At first they were isolated incidents, reported by TV newscasters struggling not to laugh. But as the sightings in California piled up, the phenomenon began to resemble the opening scene of a zombie movie.
In downtown Riverside, a pack of feral hogs marauded through the streets at night, causing millions of dollars in damage.
In Corona, a wild boar trailed a woman and her dog through a residential neighborhood.
In Ventura County, a car was damaged after hitting a giant hog ambling along Highway 126.
On Highway 1 in Central California, the breathtaking natural sights include feral pigs loitering along the side of the road.
On the border of Orange County and into the Inland Empire, packs of wild hogs living along the Santa Ana River often emerge, scaring hikers.
In San Jose, feral pigs regularly rampage through golf courses and front yards in search of food, leaving a trail of destruction.
In Monterey County and the Central Valley, wild hogs cause millions of dollars in damage to crops and land each year and threaten food safety.
On privately owned Tejon Ranch, off Interstate 5 near the Grapevine, thousands of wild boars roam the land, devouring deer fawns, uprooting plant, fungi, and animal spawn like frog eggs, and hoovering up acorns that could otherwise sprout into oaks on the 270,000-acre spread.
And that’s just the tip of the ecological-disaster iceberg.
Wild invasive pigs, which number between 6 million and 9 million nationally and cost the U.S. agriculture sector $2.5 billion annually in damage, have long been a problem in the American South. In Texas, where they’re hunted from helicopters with machine guns, millions of giant feral swine roam in herds, destroying ecosystems and crops, threatening the survival of other species, breeding uncontrollably, even at times killing humans.
Now, those same hogs are exploding across California’s parklands,
