing for those two landowners. There’s just a smattering of hog activity spilling out into Elmore Co from what I’ve seen…….I think another reason also being that they don’t have nearly as much prime pig habitat as the plantation belt…….You have small isolated thickets that people can kill them out of versus hundreds of thousands of acres of thick understory.