When George Gordon Moore imported the first European wild boars to Graham County, North Carolina, in April 1912, neither he nor anyone else who would later attempt to hunt them fully understood how formidable a quarry these animals would prove to be.
Moore kept his boars in a 500-acre split-rail enclosure built nine rails high — but even this impressive structure was insufficient to contain them. As adults, the boar stood about three feet at the shoulder and could weigh more than 400 pounds, wielding sharp tusks and armored with a thick layer of cartilage. The animals had little trouble rooting out of their enclosure when they so desired, though for the most part they seemed content with the easy living inside. By the early 1920s, the original herd of 13 had multiplied to include 60-100 animals.
When Moore’s finances deteriorated, the property’s erstwhile caretaker Cotton McGuire took ownership. Not wealthy enough to maintain Hooper Bald as a game preserve, the Graham County native sold as many of the animals as he could. But there were plenty of pigs left, so McGuire invited his friends and their dogs up for a big boar hunt.
The day didn’t go quite as planned.
“Only two boar were killed, and at least a dozen dogs were killed, or severely maimed,” Perry Jones wrote in The European Wild Boar in North Carolina, a 1959 NC Wildlife Resources Commission booklet adapted from Jones’ 1957 master’s thesis. “Some of the hunters were forced to take refuge in trees to escape the charging beasts. Overly excited by the baying of dogs and shouts of hunters, the boar simply tore their way through the fence and escaped into the nearby mountains.”
Like mowing the grass
The boars have been expanding their range ever since and have been throughout Great Smoky Mountains National Park since the 1970s. Now hybridized with more docile domestic swine, today’s wild boars are shy and skittish, being smaller and less aggressive than their European ancestors. Despite their prevalence in the park, most visitors never see one; injuries are rare and extremely minor when they do occur.
But to the ecosystems they have colonized, hogs are detrimental. To stem the damage, resource managers must partake in a never-ending yet seldom-discussed chore: hog hunting.
“I kind of equate it to mowing the grass,” said Bill Stiver, a now-retired Smokies wildlife biologist who spent 32 years managing hogs and other wildlife species. “You’ve just got to keep after it and keep the population as low as you can.”
Barnyard pigsties are muddy for a reason: hogs are hard on the land. A herd of pigs can root up swaths of woodland and delicate habitats like wetlands and spruce-fir forest in short order, feeding on everything from snakes and salamanders to berries and bugs. “One hog can do a lot of damage,” said Lisa McInnis, the park’s chief of resource management and science. “Sometimes you’ll roll up on an area and say, ‘Holy cow, this must be a herd.’ But it might only be one or two pigs.”
They are extremely prolific animals, with sows typically producing three to eight piglets per litter and reaching sexual maturity at six to ten months. Estimates indicate that if the park were to cease all hog control efforts, the population would nearly quadruple in just six years.
Effective at destruction
Between 1977 and 2022, the park removed an average of 271 hogs every year. But when control efforts paused in 2024 while a new hog management plan was developed, park staff saw just how quickly they can multiply. Due to the increased population, park staff were able to kill 503 hogs in 2025 without increasing staffing or other resources. “The change in damage you could see on the landscape was really obvious from one year to the next,” said Joe Yarkovich, a wildlife biologist who has spent more than two decades working on hog control in the Smokies. “If we back off and stop doing hog control, I don’t know that there would be any ground left untouched by pigs in the Smokies within a few years.”
Today, the park has four permanent wildlife employees whose duties include hog control, and for half the year, seasonal hires — anywhere from two to four in recent years — increase that workforce. Park partner Friends of the Smokies currently supports two of the permanent employees and all seasonal wildlife hires.
Current modeling puts the Smokies population at 1,200 to 1,500 hogs, each one eating three to five percent of their total 100–200-pound body weight every day. Acorns, an important food source for many animals in the Southern Appalachians, are a favorite meal.
“The mountains are a tough place to make a living,” said retired wildlife biologist Kim Delozier, who began his 32-year career at the park as a boar hunter in 1978, “and when you take that much food out of it, you’re going to have less bears, less deer, less turkey, less species that depend on it as well.”
Hogs can also exert a heavy toll on cemeteries, as well as archeological artifacts, which in the Smokies are typically buried close to the surface. They also complicate maintenance when they tear up the park’s rare grassy, open areas.
“There are a lot of invasive species in the Smokies, but this one is just so effective at destruction that I would put them at the top,” McInnis said.
Evolving control measures
Resource managers didn’t always view wild hogs as a scourge. Though the federal government initially planned to exterminate the escaped herd “as a menace to public safety . . . sportsmen protested so vigorously that it was finally decided to extend it the same protection given other game,” Jones wrote. North Carolina and Tennessee both continued to protect wild hogs as a big game species; 2011 was the turning point, when both states launched efforts to eradicate them.
However, the national park is managed by the federal government, which sets its own policy, and it has been treating the hogs as undesirable invasives since removing the first one in 1959. The first wildlife staff tasked with addressing the hog problem were hired in 1977.
When Delozier came on board in 1978, there were no best practices or established protocols to follow. The park service was “stretching” to find a solution to its hog problem, and control methods were “pretty primitive,” he recalled. A more comprehensive hog control program emerged in the mid-’80s. During this time, the park’s institutional knowledge grew, trapping methods became more sophisticated and funding became available for purchases such as the boats the park service used to access hog havens bordering Fontana Lake.
Improvements have continued in recent decades. Most new trap designs focus on removing an entire family group — called a sounder — at once, and come equipped with a camera system that notifies hog control team members once the pigs are trapped. Wild hogs are quite intelligent, so if one member of the group gets trapped, the rest are unlikely to fall for the same trick, and their prolific nature means that taking out one at a time doesn’t do much to slow population growth.
“If you want to make a real impact, you have to remove an entire sounder,” Yarkovich said.
Due to the potential of spreading the multiple diseases wild hogs are known to carry and the resulting state laws against transporting hog carcasses, euthanized hogs are typically left in place, providing food to a menagerie of native wildlife such as black bears and vultures.
The park is also working to exclude hogs from places that are especially vulnerable to their damage, deploying electric fencing to certain wetlands and cemeteries. However, fencing is not a viable solution for the entire park, whose boundary measures about 287 miles. Hog-proofing the whole perimeter would be incredibly expensive and time-consuming — especially considering how easily Hooper’s hogs were able to escape their formidable split-rail enclosure in Graham County.
“Once you have wild hogs, you’re stuck with them,” Yarkovich said, “and you’re going to be dealing with damages.”
An expanded version of this story was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of Smokies Life Journal, a twice-yearly magazine that is the primary benefit of joining Smokies Life. To read more stories like this while supporting Great Smoky Mountains National Park, visit SmokiesLife.org/Membership and become a Park Keeper.
(Holly Kays is the lead writer for the 29,000-member Smokies Life, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the scientific, historical and interpretive activities of Great Smoky Mountains National Park by providing educational products and services such as this column. Learn more at smokieslife.org, or reach the author at hollyk@smokieslife.org.)