1,802 Hogs Gone From Land Between the Lakes, and Why Kentucky Says Don't Shoot

The short version: Crews removed 1,802 feral hogs from Land Between the Lakes over the winter, cutting the herd there an estimated 90 percent with helicopters, thermal cameras, and bait traps. And yet Kentucky now bans hunting wild pigs. That is not a contradiction. Shooting a few is exactly what keeps the rest.

The fastest way to keep wild hogs on Land Between the Lakes is to grab a rifle and go after them. That is the hard lesson behind a rule that still catches people off guard out here.

Between January and March, the USDA Forest Service and its partners worked the 170,000-acre peninsula between the rivers and pulled out 1,802 feral hogs. Follow-up counts put the LBL population down roughly 90 percent from where it started. Three winters of this now, and the animals that once tore up the ground around the Elk and Bison Prairie are close to gone.

Not by luck, and not with a hunting season. The work is run by wildlife specialists using a helicopter fitted with a forward-looking infrared camera that finds the hogs by body heat, day or night, and directs the crew to them from the air. On the ground, bait traps take whole groups at once. The federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service does the removals alongside the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, since LBL straddles the state line.

The reason 2026 landed better than past years was time. "Normally, it's just in January and February," said Scott Raymond, the public affairs officer for Land Between the Lakes. "We were able to expand that a little bit into March this year." More weeks in the air, more hogs off the land.

Because hunting is what let them spread in the first place. In late 2023 the Kentucky Fish and Wildlife Commission voted to end the state's year-round wild hog season, and the ban was finalized in 2024. It sounds backward until you know how the animals behave.

A group of wild pigs is called a sounder. When a sounder gets shot at, it does not thin out and stay put. It scatters, goes nocturnal, and gets smart about people, which makes the survivors far harder to find and trap. One hunter takes two hogs and educates the other twenty. Wildlife managers across the South learned this the expensive way, and several of them warned Kentucky to head off a "pig hunting culture" before it took root, because a population that people enjoy hunting is a population somebody has a reason to keep around. Hunting has never wiped out a wild-hog population anywhere. Coordinated trapping and aerial work has.

That is the whole paradox in one line: the state pulled 1,802 hogs off this ground, and it still wants your rifle to stay in the truck.

They root. A sounder turns a field or a food plot into what looks like a rototiller went through it, eating crops, wrecking native plants, fouling water, and competing with the deer and turkey people here actually want. Nationally, feral pigs run up an estimated $2.5 billion a year in damage and control costs, most of it in agriculture. On a place like LBL, with its restored bison and elk and around 250 kinds of birds, that rooting tears up ground the whole region uses.

Do not shoot it. Report it. Kentucky Fish and Wildlife asks people to call in sightings so a crew can trap the whole sounder instead of scattering it. A landowner can still put down a pig caught tearing up private property, but even then the state would rather get the call. One report that leads to a trapped group beats a dozen that only teach the herd to hide.

THE FACTS