Lock and load boys, lock and load.

These animals are not your bedtime story animals.

They're not Charlotte's Web by any means.

He's a big one.

He is a big one.

They are aggressive, they are disgusting, and they will absolutely destroy everything they come in contact with.

We'll try any way possible to get rid of the pigs.

It's a very serious issue with us.

Turn to your right a little more, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right, straight in front of you.

If you want to shoot that leader.

Roger.

Two-five, two-five.

Wild hogs are one of the most destructive, invasive species in the U.S.

European explorers brought them here as food and the population exploded.

They have no natural predators.

After about two weeks of life, they breed very quickly.

Today, there's somewhere around six to nine million feral hogs nationwide.

They destroy just about everything, native vegetation, native animals.

They tear up crops.

They carry diseases that can be contracted by our livestock.

Hogs eat endangered species like sea turtles and Houston toads.

They destroy property, cause car crashes, and can infect humans with diseases like E. coli.

It's a serious problem, in my opinion.

Wild hogs take the blame for about $1.5 billion in damage in the U.S. each year.

And Texas has more of them than any other state.

It would be like if you woke up and there was three million rats living in your house.

You would call an exterminator and you would get rid of them.

And that's exactly what we have to do here in Texas.

We have to exterminate them.

But since exterminating every last hog is impossible, Texans do what they can just to keep them in check.

There's no simple solution to a lot of this.

The best way to control their population is a combination of hunting, trapping, possibly poisoning, responsibly.

Helicopter hunting is the quickest way to kill a bunch of pigs.

Texans once had to pay companies to shoot hogs on their land.

But a 2011 state law allowed anyone, even tourists, to hunt from the sky.

Now they pay the tab, and farmers don't have to.

Originally when we were hiring the helicopters, it was very expensive.

The hunters being able to take care of the cost to help suppress these animals is very beneficial to us.

This is playing.

Now he's just playing.

Feral hogs feed our family.

We don't like them, but their existence has left a business opportunity for us.

The typical number of hunters we see in a season is anywhere from 50 to 150, depending on how hard we work.

It's coming up.

There we go.

We charge $2,400 per person.

That includes all of the lodging, meals, weapons, ammunition, and two hours of flight time.

We have lots of groups that come for bachelor parties, birthday parties.

We get a lot of international clients.

We've had several people from China come visit.

Three, two, one.

Three to five, three to five.

Good job.

Nice, very nice.

All right, hold that right here on your left side.

Roger, gotcha.

Clear to fire, clear to fire.

Very nice.

It's pretty cool to watch people's face light up when they get to do it.

This is awesome.

May do it again, maybe.

Got up this morning, got in them helicopters, and shot a bunch of pigs.

Three, two, one.

Clear, clear, clear.

Very nice.

I lost my wife to leukemia in 2016.

I raffled this hog hunt off as a charity fundraiser.

His son won the hunt.

He gave it to his dad, and I decided to ride with him.

Now get as close as you can and shoot.

We're ready when you are.

Get as close as you can.

Emory, go.

Clear, clear, clear, clear.

Absolutely perfect.

I always want to help the landowners.

You know, the pigs are tearing up land that other animals live off of, too.

Very nice.

I've hunted pigs several times, usually on foot.

And I've probably killed 150 pigs total in 15 years.

And now I kill 54 in one day.

So, it's definitely more effective.

After we shoot the pigs, we let them lay and we feed the coyotes.

Then we come shoot the coyotes.

I don't see shooting them from the air as being a problem.

We'll shoot them more than one time if it's necessary.

We don't let them run off.

We have a heart, too.

For anyone that feels that it's not the most ethic way to do it,

I have never fought the pig problem in Texas.

Chopper hunting killed 43,000 Texan pigs last year, but that was less than 2% of the hogs in the state.

So Texans have other methods to get rid of these hogs.

I'm Bubba Ortiz.

I've been in hog management now for 50 years.

How old are you?

I'm 55.

My mom told me that I caught my first hog when I was 5 years old.

I'm tribal.

We're Pueblo Nation.

Morally, I don't like any animal to suffer.

And if the hogs are destroying habitat or other animals directly,

I feel like I should do something about it.

Helicopter hunting is another tool in the toolbox.

I'm not a big proponent of it.

The land is not made to handle that much death at one time.

The reason I trap them instead of hunting,

I'd prefer to take them alive than dead because when they're dead, I want to do something with the meat.

I build my own traps and my own electronics.

So it's like a security camera that's always on.

It's there 24 hours a day, and I operate it myself via my phone or computer.

Hunting is only effective when you're hunting.

You can't hunt 24 hours a day, although some people would like to.

There's a lot of hog psychology in what we do.

They equate their intelligence to dolphin or chimpanzee intelligence.

I have traps that I no longer use because the hogs have figured out how to get out of them.

See how they're piling up?

They're forming a pig pyramid.

It's kind of for protection.

They try to get underneath each other.

They'll attack that corner, and a lot of times what they do is they'll run out over there.

The pigs can go to a processor, which processes the meat for people.

Mainly, they tend to ship it overseas.

Or they go to certified hunting ranches.

They're cute when they're little.

Not so much when they get bigger.

I mean, I was a cute baby.

Look what happened to me.

They get ugly when they get bigger.

Within the city limits of San Antonio, in 2017, I removed 417 hogs, and I removed about 1,000 hogs.

That's a lot of hogs.

It's a lot of hogs.

It's a lot of hogs.

It's a lot of hogs.

In 2017, I removed 417 hogs, and I removed another 300 from the county.

I think, definitively, trapping is probably the best thing.

But, like hunting, trapping only makes a small dent in the population.

The USDA is testing a poison that effectively puts pigs to sleep, permanently.

But first, they have to make sure other animals don't eat it.

We're going to every effort to make sure that the toxicant is humane and effective.

But this tool is not going to replace the other tools that are also improving over time, too, related to helicopter gunning and related to the use of traps.

We're probably still three, four years out from being able to use it.

And as for the hogs that aren't poisoned...

I like eating real hogs very much.

I have.

I have, too.

It tastes like pork.

We don't eat them.

They're disgusting.

I've had it smoked.

I've had it cooked in the ground.

I've had them in tamales.

I've had them in barbacoa.

I've had them on the grill.

We've even made our own ham.

We've made our own bacon.

It tastes like any other pork.

Feral hogs carry anything from ticks to lice to any kind of disease you can imagine.

They're scavengers and they will literally eat each other.

They're not edible at all.

As long as you cook it, it's pretty much sterilized.

You don't have pork sushi.

We don't eat the feral hog.

We generally raise pork and have it slaughtered and we stick to that.

I don't eat them all the time because I'm around them so much and I get tired of pork.

Who wouldn't eat pizza every day?

But they're tasty.