Razorback - Introduction To The Americas

Introduction To The Americas

Domestic pigs were first introduced to the Americas in the sixteenth century.

Christopher Columbus is known to have intentionally released domestic swine in the West Indies during his second voyage in order to provide future expeditions with a freely available food supply.

Hernando de Soto is known to have introduced Eurasian domestic swine to Florida in 1539, although Juan Ponce de León may have introduced the first pigs into mainland Florida in 1521.

The practice of introducing domestic pigs into the New World continued throughout the exploration periods of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is thought that the Eurasian wild boar (Sus scrofa scrofa), which originally ranged from Great Britain to European Russia may have also been introduced.

In South America, during the early twentieth century, free-ranging boars were introduced in Uruguay for hunting purposes and eventually crossed the border into Brazil in the 1990s, quickly becoming an invasive species. Licensed private hunting of both feral boars and their hybrids with domestic pigs was authorized from August 2005 on in the Southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, although their presence as a pest had been already noticed by the press as early as 1994. Releases and escapes from unlicensed farms (established because of increased demand for boar meat as an alternative to pork), however, continued to bolster feral populations and by mid-2008 licensed hunts had to be expanded to the states of Santa Catarina and São Paulo.

Recently-established Brazilian boar populations are not to be confused with long established populations of feral domestic pigs (porcos monteiros), which have existed mainly in the Pantanal for more than a hundred years, along with native peccaries. The demographic dynamics of the interaction between feral pig populations and those of the two native species of peccaries (Collared Peccary and White-lipped Peccary) is obscure and is being studied presently. It has been proposed that the existence of feral pigs could somewhat ease jaguar predation on peccary populations, as jaguars would show a preference for hunting pigs, when these are available.