On the Job With Edward Dickey, Houston’s Feral Hog Patrolman

Welcome to Wildlife Week, an exploration of what happens when nature and home meet.

Edward Dickey would’ve caught that whole hog herd (or the whole hog "sounder," as those in the industry know it). He always does. He’s been successfully trapping feral hogs around the Houston area for five years now, studying their moves and evolving his practices to out-maneuver their intelligence. Dickey is the guy you call when you have a feral hog problem, as large swaths of the Texas city currently do. So there’s no reason to doubt that he would’ve caught the whole sounder in nearby Sugar Land, if the homeowners association hadn’t chased him off.  

As Dickey told me over the phone recently, he didn’t mean to get in trouble on that hot summer day in the suburban city just southwest of Houston. He assumed that, since several Sugar Land homeowners had gotten together and pooled their money for his services, he had the HOA’s blessing. That wasn’t the case. Mere hours before he intended to finish the job, he got a call demanding he remove his materials "immediately," as the HOA claimed he was trespassing and that the traps posed a danger to children and pets.  

"The other HOAs have never been worried about my trapping system being a danger to the public," Dickey says, adding that he told the Sugar Land HOA he was both bonded and insured. The devices themselves are clearly marked and look like what they are: hog traps. Plus, the tall panels don’t even have a real gate attached until Dickey installs it late in the process, and the gate only drops if he presses the button. But such are the risks of trying to eradicate 350-pound hogs in one of the country’s most sprawling suburbs.  

Dickey, who came to hog hunting as a career after growing up hunting with his family in Texas, deals with HOAs frequently, usually because they’ve hired him. While he also clears feral hogs for ranchers around the state’s farmland, it’s Houston’s growing neighborhoods that need the most help. Feral hogs, which are both a meme and a real threat to humans and their pets, were once a problem primarily for farmers in rural areas, but are increasingly disrupting more settled territory: the suburbs.  

Dickey told me he’s personally noticed an uptick in hog activity around Houston since he started professionally eradicating the animals half a decade ago. The Woodlands, a suburban city on the northeast side of town, are rife with feral hogs, and residents in Anahuac—the state’s alligator capital, southeast of Houston—claim they’ve been chased by the hoofed animals. In Fulshear, on the far-west side of Houston, a teenager killed a 400-pound hog after it enacted severe damage to local ranches. Dickey is currently at work on a job in the northeast Humble-Atascocita area. The hogs are everywhere. 

Part of it has to do with the city’s rapid growth. As construction spreads across Houston in every direction, builders—and, eventually, residents—are encountering existing hog populations that were chased out by new developments. It doesn’t help that the suburbs are the perfect environment for the feral hogs, which are drawn to the trappings of quiet human life—namely: moist, worm-laden lawns and soft-soiled gardens.