A few blood stains dotted the back of Robert Stalbaum’s pickup. The blood belonged to the feral hogs he trapped the night before.

“Feral hogs have become a huge problem throughout the state,” said Stalbaum, a wildlife biologist for the Texas Cooperative Extension Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We’ll never get rid of pigs; they breed too fast. But we want to alleviate the problems they are causing for farmers and ranchers.”

Feral hogs aren’t just wild animals out in the country anymore, he said. They’re starting to move into the city, too.

DRC/Al Key

Robert Stalbaum, a wildlife biologist for the Texas Cooperative Extension Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shows off damage caused by wild pigs in the front yard of a home in Lakeview Estates in Denton’s eastern city limits. In the past month, Stalbaum has trapped 16 feral hogs in the subdivision.

In the past month, Stalbaum trapped 16 within Denton’s city limits, in the Lakeview Estates subdivision, on the south side of U.S. Highway 380 in far east Denton.

Wild hogs are known to attack goats and sheep, Stalbaum said.

Spring floodwaters pushed the wild hogs to higher ground and into more residential areas. The rain also made the pigs’ food grow, which makes them breed faster and have larger litters, he said.

In the wild, pigs eat just about anything, including pork, Stalbaum said.

“They’ll prey on other animals; they’ll eat roots, berries, grubs, insects — anything, even their own young,” Stalbaum said.

But hogs have very few predators, except for coyotes that prey on small pigs, he said.

Sows, the adult female pigs, can have up to three litters a year and each litter can have four to 10 pigs, Stalbaum said.

They could pose a threat to people, but no injuries have been reported locally so far.

Property owners have reported a lot of damage from the pigs, though, Stalbaum said.

In the Lakeview Estates subdivision, swine tore up Deborah Muscle’s and Walter Kolbenheyer’s front yard four times in about a month.

“I started seeing them, and they were just running around,” Kolbenheyer said. “They weren’t doing any damage then. When they started getting destructive, I said, ‘That’s enough.’”

The city called Stalbaum to trap them.

The city worked with the Texas Department of Wildlife and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to arrange for Stalbaum to trap the hogs in the city limits, said Jim Bryan, a spokesman for the Denton police.

The city pays $125 for each day that Stalbaum catches pigs, Bryan said.

His traps consist of four, 5-foot-tall steel hog panels formed into an oval and held up by about a dozen steel fence posts. A trip wire rigged up inside closes a trapdoor that keeps a herd of pigs in the pen until Stalbaum arrives in the morning to kill them.

His uses corn to bait the hogs into the trap, and once the trapdoor closes, more pigs can get in but they can’t get out.

He performs lab tests on each pig to check for a wide range of diseases.

The pigs Stalbaum catches usually weigh between 75 and 150 pounds, he said. Feral hogs can get much larger, he said, but “the big ones get smart.”

In Stalbaum’s five years of trapping swine, his largest catch in one night was 22 pigs.

The biggest pig he’s caught in a trap weighed 280 pounds, he said.

Swine aren’t native to the U.S., Stalbaum said. Settlers brought them to the continent as livestock, and they got loose.

Domesticated pigs become wild quickly after they escape, he said. In two generations, their curly tails straighten out, and their hide turns black, he said.

Stalbaum said the pork from wild hogs can be good to eat, and some homeowners want to slaughter them.

Otherwise, he hauls them away and disposes of them.

Stalbaum said the cooler weather has made the wild pigs a lot more active during the day, after they’ve been mostly nocturnal during the summer.

But because acorns have fallen, pigs are finding more to eat and are avoiding the traps, so there are still many more to catch in the area, he said.

For more information about wild pigs or about trapping other animals, such as beavers, call Stalbaum at 817-978-2630.

MATTHEW ZABEL can be reached at 940-566-6884. His e-mail address is mzabel@dentonrc.com.