Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
The Cobra Effect is precisely what I was alluding to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
In my home state we have tons of invasive species due to similar strategies over the years. It's a serious problem.
I've been chased by wild hogs a couple times. It's scary. However the answer is obviously not a massively robust virus which kills any pig it touches.
But we have to be practical about introducing invasive, hardy species into an ecosystem.
Reread my post. I was talking about introducing a virus to kill off feral hogs.
What if it jumps species?
What if our livestock doesn't recover?
If you read the article, it describes how hardy this virus is. That's not the kind of virus we want spreading and evolving.
Protecting the pork industry is all well and good, I love ham as much as anybody else, but sacrificing a few years of pork production seems like it could be a good deal if it means the eradication of environmentally destructive feral hogs.