I’m trying to come up with a thoughtful reply, but I can’t figure out how you managed to interpret my comment as “you should shoot at your kids, or otherwise handle firearms unsafely”.

Are you perhaps projecting onto me some ideas you have about the kinds of people who discuss guns?

Maybe because the whole premise of your hypothetical is how quickly you can start picking off hogs in the yard while the kids are out there? In what way would ANYONE consider it reasonable or safe to start shooting with kids in the range of fire?

I am definitely interpreting your lack of concern for small humans as someone who does not have kids nor understand their lack of ability to do whatever it is you think they should do when being shot at.

Again it’s hard to see how you got that from my post. It seems like guns are something of a dog whistle for you, so let’s just leave it at that.

Your original comment discusses the time it takes to go from having no gun to being in a position to fire your gun at wildlife that has bypassed your garden fence. You make no mention of the time it takes to actually retrieve the children from the garden who are too small and not strong enough to fight their way past the enormous number of hypothetical hogs. Those children need to be picked up and carried to safety before you can unload into the sea of brown fur that 30 to 50 feral hogs would become if packed into a small garden. Ideally, if those hogs are violent and armed with tusks that could break an arm, you should be rescuing the small, weak, juvenile humans before taking any other action.

A hurt pig can turn into a really dangerous creature, will charge against any human, including children, so shooting them is the worst idea possible. Females are social. Killing one of the small pigs will 100% grant triggering a vicious attack from their mother and aunts. Just running towards the children and allow the pigs an escape route would be a much safer move.

The tale looks much more like an excuse to explain having a lot of furtive hunting in the fridge IMO.

Did you mean to reply to me?

I haven’t been confronted with feral pigs, so I’ll take you at your word. What I can say with great confidence is that it doesn’t take 5 minutes to get a gun, so the fact that someone manages to shoot pigs in their back yard doesn’t in itself point to furtive hunting.

I guess that leaves us with two possibilities:

- poaching

- a bad response to a legitimate threat

You can rest assured that we agree both are bad.

It was for sure not poaching.

It is strictly legal to hunt feral pigs any time of the day or night (!!), any time of the year, without permit in Arkansas, so long as it's on private property. You can even do it on public property if you have a generic hunting license, though there's time-of-year and time-of-day restrictions in that case.

There is no bag limit. You can even do it with night vision.

But yes, shooting pigs with small children playing nearby isn't good. I don't know the context, maybe it was very obvious that the kids all got safely inside and accounted for.

If it was Europe I would say 100% excuse to poaching. I had seen similar cases here of hunters claiming that there are too much wildboars so they must be granted a special permit to hunt more out of season. Cameras at the same time don't show the wildpigcalipse that newspapers claim

... but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.

If this is a concern in some areas, just a small stone wall around the kids's playing area would deter the pigs to enter. They do not jump very well.

> .. but if is legal in US, is legal. Definitely unwise in any case.

It is only legal in a handful of states, usually those with insane quantities of feral pigs.

In a lot of the US, it would be illegal. However in Arkansas where the person in question was, it was legal on private property.

In nearby Alabama or Louisiana you need a permit, likewise in California. So in those states it would have been illegal. In Arkansas, Texas, or Oklahoma, there's no permit.

In Texas, it's legal on public property even. Texas has a feral pig population nearing 2m, which causes almost (supposedly) half a billion dollars in damage annually. Or $50m. Or a billion. It depends on the study.

> Definitely unwise in any case.

I think this relates to the specifics of the situation.

If you're on farmland, and you've ensured your family is in a safe place, it's pretty safe. The danger -- as I mentioned in a previous comment -- is that this kind of situational awareness is a perishable skill. If it's not being practiced (ideally by all parties involved), it's easy to make mistakes. It's definitely not like riding a bike.