Trapping Feral Pigs, and Other Parables of Modern Life

Professional trappers don't catch fast-breeding and destructive feral

pigs using hunting dogs and guns, or in little traps one or two at a

time. The wily pigs quickly learn to evade humans after such fleeting

contacts. So how do the pros trap entire feral pig herds, eliminating

them all, from granddads to piglets, in one go? They feed them, most

generously. They kill them with kindness.

First, in a clearing in the woods, the trappers build an enclosure

about twenty feet on a side and four feet high, made of stout wire

fencing. There is an opening on each of the four sides of the pen. The

pen is loaded with corn and other pig favorites. At first, the suspicious

hog honchos will send in a few of the little ones as scouts. The scouts

come and go at will, eating to their piggy satisfaction, until eventually

suspicions die and they are joined by every other member of the herd

right up the chain of command. The pigs soon come to believe that if

nothing bad has happened to them after entering the strange wire enclosure

full of corn, then nothing bad will ever happen. Their "normalcy

bias" kicks in very quickly.

Soon, the pigs can't imagine any other life. Rooting for tubers?

An unpleasant task of the forgotten past. Every night the herd eagerly

trots toward the free corn in the pen, and they all fail to notice when

one of the openings has been closed off with another panel of wire

fencing during the day. Pigs are often said to be as smart as dogs, but

neither can count to four. Nor are the closings of the second or third

openings much noticed. Finally, all that remains for the trapper to do

is to install a powerful spring-driven trap door above the last opening.

The entire tribe of formerly wary feral hogs once again enters the pen,

and with a metallic clang their miraculous corn nirvana turns into a

death trap.

The moral of the story: If it looks too good to be true, it probably

is. Don't go inside the "free corn" pen, not even when all the doors

are open. Free food is as dangerous as the sirens' song to ancient

mariners. It is all too easy to get used to being fed, and then to miss

the exits closing one at a time.

2. The Turkeys and Farmer Brown

Pigs are Einsteins compared to domesticated turkeys. These turkeys

are so stupid that care must be taken to prevent them from killing

themselves by accident. For example, if incorrectly stimulated, they

might stampede into a corner of a feeding lot and trample many of

their brethren to death in their urgency to follow the herd.

If turkeys think at all, they think of Farmer Brown as "the food

man" or "the food god." So you can imagine their simple and unreserved

joy at seeing the food man arriving to dispense the daily

manna. For 364 straight days they believe they are living in turkey

heaven, and they worship the food man, until on day 365 he unexpectedly

takes an ax to their necks. (Hat tip to Nassim Nicholas Taleb

and his seminal book, "The Black Swan" If you have not yet read it,

you are way behind the learning curve. It's waiting for you at your

local public library.)

The moral of the story: If somebody is feeding you every day and

asking for nothing in return, give an occasional thought to his motives

and his possible end plans. Not everybody that feeds you loves you.

The normalcy bias can kill you.

3. The Buffalo Jump

Native American Indians hunted on foot before the arrival of Spanish

horses in North America. Bows and arrows and spears were not

showstoppers against stampeding herds of bison, each weighing up

to a ton. The Indians understood bison much better than the bison

understood the Indians, however, and so the bison repeatedly failed

to discern that all the pesky humans waving flags and setting grass

fires were funneling them into a narrow draw and then toward a high

cliff, with the squaws and children waiting down below to commence

the butchery.

The moral of the story: If you are being stampeded and funneled,

it might be toward disaster, not away from it. Take any exit and go

another direction. Read about the then-Greek city of Smyrna in 1922

to see a human Buffalo Jump in action.

4. The Lemmings

The lemmings we are interested in are the small furry rodents that live

on islands around Norway. For most of history, their mass charges

into the frigid waters were seen as some kind of group suicide. Today,

they’re understood to be the result of the little rodent's rapid gestation

period kicking into high gear during rare periods of abundance of

seed grasses sprouting madly during particularly mild arctic summers.

In a matter of months the lemming population explodes, but

eventually every last seed is eaten, and not another seed will appear

until after the passing of the long arctic winter. The starving rodents

packing the small islands can either die in place or undertake a desperate

swim to greener pastures on other islands beckoning in the

distance.

The moral of the story: There doesn't need to be a pig trapper or

a turkey farmer in the equation to cause a mass die-off event; nature

can do it all on her own. And nature doesn't care about your schedule,

or your personal problems.

5. The Land Crab Massacre

One day in Puerto Rico a platoon of Navy SEALs drove a few trucks

and vans to an isolated rifle range way out in some swampy corner of

the Roosevelt Roads Naval Base, now sadly closed. A few miles of

gravel road paralleled the Caribbean shore, with mangrove trees close

on both sides of the narrow track. You had to access this rifle range

at certain times during the daily tidal cycle, or the road might be under

water. The frogmen spent the day shooting guns and blowing things

up, then at sunset packed up the trucks for the quick run back to their

beloved NavSpecWar Det Caribbean.

Truck headlights illuminated a moving sheet of land crabs, migrating

from the ocean toward the land for the night. Land crabs have

a body about the size of a fist, and one claw as big as a Maine lobster's.

They were so tightly packed that you could not toss a hat into

their midst without hitting two or three: there were a near solid mass

of them covering a mile of gravel road and the mangrove swamps on

both sides. All the SEALs could do was drive over them in their

government trucks, pulverizing thousands of them, maybe millions,

leaving two wide swaths of crushed crabs, crackling and squishing

beneath our tires for a mile.

On the return trip to the range the next day, not a sign remained

of the land crab holocaust. The smashed crustaceans had immediately

been devoured by their erstwhile kin, who were probably happy that

the hard work of shell-cracking had already been done by Goodyear

tires. A mile-long crab massacre was followed by a cannibal feast that

left no trace, overnight.

The moral of the story: Don't be caught in the middle of a mass

migration where you have no room to maneuver independently. Any

outside force, or your neighbors, can smite you at will. Like Desert

Storm's "Highway of Death," refugee columns attract warbird attention

the way that honey attracts flies. History is full of refugee

columns being strafed, on purpose or through mis-identification. Or

like the bison, refugee columns can be herded into traps, and the

individual refugee can do nothing to prevent it. This is a paradoxical

case where the normally presumed “safety in numbers” is a deadly

betrayer instead of a savior. Given a choice, going it alone beats The

Buffalo Jump every time, but it’s very hard to bolt from the herd.

6. The Rat Flood

This occurs in northeastern India and parts of Burma. Only in the last

century was this bizarre cycle of human famine following unexplained

super plagues of rats finally understood. It turns out that

forests of a certain bamboo species go into a periodic explosion of

fruiting, producing seed nuts on a 48-year cycle, a trick of nature that

had been missed until the middle of the 20th century. Intrigued by the

half-century cycle of human famines reported in 1862, 1911, and

1959, modern scientists finally noticed the link between the famines

and the bamboo tree cycle. By 2006, the next time the bamboo began

to fruit, they were on hand to observe the complete phenomenon.

The superabundance of nuts every 48 years leads to an explosion

in the population of Asian black rats, which live in the thick bamboo

forests. Because of their rapid breeding cycle, the number of rats per

acre shoots up to astronomical levels, but eventually the entire mega97

crop of nuts is consumed, and a lemming-like mass starvation event

follows.

Millions of starving rats break out from the forests in what the

local people call the Rat Flood. The onrushing solid tide of scurrying

rats destroys entire crops in the ground and attack unprotected

granaries, leading to an immediate human famine. Millions of dying,

dead and decaying rats add to the misery by polluting streams and

causing other intensely nasty sanitary problems. A once-every-48-

years bamboo nut super-fruiting leads to millions of rats and then to

human famine.

The moral of the story: If subtle connections are missed, a radical

new situation may at first wrongly be considered a Black Swan Event.

But sometimes the Black Swans can be seen in advance, if seemingly

unconnected links and mechanisms are properly understood. And if

you’re not sure what a Black Swan Event is, you definitely need to

read Taleb’s book.

7. Hippos and Crocodiles

Certain stretches of African rivers dry up from time to time, stranding

all the water-dependent creatures in a new desert-scape dotted with

evaporating ox-bow lakes. During the normal times of plentiful

water, hippos and crocs are the masters of the riverine environment.

Lions and elephants interface with them at the edges, but pose no

challenge to the undisputed lords of the river.

That is, until the water level drops during a severe drought cycle,

and the last stagnant ponds dry to cracked mud. Then the crocs and

hippos, already starving and dehydrated, must bolt overland to

discover another pond or river extension. Few of them moving crosscountry

in the desert heat live to see another waterhole. Their

overland fatality rate is lemming-like, as lions, hyenas and vultures

swarm in when they finally drop to the earth.

The moral of the story: Don't be a hippo if your stretch of river

might dry up. Be adaptable to many environments, not just the master

of one that might prove to be impermanent or vulnerable to outside

impact. Better yet, be a bird, able to fly away to a safe location as

conditions on the ground change for the worse. Always have an agile

mobility plan—or two or three.

8. Hungry Horses

If you read a lot, you will run across these stories a few times a year.

As a recurring phenomenon it's not as well known as some of the

others, but it happens often enough to merit attention. Do an internet

search on starving horses, and you will find many such sad stories.

Typically, a utility company repairman, meter reader, contractor or

salesman will visit a remote ranch or farm and be horrified at the sight

of dozens or more starving horses or cows. There may even be dead

livestock on the ground. The witness informs the sheriff, who comes

out and arrests the land owner for animal cruelty and other charges.

The land owner will usually end up doing prison time, often for

what he believes was no crime. He was merely doing the best he

could, but times were hard. He had lost his job or been injured, but

bottom line, he couldn't afford trips to the feed store. They were just

plain hungry times, they were all hungry, but the livestock would fatten

up again just as soon as he got enough money for the feed, or the

drought ended and greened up the fields. And it’s going to rain any

day now.

This sad dynamic recalls Confederate Major Henry Wirz, the

commander of the open-air POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia.

Everybody was hungry, civilian, military and prisoner. They were

hungry times. There was no food to give the detainees. Nobody had

a plan for the Union POWs, except to corral them in a given location.

In the year before April 1865, nearly one-third of the 45,000 Union

prisoners died. Wirz was hanged in Washington late in 1865, after

one of the first American war-crime trials, yet to this day many

believe he got a raw deal. After all, his apologists say, he was doing

the best he could under the terrible circumstances.

The moral of the story: The guy who is starving you may sincerely

be trying to feed you, but his best efforts might not be enough.

In the end, if you are penned in, you can be killed by simple starvation

and neglect, requiring no directly malign intention by your captors.

Starvation just happens naturally when insufficient food is coming

into the enclosure.

9. The Crazy Cat Lady

When the stink of the crazy cat lady's house sufficiently annoys the

neighborhood, she is either found inside dead, or if she is still alive

she must be taken away to the crazy old people's home. After the

surviving starved cats are taken away by folks in hazmat suits, her

house will often be burned down to prevent the spread of disease.

Most of the rescued cats are too far gone and must be euthanized at

the animal shelter.

Yet her motives were perfectly pure! The crazy old lady truly

loved her pets. She could not bear to imagine them out in the cold

rain, hungry and alone, so she invited them inside. Imagine that you

are the fifth or sixth cat adopted into her warm and dry house. An old

stray would consider himself to have landed in cat paradise. Soft rugs,

plentiful food, and a kind human hand await inside. Purrr-fect.

It's a great deal even if you are the tenth cat invited inside, but not

so great when you are the two hundredth and the inside population is

breeding unchecked. The crazy old cat lady, in spite of her very good

intentions, ends up presiding over the feline version of Auschwitz, a

true death machine, killing her beloved cats slowly by starvation,

dehydration, and disease.

The moral of the story: Good intentions don't mean squat if you

trap other living beings inside an enclosure and then you can't feed

them. The holocaust that results is still on you. Your frequently

expressed good intentions about your trapped population will not be

accepted. "I was doing my best to help them" will ring as hollow a

defense as "I was just following orders." North Korea comes to mind

as a very large enclosure.

10. The Grasshopper and the Locust

Grasshoppers are the same creature as locusts, but as population

density and crowding increase, the small green insects undergo a

morphological change caused by increasing tactile stimulation that

leads to new hormonal releases. Little Jiminy Cricket will more than

double in size, take on a darkened and armored appearance, and then

develop effective flying wings. The morphing locusts will breed even

more often, in preparation for their famous swarming behavior.

The tiny grasshoppers, instead of accepting the fate of other

overpopulated, starving species, turn into warlike invaders and take

wing to go in search of greener pastures, leaving famine and death in

their wake. An emergency breakout plan is part of their DNA.

The moral of the story: Soft and timid little creatures can turn

fearsome and go on the warpath if their very survival is at stake. Even

a weak and normally helpless neighbor can become a danger if his

survival is at stake, especially if he joins a gang where he benefits

from strength in numbers.

Larger Lessons

If somebody else is feeding you—even if you entered the community

or the building of your own free will, even if all the doors and gates

are currently open or unlocked—you may already be living in your

future prison. All it takes is a change in management to turn your

Holiday Inn into San Quentin. Like the feral pigs, you might find that

the exits are all sealed off, and the free food was meant only to lure

you in and fatten you for slaughter.

If you are kept in an enclosure, even if you are currently being

fed with food brought in from outside, you are living at the mercy of

the status quo. The benevolent dictator who satisfies your needs may

be replaced overnight by Caligula or Stalin. Your Holiday Inn might

be sold to or taken over by the next Nazi SS.

Or authority might be abdicated entirely, leaving the prisoners

starving in their pens and cells; think Baghdad Zoo after the 2003

American invasion. A power vacuum, such as occurs when the crazy

cat lady becomes infirm, can be as deadly to a trapped population as

the turkey farmer and the pig hunter are to their own deliberate target

populations.

Creatures that are able to flee starvation will do so. If presented

with an impossible barrier, they might attempt a lemming-like swim,

or head across desert terrain like hippos fleeing the last dried-up pond.

But they will try. They will not starve in place.

Or starving millions may break out and appear like a sudden

refugee tidal wave, as is the case with the Rat Flood in India. Or the

millions might turn warlike and break out violently like locusts, bent

on temporary conquest and laying waste to the land in their search for

sustenance. But few creatures will starve to death quietly in their

dens. Social ecologists will ignore this lesson at their peril.

Most of these parables involve a densely packed population that

undergoes a cutoff in their food supply that is too rapid to permit them

an adjustment period. The more densely packed the population, the

more likely that when their food is abruptly cut off, they will attempt

to break out in search of new food sources.

Urban areas in the United States and other countries present many

risks similar to some of the parables cited above. America has

somehow evolved a system for artificially maintaining the lives of

millions inside open-air prisons, with free food dispensed to the

voluntarily semi-incarcerated. It is all too easy to grow dependent on

free food, as the feral pigs might attest. Turkeys don't know any

better, being born in captivity, but the same fate awaits them at the

end of the free-food line.

Today, we have become a nation of slaves.

One group is made up of the wage-slaves, basically working for the

government so that politicians can dispense taxed largesse to their pet

interest groups in return for their votes. Fifty million Americans are

currently enslaved on the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) food stamp

plantation. The masters of both the producers and the moochers

are the looters “employed” in the government sector, robbing Peter to

buy Paul's vote in order to raise taxes on Peter yet again. Combined,

the looters and the moochers will always outnumber the producers,

until some population-altering event disrupts the status quo. (Hat tip

to Neil Boortz for his looters, producers, and moochers trichotomy.)

The urban population density is obviously high, with no possibility

of providing its own food through local agriculture. In the event

of a food supply disruption, such as a breakdown of the EBT system,

it’s very likely that a large part of the urban population will break out

in search of food, rather than quietly starving in place after the supermarkets

and other nearby food sources are looted.

Like restarting a diesel engine with an air-locked fuel line, getting

the food supply system of a city running again cannot be done by

turning a key and stomping on the accelerator. The diesel engine airlock

must be tediously purged and the injectors bled. This takes time,

and there is no shortcut method, no matter your state of desperation

to get the engine running.

The modern “just in time” food supply system and our lack of

old-fashioned food warehouses will worsen the “diesel air-lock” in

the broken food supply. It will be extremely tricky to restart the food

supply conveyor into an out-of-control city in the middle of deadly

food riots. The hungry population may break out in anger before the

authorities are able to introduce some type of emergency feeding

plans. In fact, the desperate rioting mobs, paradoxically, will be the

main impediment to delivering the food. FEMA might rescue one or

a few cities, but will be impotent if the food supply crisis is widespread

and many cities are affected.

In normal times our urban inhabitants are free to come and go at

will. But cities are usually divided into manageable sections by

highways, railroad trunk lines, rivers, ravines, steep mountainsides

and other manmade or geographical features. The authorities, or those

living in areas adjoining the boroughs experiencing starvation, may

or may not permit the free entry or passage of hungry refugees. If the

authorities or suburban vigilantes wish to stop the breakout of the

starving masses, it will have to be done with extreme force, if it can

be done at all.

Roughly speaking, these are the three alternatives facing people

who find themselves in an urban area when the outside supply of

food stops:

1. Die in place like the neglected horses, or the felines trapped in

the crazy old cat lady's house of horrors. This only happens to captive

populations, but it happens. Some armed force might be guarding the

bridges and highways around your ’hood, with strict orders to

“contain the problem.” The Warsaw Ghetto could become the model

for ultimate urban renewal and a radical rebalancing of the moocherto-

producer population ratio. As with the crazy old cat lady's putrid

house, fire may be the cleanser of choice. Again, read about The Great

Fire of Smyrna in 1922.

2. Attempt relocation too late, like the lemmings and the hippos.

This was the fate of many of the Jews in Germany, the Armenians

and Greeks in Turkey, and the Christians in the Middle East today. The human normalcy bias is so strong that it's difficult for most

people to understand, after a few peaceful generations, that bad can

go to worse and then to fatal in a few unexpected jumps. The Jews,

Armenians and Greeks all clung to the belief that things could only

get better—until it was too late to flee successfully. The Copts in

Egypt may be the next population of Christians marched into a desert

to die, while the world watches.

3. Break out, like the bamboo forest rats and the locusts in search

of more nutrition in the next valley. But don't expect to be welcomed

in the next county if you are forced into a mass refugee exodus. Instead,

you will be considered a plague of hungry locusts, and locusts

are exterminated whenever possible. When you move into the hinterland

you may find crude signs posted stating that Trespassers Will Be

Shot On Sight. Signs put up by very serious hard-eyed people with

more scoped deer rifles than EBT cards among them.

It will now be pointed out that there are more rural than urban

users of the EBT system. This may be true in absolute numbers, but

it is not important. There is a reason why the parables in this essay

focus on situations where population densities are high when the

food-rug is pulled out from under. Out in the wider country, there is

a likelihood of the former EBT user moving in with other rural kin.

Truck gardens and farmer's markets are not such a distant memory,

and arable land is plentiful. A deer or a pig might wind up over a fire.

“A country boy can survive,” to quote one modern philosopher.

But there will be no surviving within the urban death traps when

the seemingly perpetual food conveyor grinds to a halt for any of a

number of causes. The only question is, will the EBT urban plantation

slaves die in place, penned in by suburban rifle fire or other means,

or will they break out in a starving flood? Possibly even with government

help, on government buses? To be taken to whatever wire fenced

FEMA camp enclosure awaits them—or perhaps to your local

high schools as a “temporary” measure?

Either way, what an unholy mess we find ourselves in. Our urban

plantation population of EBT slaves has become a Damocles Sword

hanging above the greater society. That perpetual food conveyor had

better not experience a hiccup—for any reason—or in an eye blink

there will be unholy hell to pay. Wise citizens will carefully consider

the meta-terrain around them for future Black Swans, Black Swans

that in reality might be located at the intersections of already understood

natural phenomena and the unintended consequences of social

experimentation gone disastrously wrong.

The final moral of the story: Don't live in—or near—a densely

populated enclosure where all the food is brought in from outside,

even if today the exit doors are all open. (And now I will be called

the usual pejoratives by the usual politically correct imbeciles, who

would condemn a child for noticing that a too-swiftly receding ocean

tide might be a tsunami warning. “Don't ever mention tsunamis!” the

imbeciles will shout at the child. “It is forbidden! Tabu! Haram! If

you mention tsunamis, you will cause them!” Wise people ignore

these imbeciles and press on with learning, and warning others.)

[This is an excerpt from The Bracken Collection, Essays and Short Fiction. It’s available directly from me in printed format, or from Amazon in print and e-book form. Here’s my website, EnemieEnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com, and here’s my Amazon author page.