Feral Swine in the Southeastern United States

Abstract

In the southern part of the United States, the pig, Sus scrofa, is not only quite capable of getting along without the protection of man, but it probably has survived in this manner for four hundred years (Towne and Wentworth, 1950). The first swine to reach the United States were landed on the Gulf Coast in 1539 by Fernando De Soto (Lewis, 1907). Swine escaped from De Soto's entourage as he traveled over 3,000 miles through what is now southern United States. Other adventurers and the Spanish missionaries continued to introduce swine at intervals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indians aided in the naturalization of the swine, as the animals that passed into their hands were usually allowed to roam free in the woods, a custom which many of their white brethren also followed. When the French attempted the settlement of Florida in 1560, Indians supplied them with pork from feral herds. In 1697, Jonathan Dickinson (1790), who put ashore for a day on what was probably St. Simon Island (Georgia), reported that Indians in his party went hunting for deer and hogs and brought in several of each. Such allusions to hunting swine are rather infrequent in early records. In spite of many reports that swine readily took to the woods in Carolina and Georgia and increased prolifically there, the animals must not have spread far from settlements. If they did, natives and travelers appear not to have considered them game. Moore (1840), who visited the coast of Georgia in 1744, and Kemble (1863), who spent the winter of 1838-39 on Butler's and St. Simon islands, do not mention feral swine in their accounts of game animals. However, there is no real evidence that feral swine ever disappeared from these areas. Salley (1911), who was secretary of the Historical Commission of South Carolina in 1911, asserts that feral swine were then to be found in the lower