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My name is Aaron Sumrall. I'm a county extension agent for Texas AgriLife Extension as part
of the A&M University System. I'm right now currently in San Jacinto County, and I'm also
a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University in College Station. Alright on these traps, whenever
you're thinking about your traps, your corral traps is going to be mainly what we're visiting
about today. Main thing you want to do is, starting at the ground, make sure that all
of your panels are flush with the ground. You do not want any spacing below that bottom
line of your panel. Anything that a pig can get their nose under, they will go under,
so you want to make sure you're flush with the ground in all parts of your trap. Livestock
trails can present an issue, where you have to avoid having an avenue for those hogs to
get their nose under that. Also, like what we talked about with the cameras, post facing.
Always space your posts no more than every 4 feet, 3-4 feet is optimal in your post spacing.
Whenever you drive your post in, if you look at the spade of the post at the bottom, if
you're going to be moving the traps periodically, make sure that you don't drive the post into
the ground at the point where the tip of the spade is below the ground. Reason being is
you're going to have a lot of grass roots that are going to grow over the top of the
blade of that spade, and it's going to be more difficult to pull out. It doesn't need
to be that deep, in addition. So what you're going to want to do is make sure that this
trap maintains its integrity, but it's not too rigid with the posts driven too deep where
an animal can use that rigidity of the trap to escape. So next thing you're going to want
to think of is the height of the trap. Make sure that the height of each trap is never
below five feet. The five foot height is what you want to look at as a minimum, with the
four inch square spacing. These are what they term as a "horse panel" or a "utility panel."
They are 4 inch by 4 inch square spacing, 5 foot high. You can get them in the 16 foot
length or the 20 foot length. The size of the trap is going to be dictated, sometimes
based on the camera. If you have smaller sounders, and you know that's what you have, you can
get away with a smaller trap. Ideally, bigger is better. You want to make sure you can get
the biggest trap out there that you can afford to put out. That traps that we use is typically
a 5 to 7 panel trap, and we shape those traps always, rule of thumb is to never put any
right angles in your traps. Everything needs to be a flowing curve or circular shape, never
putting a right angle in there to allow those animals a place to basically piggy-back and
find a way to get out of there. Tying your posts to your gates or to your line posts
on your gates, you're going to want to make sure that you put extra reinforcements on
areas where you may have a weakness that exists, and that's going to be at your seams and where
they join the post. What we use to fix these panels to the posts and to the gateway with
is just a number 9 baling wire, and what we do on the gates is we put at least 5 or 6
ties on each side of the gate. On each of the line posts, we will put a minimum of 4
ties to each of the line posts, with the first one at the bottom of the trap, and increments
up to the top, but with 4 or 5 in there. At the seams of the trap, what we have is overlapped
the seams of each panel with 4 inches of panel of overlap at each of the seams, and we'll
put at least 6 or 7 of the ties at each of those seams. That way it'll allow for the
give in those seams. But make sure that you overlap your seams. As far as the remainder
of the trap, just making sure. I guess one of the main benefit of the trap is that your
non-target species and the ease of release of those animals. A five foot fence does not
present any issue for a deer to be able to escape, and obviously the raccoons and the
opossums and things like that can crawl back through the panel spacing. So making sure
that basically the only thing that you're going to hold in that trap is going to be
the target species, feral pigs. In the event that you do have the proper facility to market
your animals to, one of the concerns that you're going to have to think about while
you're building your trap is how you're going to get the hogs out of that trap. Many times
you may only have one or two folks that are there to trap to try to load hogs and to transport
hogs. You need to think about the trap's dimensions, and what you can do to make it easier on you.
One of the first things that you need to do while you are building your trap is to put
in what we term a false wall into your trap. What that false wall is is just simply another,
additional panel that's affixed to the perimeter wall of your trap that will allow you to basically
sweep that panel around and reduce the size of your trap. Now what we've done here is
on another smaller scale is to create that false wall, and you need to find out where
it's going to terminate at. The ends of this panel will be attached by rope or by some
type of pulley system which is very simple to assemble. But you'll be on the outside
of the trap with ropes attached to this or something like that, and you'll pull this
panel around, all the while sweeping your hogs to the front of the trap. Whenever you
get this swept all the way to the front of the trap, it's going to affix as close to
the trigger as you can get it and reduce the size of your trap. So with the addition of
an additional 20 foot panel, we've cut the size of a relatively large trap by 3/4 in
size. So it makes it a lot more readily available to load hogs out of this type or size of this
trap. Another thing is going to be your trap dimensions. The trap that we're in right now
is a tear drop trap where we have a confined neck, almost the shape of a loading chute
that you'd find for other livestock species. Whereas opposed to the other trap we talked
about earlier being the lobed type clover end, this trap being the tear drop trap is
a lot more readily used while removing feral pigs because it's easier to back a trailer
up to the gate and load them out. Whereas on the lobed end of the trap, it's difficult
to get the trailer close enough to the trap gate to load those animals because of the
lobing not allowing the trailer to get close. So, whenever you're thinking about marketing
animals, first of all, you need to make sure you're taking them to an approved facility.
Second of all, you need to think about the trap design that you're going to have to use
to be more efficient in your loading efforts, and then again maybe a false wall may be something
you can incorporate into your trap designs to make it a little easier on you. Again,
think about the marketing before you get started, and one of the more profitable marketing areas
for feral hogs is marketing to yourself.