Boarish behavior: feral pigs are violent, dirty, and ugly, and they ravage every ecosystem they live in--still, who knew killing them could be such fun?

• Author: Peters, Justin
• Position: Year of the Pig - Book review

Year of the Pig

by Mark J. Hainds

University of Alabama Press, 248 pp.

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There comes a point in every man's life when he realizes he hasn't spent enough time killing feral pigs. For Mark Hainds, that point was 2007--the Year of the Pig, in the Chinese calendar--when he decided that too many pigs had been alive for too long, and that the only reasonable solution was to raid his retirement account and spend a year traveling the country, killing pigs in as many states as possible.

Year of the Pig, recently published by the University of Alabama Press, is Hainds's account of his monomaniacal quest. In it, Hainds takes the reader through his year of hunts--across eleven different states, from Hawaii to Florida; alone and with company; using KA-BAR knives, black-powder rifles, compound bows, and various other weapons. It is the best book on killing feral pigs you'll read all year.

Feral pigs have been devastating the American landscape since they were first introduced to this continent by European explorers in the 1500s. Some people call them razorbacks, or wild hogs--and, like the John Travolta movie of the same name, you will have trouble finding anyone with a good word to say about them. They ravage every ecosystem into which they're introduced. They can grow to 500 pounds. They reproduce rapidly, and can begin breeding when they're only eight months old. They're violent and dirty and ugly and omnivorous--and they are everywhere. Writes Hainds,

Excepting city dwellers in the North who never visit the Midwest or South, virtually everyone in America lives or vacations in or near wild hog habitat. You may not have seen them. You may not have recognized the signs, sounds, or smells that identify them, but they were there, lurking in the shadows. If they stayed in the shadows, there would be no problem. But they inevitably come out--tramping indelicately through woodlands and rooting through soil in search of food; destroying crops, polluting wetlands, imperiling forests, and spreading disease; endangering other species by ravaging their traditional food supplies. They are the animal kingdom's scorched-earth policy.

It is the hunter's role to fight back, and Hainds embraces this role with an assassin's eye and an apostle's zeal. Throughout the book, he hunts and kills pigs with extreme prejudice, stripping their skulls and boiling them clean so they can later be displayed as trophies. After he beheads them, he eats them...