More on the wild pigs

In mid-April, I wrote a post about the wild pig hunt on Santa Cruz Island and what a potent metaphor it is for those fatal missteps that start a chain reaction of destruction. Well, the pig hunt continues and AP has the continuing story. They expect it will take two years (using marksmen, trained dogs, infrared sensing devices and GPS systems) to kill off the island's wild pig population. To refresh your memory, the pigs are being killed in the name of the fox population. The fox population is threatened because they are preyed upon by the golden eagles. The golden eagles were initially attracted by the feral pigs (which had once been regular old Wilbur-type pigs but had gotten loose and gone wild). The golden eagles would have been the natural prey of the bald eagles, but the bald eagle population was eradicated by DDT.

Got all that? Well, here's a little slice from today's story about the whole clusterfuck:

Federal and state law prohibits relocating the pigs, which may have pseudorabies and cholera, to the mainland. For the same reason, the carcasses of the dead pigs will be left on the island to rot. Sterilization and contraception aren't practical because the plan would fail if biologists miss only a few pigs--the fast-breeding pigs can rebound from a 70 percent population reduction in just one year, according to Galipeau.

"I'm trying to protect the natural system--not what humans handed us, but what nature handed us," he says. "Sometimes you have to do the same amount of disruption that damaged a place in order to restore it."

Critics have argued that, after so long on the island, the pigs belong as much as the foxes.

One group, the Channel Islands Animal Protection Association, was formed in the mid-1990s after the National Park Service poisoned nonnative rats that were damaging vegetation on nearby on Anacapa Island.

In the current case, the association believes the golden eagles were attracted not by pigs but by the rotting carcasses of feral sheep from an earlier eradication program in the 1980s. They believe the golden eagles discovered the 4-pound foxes--not the pigs--and stayed.

And here I am struck by three things. Of course, there is the continuing epic absurdity of humankind's outstanding ability to really mess things up. And then there's the whole prospect of contraception for wild pigs, which conjures a host of disturbing questions and images for me. And finally, there's the feral sheep phenomenon. I don't know why that makes me think of a Monty Python skit, but it really does. I can just see John Cleese in a kilt fleeing from a herd of wild sheep.