Wildlife specialists in Texas Hill Country regularly review nighttime trail camera footage as part of their work with feral hogs. The animals are familiar subjects; researchers have logged thousands of hours observing their movements in the dark. Infrared light gives the hogs a pale appearance against the black landscape, which is routine for those who study them. The cameras were placed specifically to track hog activity.

What caught the biologists’ attention was not the hogs themselves but something else at the edge of the frame, partially hidden in the brush. The researchers had gathered to count and cull hogs, but another animal was moving with clear purpose. When they identified what they were looking at, it did not match any of the control strategies their agency had modeled. The creature at the edge of the footage was not treating the hogs as a nuisance. It was treating them as prey.

Texas has been losing this battle quietly for more than three decades, and most Americans have heard little about the scale of the losses. It represents one of the largest land mammal invasions in modern U.S. history, yet it has been treated largely as an inconvenience, a budget line item, or a county-level problem. The camera footage from Hill Country points to something that no eradication program, helicopter contract, or expensive trapping effort had uncovered: a native predator, receiving no funding, appears to have been fighting the same war alone in the dark, winning small engagements.

To understand why the footage unsettled professionals, it helps to know how the hogs arrived. That story begins roughly 500 years ago.

Around 1500, Spanish explorers reached the Gulf Coast, carrying with them domesticated pigs as a mobile food supply. The arrangement was practical: rather than hauling meat, they drove it alongside them. When expeditions stalled, camps broke up, or missions failed, some pigs simply wandered off into the surrounding forest. No one pursued them. There was no shortage of food, and the animals faced no significant predators, no harsh winters, and abundant crops and cover. The pigs reproduced freely for generations.

By the early 1900s, a second wave arrived deliberately. Wealthy European hunters, seeking game they could not find at home, imported Eurasian wild boar. These were larger, more aggressive animals, bred for survival in harsh conditions. They were kept in enclosed hunting grounds, but fences failed during storms, gates were left open, and floodwaters carried away entire sections of wire. The boar escaped into the southern countryside and interbred with the feral descendants of the Spanish pigs.

The result was a hybrid: stronger than domestic pigs, more adaptable than wild boar, and highly destructive. This is the animal Texas is fighting today.

The population math is central to the problem. A single female hog can produce two litters per year, with each litter containing up to a dozen piglets. Without interference, the population can double within a matter of months. Unlike most species in the region, feral hogs have no natural limiting factors at scale; no predator, disease, or severe winter has historically kept their numbers in check. Even removing 70 percent of the population in one season can be reversed before the next season begins, because surviving hogs quickly breed to fill the gap. Researchers describe this as a void effect: you are not draining a pond, you are punching the water.

The term experts have increasingly adopted is not “problem” but “occupation.” Current USDA estimates place the national feral hog population at about 6.9 million, with roughly 2.6 million in Texas alone. Hogs have established breeding populations in 253 of Texas’s 254 counties. Only El Paso, in the arid far west, has remained free of them.

The animals themselves are difficult to manage. They can run about 30 miles per hour, faster than most dogs used to chase them. They clear fences up to 40 inches high. Their shoulders and sides develop a layer of cartilage and scar tissue up to an inch thick, dense enough to deflect knife blades and slow stray bullets. They are also observant. Researchers tracking their reactions describe what looks like calculated behavior rather than panic. A hog that survives a missed shot may associate a specific scent, location, and method with danger and avoid the area for months. One poorly placed shot can alter the effectiveness of an entire hunting site.

The damage extends beyond agriculture. Hogs have torn up golf courses overnight, chewed through fiber-optic cables buried in soil, and entered military runways, causing flight delays due to strike risk. In 2019, a woman in southeastern Texas died after being attacked by feral hogs while heading to work in the early morning. That incident drew attention to the reality that hogs can pose a direct threat to people.

The financial cost in Texas alone is estimated at roughly $500 million per year in agricultural losses, infrastructure damage, and control expenses. The national figure is around $1.5 billion annually.

For decades, the standard response involved trapping, shooting, and moving the problem to neighboring properties. One landowner, Norman, tried cage traps baited with rotten corn, hunting dogs, hired shooters, and significant personal expense. Fields would quiet down for a few weeks, then the damage would resume. In many cases, surviving hogs simply relocated to adjacent land, and those that returned had learned to avoid traps, dogs, and the people associated with them.

Helicopter shooting became a favored method, and it could be dramatic. A skilled crew could work large areas in days, producing numbers that looked like progress on spreadsheets. But the underlying equation never changed. Helicopter runs typically killed hogs caught in open ground; the rest scattered, often running for miles into areas that had not previously had hog problems. These aggressive culls, researchers found, were effectively seeding new populations in neighboring counties. The cost was considerable, with single operations running around $20,000 for a few hours of work. The USDA has spent over $100 million on hog control over roughly a decade, and population estimates have continued to rise.

Around 2014, something began to appear in the Hill Country that did not fit the established picture. Researchers checking hog nests discovered that many were empty. The nests, shallow depressions lined with grass where sows keep newborn piglets in their first vulnerable days, were not abandoned. They had been dug out, with the piglets gone. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle. The attacks were clean, quick, and silent.

Tracks around the nests belonged to coyotes. That was unexpected. A coyote typically weighs around 30 pounds. A sow guarding a nest can be a 200-pound animal with dense hide and formidable teeth. Textbook accounts held that coyotes avoided such confrontations, generally scavenging or targeting easier prey. Yet the evidence was consistent: coyote tracks circling the nest, and inside the circle, an empty nest with no trace of a fight.

When biologists began looking more systematically, they found remains of feral piglets in coyote diets across different locations and groups. This was not an isolated event. The behavior appeared widespread and possibly learned, passed from one coyote to another.

The strategy was simple. Rather than confronting the sow directly, the coyote waited downwind in the grass. When the sow moved far enough from the nest to forage, the coyote darted in, took a piglet, and retreated before the sow could respond. No fight occurred, so there was nothing for the sow to win. Over time, this kind of predation could reduce the number of piglets surviving to adulthood.

There is a complicating factor. For much of the same period, coyotes have been treated as pests across large parts of the country, with bounties, hunting, and poisoning. Researchers have begun to suggest that reducing coyote populations may have removed one of the few natural checks on feral hog numbers. In other words, while millions of dollars were spent on helicopters, traps, and other hog-control measures, the same landscape also saw efforts to eliminate an animal that was quietly working against the hogs for free.

Some changes are underway. Smart traps using infrared and remote gates can now capture entire groups at once. Texas is testing toxic feeders designed to target hogs specifically while reducing risk to other species. There is also growing discussion about whether coyotes should be protected rather than hunted, not as an act of kindness but as a practical strategy, since they are one of the few available predators that can reduce hog numbers.

Even so, the scale of the problem remains large. The national hog population is still around 6.9 million, with Texas holding 2.6 million across 253 of its 254 counties. A single sow can still produce two litters per year, and populations can still double within months. No coyote population, however effective, can by itself offset that rate of reproduction. The hogs still have the numerical advantage.

What has changed is that the dynamic now resembles an actual contest rather than a one-sided removal campaign. For the first time, a native and overlooked predator appears to be exerting meaningful pressure on the hogs. The open question is whether that adaptation will spread through coyote populations faster than hogs can reproduce, and whether future policy will avoid the mistake of treating every predator as the primary problem.