The Boar Wars

ONLY A FEW HOURS BEFORE I GOT stampeded by wild hogs, I was trudging exhausted through a damp, buggy forest, pouring with sweat in my head-to-toe camo, and carrying two borrowed weapons, a rifle and a knife, with which I had almost no experience. We hadn't caught the slightest glimpse of our prey, I already felt sure we never would, and I was beginning to wonder if I was cut out for confronting invasive, non-native, habitat-destroying mammals in the Hawaiian bush.

Not that I wanted to protect the poor dears. My guide and hunting partner, Lance Holter, his bird-dog puppy, Kiko, and I were slipping and stumbling on soil so ravaged by feral pigs it looked like the aftermath of a cage fight between rototillers. Rooting up all the topsoil in huge clearcut swaths--they can take out an acre in a single night--hogs had completely eliminated the forest understory, leaving nothing but churned-up mud, pig tracks, pig turds, and pig wallows full of foul water and mosquitoes. Throw in the feral goats and non-native deer stripping bark and leaves off every tree in sight and spreading the seeds of non-native weeds, then multiply that by thousands of these animals on Maui alone, and we're talking about widespread environmental destruction.

Native plant species are vanishing and invasives are taking over; mosquitoes are carrying avian malaria that kills native birds; heavy rains are washing away tons of degraded topsoil, polluting streams with pig feces full of potentially lethal leptospirosis bacteria, and smothering offshore coral reefs with excess silt. In short, this is an environmental catastrophe so acute that it has only one reasonable solution, the same one advocated by the Sierra Club: confining some feral ungulates to fenced-off game areas to preserve sport hunting on the islands, and then eliminating the rest from every inch of the remaining island chain.

In principle, despite my dehydration and mounting frustration, I was still happy to do my part. I'd never hunted before, but I had met a couple of professional hunters over the years and liked and respected them. They knew things about the natural world that I did not, and one of them introduced me to a wildlife biologist who told me something I've been thinking about ever since: that regulated hunting is not only not a problem in terms of wildlife conservation, but it's also often the best thing that can happen to a wildlife species. Once hunters get interested in a species, the reasoning goes, they'll do everything in their power to make sure that it and its habitat don't disappear. Inspired by that idea, I'd tagged along on a wild sheep hunt in Mexico that was arranged by a conservation nonprofit called the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep. The organization introduced me to two astonishing truths. First, hunters bring force, focus, and money to wildlife conservation (the foundation alone has raised $50 million for wild sheep conservation in the past 20 years); second, bighorn grilled over mesquite coals possesses an unforgettable flavor. Another step in my education came with reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and his depiction of cattle being fed a near-lethal diet of corn, growth hormones, and animal byproducts to fatten them quickly, while crowded onto feedlots where they live in their own feces and get pumped full of antibiotics so they won't die before they reach market weight. Following Pollan's suggestion, I filled a chest freezer with grass-finished, beyond-organic beef from a local rancher and salivated at the thought of making like Pollan himself and adding a little wild pork. That's when I got the invitation from Holter, a Maui real-estate agent, chair of the Sierra Club's Maui Group, current political director of the Club's Hawaii Chapter, and a lifelong hunter.

Out on southeastern Maui, Holter told me, in a remote and rural area with only a one-lane dirt road, feral pigs and goats were running wild on critical native habitat. We could reach them by staying on the private property of another Club member, a man who'd be delighted to see us remove a few pests. All in all, it sounded like the perfect first hunt for me: environmentally positive, done in a gorgeous setting, and resulting in what I assumed would be fantastic meat to bring home. So I took a hunter-education course offered by the state of California, immersing myself in bolt-action and semiautomatic rifles, the importance of wasting no meat, and the even greater importance of not strapping a dead deer to the hood of your car and driving through town. I read also about the critical role hunters can--and do--play in healthy wildlife management.

Poking around on the Web, I found an outfit called Maui Hunting Safari and read that "because Kaupo Ranch and Nu'u Mauka Ranch are home to thousands of free-ranging goats, hunters will see hundreds of goats in a day.... We take numerous record-book trophies each year!" I wasn't going to hire these guys, but I knew that Holter was taking me to the same part of Maui, where I could apparently make a serious contribution to preserving the local ecosystem. And I loved the sound of this: "All animals are free-ranging. Our hunting areas consist of many tropical fruit trees including guava, mango, and lilikoi [passion fruit], which the wild pigs love to feed on." My hunter friends did offer words of warning: One said he'd eaten wild hog twice in his life, and only the first was pleasant. Another confessed that he couldn't touch wild pig, having watched them forage on rotting cow carcasses. But I blocked that out and searched for recipes for cooking everything from headcheese to baby back ribs and from home-cured prosciutto to cotechino sausage, and I asked around for a Maui butcher shop that could portion out my wild pork, vacuum-seal it, flash-freeze it, and then ship it directly to my home. By the time I arrived at Maui's Kahului Airport, in other words, and climbed into Holter's old Ford Explorer, I had that free-range, beyond-organic, mango-fed sow pretty much eaten.

"THIS ISN'T REALLY WORKING, IS IT?" I asked Holter. We both stopped walking, stunned by the devastating heat. He's a lanky and towering guy, with long skinny limbs, a loose springy posture, a wry manner, a deep tan, and crow's-footed blue eyes that sparkle under a well-barbered head of bright white hair. He knew the names of almost every tree in the forest. Mango and guava trees, he said, were the primary canopy plants--tree-fallen strawberry guavas lay yellow and rotting all over the trail--but both were apparently non-natives, encouraged by the pigs and crowding out the lovely native koa trees. I picked an intact fruit for a taste and broke it open, but a bug crawled out of the red pulp, so I dropped it. My rifle hung heavy in my hand like a hunk of lead, and the extra cartridges weighed down my daypack and the cargo pockets of my borrowed camo pants. Notwithstanding all that, or all the trashed terrain we'd mucked around in, we still hadn't seen any terrestrial quadrupeds other than Kiko. Holter's eyelids were looking heavy, and his face was setting into a grim this-is-not-what-I-pictured kind of cast. Then he sat down--just like that, on the trail. I stood behind him, watching his long, broad back slouch and heave. My eyes glazed over, then I said, "Hey, you want to have lunch or what?"

Holter nodded without looking at me and ran a hand through his hair. While I started to pull out a loaf of white bread and some cheese and salami, and shooed away Kiko, I thought, OK, clearly, this is not how the real guys do it. "What now?" I asked Holter.

"Boy, I don't know. Head back to the place?"

THE PROPERTY SPREAD OUT ALONG MAUI'S glorious shore, where the slopes of Haleakala sweep 10,000 feet from the sea up to the summit, through the spectacular and remote Kaupo Gap. It's a breathtaking environment, with its one road so curvy you rarely go more than 15 miles an hour. Almost nobody lives out there, and the house where we were staying is off the grid, with electricity from solar panels and water from a nearby well. Warm sea breezes carry the forest fragrance through a gracious great room. Fruit trees dot the grassy yard, and a step to the veranda lets you look out over the windswept waves and the looming colossus of the Big Island.

At an outdoor table, over some lemonade, Holter talked about how hunting and conservation have intersected in his life. He grew up in Big Bear Lake, he said, a Southern California resort community, and his older brother was so sickly that, as Holter put it, "he required 100 percent attention, so I grew up not getting any and not needing any." Wandering the desert and hunting jackrabbits, Holter found a place for himself in the natural world, and he spent summers with his father in the western oil fields. "I'd follow him around from Utah to Wyoming to Montana," Holter said, "and he'd tabulate the drilling equipment, and I'd go off with my .22. Ten years old, and I'd just disappear and shoot rocks and look for arrowheads and watch antelope."

Link that to Holter's first deer, at age 12, when he joined a reduction hunt to keep deer from overgrazing their winter range, and it's easy to see how he developed a personal connection to his sport's ecological upside. Enrolling in a forestry program at California's Lassen Community College after high school, Holter hoped to become a wildlife biologist. He dropped out for a stint in the Peace Corps in Tunisia but never lost his love of the outdoors. Even while living on a New Zealand commune in the mid-1970s, Holter hunted non-native possums that killed endemic bird species, and after settling on Maui, he joined the Sierra Club and became a committed activist. Over the past few years, Holter has worked on Hawaii's Legacy Lands Act, which helps build low-income housing and purchase open space, and has flown repeatedly to the Arctic, fighting a mine project and advocating for preservation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"Hey wait," Holter said suddenly. "I just heard a goat." Standing up from his plastic chaise longue, Holter carried his binoculars to the far corner of the veranda.

I'd heard the goat too--a baying sound, like a sheep without the tremolo. So I followed Holter. When I was standing next to him, he told me in a don't-spook-the-prey stage whisper that he'd just seen the goat--a huge one--among some pine trees visible a few hundred yards downhill, at the edge of a ravine.

"Why don't you go get that rifle," Holter said, "and a box of shells."

So I did, shuffling off in my tube socks down the deck stairs. On the way back, I realized I didn't really know how to hold a gun. I knew how to carry one safely, because I'd just passed my hunter-education class, but I had no clue how to hold one so that I'd look like a hunter instead of an urban dork. So after I carried the rifle back to Holter, I decided to restore my self-esteem by loading it. I pulled the rifle's bolt back and put four shells into the magazine and then closed the action without chambering a shell. You have to know what you're doing to close the action without chambering a shell--it takes a little trick with your finger.

By then, Holter's goat had disappeared.

"There's one over there too," Holter said, pointing across the ravine to the steep slope on its far side. Holding his binoculars, I could actually see the thing: rusty brown, standing on a patch of denuded soil. The problem was, it must've been a thousand yards away, a shot for a Delta Force sniper.

"Looks like all the goats went down to the stream this morning to drink," Holter said, thinking aloud. "And now they're coming back up. They'll probably work their way toward us."

"What do you want to do?" I asked.

"Just wait, let them come to us."

Ten minutes later, when no goat had wandered into the clearing, I figured we'd put on our shoes, slip into the forest, and try to meet our goat halfway.

"You know what we should do?" Holter asked. "Here's what we should do. I'm going to lie down and take a nap, and when I wake up, we'll go look for that goat." With that, he stretched out again on the chaise, folded his long hands on his stomach, and closed his eyes.

OUR HOST HAD WIRELESS SATELLITE INTERNET, so while Holter napped, I looked around on the Web and learned that Hawaiian environmentalists were worried about non-native ungulates in the late 1950s, when the state started regulating introduced mammals as game rather than controlling them as pests. The controversy pit hunters and environmentalists against each other: Hunters have an understandable interest in maintaining game species in the Hawaiian Islands, and in many parts of the world that interest jibes with the environmentalist impulse to preserve habitat. But voracious feral ungulates on biologically isolated islands are a different story. So with the state of Hawaii committed to managing such animals as a recreational resource rather than protecting habitat, in 1978 the Sierra Club joined the Audubon Society in a lawsuit arguing that the state had violated the Endangered Species Act by maintaining feral goats and sheep on the habitat of the endangered native palila bird. And they won.

This was the first time an animal was successfully named as a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit--the case is known as Palila v. Hawaii--and it was also the first time that environmental "takings" were expanded to include indirect impacts. To wit, Jeff Mikulina, president of the Hawaii Chapter, explains, "The introduced sheep and goats were not eating the palila. They were eating the sweet mamane leaves and shoots, the palila's main food source." An additional 1985 lawsuit over mouflon sheep had a similar outcome: A federal judge ruled that the state had to begin eradicating the herd.

The only problem is that the non-natives aren't being removed--partly because of a lack of political will, and partly because of the sheer difficulty of eradication. Sport hunters can certainly be helpful, and many would doubtless volunteer their time, but the undirected thinning of herds doesn't solve much in an island setting. In Hawaii, the carrying capacity for deer, pigs, and goats is zero--at least if you care about preserving native biodiversity. The islands' 6,400 square miles in the middle of the Pacific are home to more than 300 endangered species. Rare plant and animal species have evolved here by wind, wing, and wave, only to be trampled and grazed and pushed from their natural habitats. So the non-native animals have to be 100 percent eliminated in a focused and sustained effort, at least from areas not designated as hunting preserves.

Not only is this expensive, offensive to portions of the public, and alienating to sport hunters--who might understandably see it as reducing their future hunting opportunities--but many of the common techniques are out of the question. Poison bait is illegal; neck snares are inhumane; birth-control darts are ineffective; and others, like helicopter hunting, are too dangerous and probably wouldn't work because of the dense brush. That leaves dog teams on the ground, which also pose problems. Experienced dog handlers can be hard to find, for starters. And nobody entirely agrees on what makes a good hog dog, but everyone does agree that you can't just round up a crew from the SPCA. A standard team might include one bluetick or walker hound that can catch a day-old scent, a couple of cattle dogs smart enough to flush a pig from the brush without getting killed, and a terrier for holding on until the hunter catches up. These dogs can cost $500 each, and handlers must break them of the itch to chase nontarget animals like cattle and cats, and hunt them on pigs all the time just to keep them fit and focused. Handlers must also be willing to do the final job with a knife; in dense brush with a pack of dogs, that's often the only safe way. Worse still, male hogs have razor-sharp tusks and a gift for using them, so the veterinary and hospital bills can get prohibitive. (Kevlar dog vests are popular accessories.)

AS HOLTER ROUSED FROM HIS NAP and we pulled on our muddy shoes to get that goat, I realized I'd always accepted, at least in principle, that beef eaters ought to try killing and butchering a cow at least once. I'd also accepted that no meat eater should look askance at hunters, and it still struck me as reasonable that environmentalists advocating non-native-species eradication should be willing to soil their own hands by helping out. But as Holter and I pushed into a thicket of ten-foot cane grass sharp enough to cut skin and so dense I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me, I wondered if I'd given enough thought to what I was getting involved in. I was still wondering when Holter, who was 20 feet to my left, said softly, "Hey Dan, did you just step on a log?"

"What?" I couldn't even see Holter just then.

"Did you step on a log? I heard a noise right in front of me."

"Lance, I did not step on a log."

"You're sure."

"I'm sure."

"Then there's a pig two feet in front of me."

The cane grass exploded with a frantic crashing and rushing sound as many hundreds of pounds of hard, adrenalized flesh charged away from Holter and directly toward me. I still had no idea what it was and no clue what to do, and because I didn't know my way around a gun I found myself frantically trying to chamber a shell, but before I could, I saw a smallish pig bolt past my shoes like a jungle torpedo. A bigger one came next, perhaps a hundred pounds, and then just as I released the safety and reached for the trigger a much, much bigger hog went roaring past my shins in a hell-for-leather sprint. Holding the rifle at my hips like a sawed-off shotgun, I swung the barrel after a fourth pig's hindquarters but couldn't quite shoot--and then the grass went silent.

Knowing the hogs were all within ten feet of me and yet absolutely invisible, and remembering a male hog's skull I'd once seen and its sharp and brutal tusks, I stood stock-still trying to make a decision. The rifle, I decided, would be useless if I stumbled over those varmints and found one gashing my leg. Move number one, therefore, was clearly to take that stupid bullet out of the chamber so I didn't shoot myself, or Holter, or Kiko. But what about my knife? It was a razor-sharp Gerber with a four-inch folding blade, and I had it in my front pocket. Would I really be able to grab the thing while facedown in the dirt getting mauled by a pack of angry pigs? Would my back pocket be any better? Opening the blade, I put it between my teeth and then decided that was an even dumber idea, a guaranteed way to cut my face to ribbons. The only sane option, I realized, was to hold the folded knife in my teeth, use the rifle butt as a blunt machete, and get the heck out of there as fast as I could. Which I did.

In my first moment of truth as a hunter, I chose retreat. And I'm happy about it. It means that my first kill didn't come in the form of a wild, half-aimed hip-shot at a sprinting hog in cover so dense that even if I'd hit the beast instead of Holter, I probably would've just wounded it. Following a hurt boar into some impossible warren of underbrush was absolutely nothing I wanted any part of.

I still hope the natural balance of the local ecosystem can be restored. And I admire the skilled hunters who are working to get the invaders off the island. But for now, they'll have to do it without my help--and I'll have to do without the wild, mango-fed pork of my dreams.