You may not have seen them running through your yard, but just wait. Feral pigs are everywhere and they’re a growing problem. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Susanne Rust, an environmental reporter from the Los Angeles Times. She talks about the millions - yes,  millions of wild pigs roaming the countryside, and the multitude of problems they bring: eating like pigs and breeding like rabbits, these wild swine trample fragile habitats and imperil other animals, ecosystems, and even humans.

Narrator  0:01  This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise.

Susanne Rust  0:27  Just about everybody except for animal rights activists really see that there's a problem and believe that whether it's expanding hunting, although there are concerns about doing that, that you could miss align the incentives there, or having the state just go in and do a massive assault. But something needs to be done because there's so much at stake.

Narrator 0:49  You may not have seen them running through your yard, but just wait. Feral pigs are everywhere, and they're a growing problem. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with Susanne Rust, an environmental reporter from the Los Angeles Times. She talks about the millions - yes, millions of wild pigs roaming the countryside and the multitude of problems they bring. Eating like pigs and breeding like rabbits, these wild swine trample fragile habitats and imperil other animals, ecosystems and even humans.

Alex Wise  1:42  I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Susanne Rust. She is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Susanne, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

Susanne Rust  1:50  Hey, thanks for having me.

Alex Wise  1:51  So you have a really interesting piece that just came out in the LA Times about feral pigs and the problems they present. Why don't you first explain what a feral pig is and how it might differ from a domesticated pig, obviously, and a truffle pig or a wild boar.

Susanne Rust  2:09  Alright, so feral pigs in California, are a hybrid of wild domestic pigs. So pigs that were brought by the Spanish missionaries in about the 1700s, who then were sort of let loose, and they became kind of wild and feral themselves. But what happened in California and has happened in a few other places around the United States. People then brought in wild boars in the 1900s as something fun to shoot, right to hunt. And then those boars got free and started breeding with the feral domestic population. So what we have now is this kind of cross between a wild boar and a feral domesticated pig. And biologists sort of refer to them as a super pig, because they're this cross but they seem they're smart. They're wily. They're incredibly what's the word I'm looking for here? But their ability to procreate is is quite astounding. I mean, we use we use the expression to breed like rabbits think it should be turned to breed like pigs, because they can have up to four litters a year, about 18 each in each litter. And females are mature, sexually mature by the age of four months,

Alex Wise  3:35  Four months - wow! That's incredibly efficient.

Susanne Rust  3:39  Yeah. So what we have is this super pig again, which is really a cross between a domestic pig that was set free and a and a wild boar.

Alex Wise  3:51  And do they cross pollinate the wild boars and the domestic pigs and these feral pigs, like in terms of their groups are these feral pigs are kind of unto themselves generally in California.