SCIC Making Progress Toward Feral Pig Eradication in Saskatchewan

The Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation reports the use of cell phone camera and remote trapping technology is proving successful is helping locate and capture feral pigs roaming through the province.The Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation overseas efforts to eradicate escaped or released feral pig populations from the Saskatchewan landscape.

Dale Knouse, the Manager of Strategic Operations with the Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation, says through a program introduced in 2015 monitoring sites are established in locations were pigs are known to be and information gathered through those sites is used to plan removal.

Quote-Dale Knouse-Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation:

We've been doing this for quite a while now and in places where we have some established populations we're starting to see quite reduced activity.We started using remote triggered trap gates manufactured in the U.S. That's been very successful for us. We're able to monitor through these remote cellular cameras that can show us what the numbers of pigs are and what types they are.

Then we're able to trigger the trap gates themselves through a text to the mechanism and it drops the gate.That allows us to do that work away from the traps so we're not having to disturb anything.Pigs are quite sensitive animals.They can sense when things change so having those remote triggered cell gates really help us to stay away from the traps to make sure we're successful.

We're very confident that we're starting to really see some reduction in populations in those areas.We're committed to continue this program and we we've assigned long term resources to it.As we continue this work we're very confident that we'll continue to significantly reduce this population.

Knouse says the public can help by reporting sightings of pigs or evidence of their presence, such as a pig wallow in a marsh or disturbed areas of grass or ground.For information visit SCIC.ca and search Wild Boar Control or SquealonPigs.org.