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Displaced hogs become home wreckers

Local officials and hunters say development east of U.S. 41 on the south edge of Brooksville has forced the hogs north.

By WILL VAN SANT
Published January 16, 2005

BROOKSVILLE - Unspoiled expanses of cheap land and a Suncoast Parkway that offers a swift commute to Tampa have made residential development in Hernando County hot.

The boom means huge spikes in property tax revenue, dreams of gated living fulfilled and overtime pay for county Development Department officials who are working Saturdays to plow through a backlog of building permit applications.

But for 94-year-old Asa Groves, there has been one unintended - and unwelcome - consequence of development: regular visits from displaced wild hogs, which crack flower pots behind his home, uproot his lawn and leave his property littered with wild hog dung.

"They have been tearing the place apart in the last two months," Groves said Thursday. "In the last week or 10 days, they have been here every night."

Not only have Groves and his neighbors on Corliss Road had to deal with increasingly frequent visits from the roving beasts; at the nearby county Cooperative Extension Service office on Oliver Street, a trapper has caught and removed 75 hogs from the area in the last year.

Local officials and hunters say development of Southern Hills Plantation, a massive community being built east of U.S. 41 about a mile south of Groves' neighborhood on the south edge of Brooksville, has forced the hogs north.

LandMar Group LLC of Jacksonville is behind the Southern Hills project, which calls for a golf course, 999 homes, 160,000 square feet of retail space and 45,000 square feet of office space to be built on 1,600 acres.

Land clearing for the golf course began early last year.

Brooksville resident Dave Cock, 48, has hunted in Florida since he was a kid. Cock knows hogs.

Using a specialized breed of dog, the Catahoula leopard, he culls them regularly with the state's blessing from the Crystal River State Buffer Preserve. The dogs corner the hogs, and Cock finishes the job with a knife.

It's a method of hog hunting common in Florida since pioneer days.

Reached in Taylor County, where he was chasing deer with his hounds last week, Cock said the land where Southern Hills is being built was always home to a hog population. Local folks would go there to hunt them, he said.

A resilient animal that breeds often and eats almost anything, the hogs are quick to seek new areas to roam when they encounter development, Cock said. And with Southern Hills having robbed them of a home, they are on the loose.

"They are going to cause a problem, that population of hogs," he said.

Spanish explorers brought the first hogs to Florida. Today's feral variety has tusks and longer snouts than domestic breeds. They are dark coated, and a bristly mane runs along their spines. Sows weigh between 100 and 150 pounds, boars upward of 200 pounds. Some boars are in the 400-pound range.

Wild hog piglets can fall prey to alligators and bobcats, but the only predator capable of killing an adult, save for humans, is the Florida panther, which is nearly extinct. State officials estimate there are 750,000 wild hogs in Florida.

Donna Peacock directs the Cooperative Extension Service, where agricultural programs are offered in conjunction with the University of Florida. She has worked at the service for eight years and said hogs have always been around, but had only become a problem in the last year and a half.

"They are certainly moving in on us," she said. "They are looking for a safe haven and for food."

Peacock stopped short of blaming Southern Hills by name, but she said development in the area was responsible. At dusk, the animals wander out of wooded areas and into residential streets such as Corliss and VFW roads, rooting for grubs and acorns, she said.

"They have never been aggressive," Peacock said, "but they have gotten close to us."

One group of hogs was particularly brazen, she said. They loafed in the parking lot, played in the extension service garden and eyed workers just out of reach when gates were shut for the night.

What to do about the hogs is a tricky question. Peacock prefers the approach now being used.

Trapper Quentin Ziske, who is involved in the extension's 4-H program, takes the animals alive at no charge and gives them to family and friends who enjoy eating hogs.

"I don't eat pig myself because I have a cholesterol problem," said the 58-year-old Ziske, who has trapped hogs in Florida for 40 years.

Peacock is opposed to hunting them, although she acknowledges that hogs are smart and can quickly become wary of traps.

"I have had numerous calls from people asking if they could come and hunt," Peacock said. "And the answer is no. We don't hunt on county property."

For Cock, a man who has no problem dealing with a pest by introducing the invader's natural predator into his own home, displaced hogs on private property may prove a blessing for those with a taste for hunting and hog meat.

"Sure, you have to be careful firing a gun in a neighborhood," Cock said. "But a man who is responsible can dispatch a hog in his back yard and eat that thing."

Such an act may no longer be in Groves' power.

Warned by doctors in his native West Virginia that the state's cool, wet weather could worsen his pneumonia and kill him, Groves and his wife, Dollie, moved to Corliss Road in 1950. At the time, the area was open range.

For decades he and Dollie, who died last summer, had no problem with hogs. Then about two years ago, he said, they began to appear. These days, they're regular visitors.

Groves said there's not much he can do about the situation. He is not physically able to chase the hogs off at night, though he sometimes tries to rake over the uprooted sod in his yard. He wants people to know what's going on, for local officials to help and for the Southern Hills owners to act.

"If they chased them out," Groves said, "they ought to take care of them."

Jim Harvey, LandMar's regional manager, said the company was unaware that the Southern Hills site was home to hogs and that they had not gotten any complaints from area residents about displaced animals.

But Harvey said he had seen the problem before. He once worked on a project in Palm Beach County, he said, that required hogs to be trapped and shipped to less developed areas of the state. If a problem does exist in the Southern Hills area, Harvey said, the company would be glad to try a similar approach.

"Frankly, we don't want them there either," he said. "They are a nuisance to the golf course."

County Commissioner Chris Kingsley said feral animals in the streets of Hernando were not to be ignored. He vowed to bring county resources to bear, perhaps in the form of increased trapping, but said he was unsure at this point just what action should be taken.

According to Cock, the hunter, county leaders should know that what Asa Grove and his neighbors are experiencing will not prove an isolated brush between beasts and humans. As development continues at a brisk clip, more Hernando residents will encounter animals who have fled the sounds of bulldozers.

"There are going to be more 'coons in people's sheds," Cock said, "more bobcats taking chickens and more hogs at bird feeders."

Information from Times files was used in this report. Will Van Sant can be reached at 352 754-6127 or vansant@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 16, 2005, 00:32:15]