High on the Hog

In early May, less than two weeks before the hog-dog rodeo was set to take place in Needville, Healey "strongly urged" Schooley to cancel it.

The Fort Bend/Southwest Sun ran a front-page story on the controversy. Relatives of Danny Hill--the event's namesake, a childhood friend of Schooley's who died in a car wreck at age 31--no longer wanted his name attached to the event if it was going to be denigrated.

Schooley canceled the event, but he doesn't get what the fuss is about. The hog-bay trial, he says, offered good, clean family entertainment that raised money for the community.

He goes on to condemn the well-publicized raid earlier this month of a pit bull-breeding operation in Liberty County, in which authorities seized more than 300 of the aggressive terriers used for illegal dog-fighting. Ninety-five percent of these dogs will be euthanized, according to lead investigator Mark Timmers, a constable's sergeant for Harris County Precinct 6.

"Why are these so-called animal-rights folks considered humane when all they did is round up and kill the dogs?" Schooley asks. "Those dogs are amazing athletes bred to fight. They love it."

Once, Schooley says, while on a hunt, his dogs caught a hog several miles away. By the time he got to the scene, the dogs had eaten so much of the hog, they were passed out next to it. The hog was still breathing, though its face was completely chewed off from behind its ears to the tip of its snout.

"It was the most grotesque fucking thing I've ever seen," he says. "But putting a hog in a pen, where it's not gonna get killed, where it's probably not even gonna get hurt, that's against the law. Come on!"

Even Healey is sympathetic to this argument. Referring to the state's aggressive tactics for getting rid of feral hogs, he says, "Some would probably find aerial shootings to be more offensive."

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In deep woods after midnight, under an enormous Texas sky aglow with constellations, Scott Trammell steps into a stirrup and sits atop his horse. One hand balances a flashlight with the reins; the other shields his face as he spurs the steed forward through heavy brush thick with cacti and tangled tree limbs. He pauses in a clearing. A thin line of blood streaks the left side of his face like war paint.

Crickets chirp; a merciful breeze whistles through the leaves; 10 collared curs rustle the tall grasses on all sides. More than three hours have passed. Trammell, a construction worker in San Antonio, wonders aloud to his friend--Jason Fairchild, who rides alongside on a mule and knows these 1,000 acres 50 miles southeast of the Alamo City like the back of his hand--if they're going to come up empty.

Just then, the dogs disappear. The two men stop, cock their heads and strain to listen. A couple of minutes pass. Silence.

Faintly, in the distance, a dog barks. Another minute passes. More barking. A hog squeals. The men take off, breaking into a gallop for a half-mile or so along an open trail. As they ride closer, the dogs rally, barking like mad. The hog's cries are like a woman's hysterical screams interspersed with deep guttural snorts and growls.

The men leap from their mounts, tie them to trees and crawl through the dense brush. Trammell clicks his flashlight off, knowing a hog will charge at the light.

All 10 dogs are mobbing the 80-pound sow, which lies motionless, though it continues to shriek and squeal. The dogs' powerful jaws are clamped to every side of the hog, tearing at its limbs, ears and snout. They rip a hole in the sow's stomach, unravel its long, slimy intestines and drag them through the dirt.

The hog dies a few minutes later, but the dogs go on chewing at its flesh and playing with its innards. Trammell grabs a couple of dogs by their collars and yanks them off. He slaps the others on their noses with the back of a knife. "Dead hog," he tells them. "Dead hog, dead hog, dead hog, dead hog."

Trammell runs his knife along the sow's stomach and chest, then plunges a hand inside, searching for piglets. There are none. Even so, he says to his friend, triumphantly, "Killing that one little baby sow saved us hundreds of hogs."

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John Goodwin has one word for the way most hunters kill wild hogs: obscene.

"Scaring a wild boar with a dog, then jumping on it, stabbing it with a knife, while the animal bleeds in agony--of course we're against that," says Goodwin, deputy manager for animal fighting issues with The Humane Society of America in Washington, D.C.

According to Goodwin, hunters "should be sharpshooters able to put a single bullet through a vital organ."

Many critics consider the humane society an anti-hunting group bent on outlawing the use of dogs for hunting any animals, including squirrels, doves, ducks, pheasants, quails and, yes, wild hogs. Goodwin doesn't deny this. But he says it's not an issue the group is currently working on.

By lobbying for legislation and assisting law enforcement in raiding events, the humane society has played a central role in efforts to crack down on hog-dog rodeos across the South.

Louisiana, one of just two states that still allow cockfighting, in 2004 became the first to ban hog-catch trials. Leading up to the vote, legislators engaged in "a boisterous hour-long House debate in which one lawmaker wore a hog nose and scores of others squealed and clucked animal noises," according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune.