Can we stop invasive species by eating them? – DW – 06/21/2024

Standing in the kitchen of the Dai Due restaurant in the American city of Austin, the strong smell of cooking pork hits my nose and I am worried. I’m vegan for environmental reasons and pork was the first meat I stopped eating, over a decade ago. But there I was, about to try some.

Even though I’m scared, I know that the meat I’m going to eat isn’t just any old pork. This is a feral hog, one of the most destructive invasive animals in the United States. And because they cause so much damage to the environment, they are widely considered to be better off dead than alive. This means that hunting season is open year-round in Texas, with an invitation from officials to kill as many as possible.

Dai Due co-owner and chef Jesse Griffiths, who prioritizes local ingredients and sustainability at the restaurant, often features wild pigs on his menu. He is one of those who consider their destruction an environmental necessity and describe them as an “indisputable source of protein”.

“If it were just one meat that I had to say is the best to eat, I wouldn’t even stop. It’s this one, right here.”

What are feral pigs and what is their problem?

Feral pigs are not native to the United States, but are the product of a cross between domestic pigs originally imported by European colonizers and wild boars. Because they reproduce at the same rapid rate as domestic pigs, their numbers have grown exponentially over the years to around six million in the United States, half of them in the southern state of Texas.

And as the amount of land used for farming increased, pigs had more options for food and shelter. The large crop fields are like a free buffet and also provide them with places to sleep and hide from people. Although some were relocated to create hunting opportunities, this led to the establishment of new and destructive populations.

They eat crops, kill farm animals and damage property, both in the countryside and in the city. According to John M. Tomeček, a wildlife biologist at Texas A&M University, they cause “more than $500 million (€461 million) in damage” per year.

The environmental damage they cause is much harder to quantify, but includes their appetite for native tree seeds and the eggs of local birds and turtles. But they also damage fragile soils by rooting for food and pollute waterways with their excrement. In their natural habitat and in other parts of the country, they can be hunted by bears and sometimes mountain lions. In Texas, however, they have no predators.

Invasive species around the world

This is a characteristic shared by many invasive species around the world, such as the lionfish, native to the South Pacific and Indian oceans but invading the Caribbean and Mediterranean, or the mysterious Chinese snails native to Asia that are causing problems in Canada. and the United States. When a non-native species moves into a new habitat, if there is nothing to control it, it can be incredibly difficult to control its spread.

According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), invasive species have played a key role in 60% of global plant and animal extinctions. The annual damage they cause now amounts to more than $423 billion (compared to 2019 figures), a figure that has quadrupled every decade since 1970.

Morelia Camacho-Cervantes, a biologist and director of the Invasive Species Lab at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, says the best way to prevent non-native plants and animals from taking over is to prevent them from becoming populations established.

“Once we get to where they don’t belong, we’ll have to eradicate them fairly quickly,” she said. “And by eradicate, I mean kill.”

Can invasive species be eradicated?

There are different ways to do this. Animals may first be trapped in large groups and killed or poisoned. With intelligent feral pigs, experts say it’s best to eradicate the entire group, called sounders, so they can’t teach each other to avoid humans.

In Texas, people can pay to hunt hogs from helicopters, which is the easiest way to kill the entire hog in one go, according to the method suggested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In many cases, such as invasive lanternflies in the northeastern United States or goats and rats on Mexican islands, authorities encourage people to kill the invasive species.

From fields and oceans to the kitchen

For some, being able to eat an invasive species makes the call to kill it easier to digest. In the Mexican Caribbean, for example, edibility encouraged people to play a role in eliminating lionfish.

“The locals started fishing with the aim of consuming it,” Camacho-Cervantes said. “And then they were very creative with the recipes that they made and they sold a lot. So they fished a lot. And now they have very small populations.

The number of feral hogs in Texas is not yet under control, and given how quickly they can reproduce, Griffiths doesn’t anticipate that happening. “We have to kill about 70 percent of them every year to keep the population where it is,” he says, deftly breaking down a dead pig.

Yet he points out another benefit of eating the pigs that roam free in Texas. “Every pound of wild pork we are able to serve also represents one less pound that comes from a broken industrial meat production system.”

I think about it when I take my first bite of pork in many years, and it makes eating an animal easier. In all honesty, it’s surprisingly good. Delicious even. But overall, I think I personally will stick to vegetables in the future.

Edited by: Tamsin Walker

Sources:

National Invasive Species Information Center
https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/terrestrial/vertebrates/wild-boar

NOAA Fisheries: Impacts of Invasive Lionfishhttps://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/southeast/ecosystems/impacts-invasive-lionfish

Invasive Species Worldwide (IPBES Report): https://www.ipbes.net/IASmediarelease