“If we get foot and mouth disease in the country, feral pigs will be the vector that will take it from Cape York all the way to the Mornington Peninsula,” Pearse said.
Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty has committed $26 million to fund the feral pig control program for another two years, including $13.1 million in last week’s budget.
She said the extra funding to reduce pig numbers would help farmers and other landholders, minimise biosecurity risks to livestock, and lower the risk of environmental and ecological damage.
“There’s still more to do, which this essential funding will enable,” Moriarty said.
NSW Farmers said the program would need to run until 2027 to cut the pig population down to a manageable size.
Feral pigs in Oscar Pearse’s paddocks on Sunday. Credit: Heidi Morris
“If we can’t cull 80 per cent of these feral pigs promptly, they will outbreed us,” president Xavier Martin said.
“I’ve been absolutely flattened off a farm motorbike by one – a boar went straight through me … they have been sighted in villages and towns, and when they come into close proximity with people, they’re not beyond attacking people, as I know from personal experience.”
But the Invasive Species Council said the state government control program was bad policy, with no targets or monitoring.
“We will never win the war with our currently available techniques,” advocacy director Jack Gough said. “What we can do is invest our money in targeted ways that protect key environmental and agricultural assets, not just throw money out there and hope someone can kill a few pigs and crow about it.”
Gough said it was difficult to know how many pigs were roaming the state, but would not be surprised if the number was well over a million.
It would make more sense to target areas where pig numbers were small but growing, like south-west Sydney, the North Coast and the Riverina, rather than areas that were already overrun, he added.
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