As Twitter user Willie McNabb tried to warn in 2019, the threat of feral hogs is real—whether their numbers range from 30 to 50 in the backyard or millions across America. The pigs have damaged virtually every ecosystem they have invaded, often with the help of European colonizers who once ferried them around the world as livestock.

These rewilded swine cost the United States an estimated $1.5 billion annually, with their indiscriminate, nearly insatiable appetites matched only by their apparent hunger for environmental destruction.

 

Read more from Alex Fox with the Smithsonian Magazine here.