What has four legs, hails from Spain, is notoriously difficult to kill, multiplies by 10 each year, and causes an annual $2.5 billion damage to the economy?
If you guessed feral hogs, you are correct. An estimated nine million nomadic pigs currently roam America, destroying crops and properties which lay in their path, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Hogs even cause the occasional fatality – either through a rare bloodthirsty attack on a human or by charging across a highway and triggering a road traffic accident.
In the most pig-dense states like Texas, law enforcement officials offer bounties of around $15 per hog ear to citizens who successfully shoot one down.
And the species is reproducing at an alarming rate, with the average hog birthing two litters of around five piglets per year. It is little wonder then that groups of self-styled ‘hog hunters’ are cropping up across the country, armed with ‘hogcopters’, bows-and-arrows and guns to wipe out thousands of the…