Eating Aliens: One Man's Adventures Hunting Invasive Animal Species by Jackson Landers Read Free Book Online

for the hunt, and didn’t know any of the state hunting regulations. Suddenly it became all too clear why the morning sign-ups were such a mess. The feds had lent their man to the state, and he was now nominally representing the state to the feds as they hashed out state hunting-license issues. Except that none of them had any idea what the others were talking about.
    With the logic as this USDA biologist presented it, there was no scenario in which they would actually be willing to kill the invasive pigs. They were there to study the damage the pigs were doing, simply in order to document it. That documentation would be used to obtain more funding to study how bad the problem was. At no point does anyone involved in this process actually make an effort to solve the problem. That would be counterproductive in terms of perpetuating the system. Once you solve the problem, it’s no longer there to be studied. Each step, taken on its own, sort of made sense. I could understand how each individual in the system came to do what he was doing in good faith, including the biologist at Back Bay. But as a whole, it added up to policy that seemed to accomplish nothing.
    Bob and I changed out of our wet clothes in the brush behind where we had parked the truck. We drove home pondering how the strategy for combating an ecologically dangerous species could have evolved into something this absurd. There had to be a better way to fight feral pigs.
    In search of that better way, I got in touch with Daniel Gentry, of Perry, Georgia, and arranged to visit him for a few days to see how they hunt pigs in the South. We’d found him through a friend of a friend of someone Bob discovered in an Internet forum about tractors. Neither of us had ever met the guy, but I’d had a pretty good string of luck with driving hundreds and even thousands of miles to meet up with strangers in order to hunt odd animals.
    The leaves on the trees were fiery shades of orange, red, and yellow when Bob and I left home, and as we drove south the fall landscape turned back to summer. The countryside grew greener and the air warmer. Signs for Starbucks disappeared and those for Waffle House took their place. Wisps of Spanish moss dangled from the trees and filtered the light of the setting sun.
    We found Daniel’s place at around eight at night. I knocked on the door and there he was, ready to go, in his navy blue military-style trousers with a pistol strapped to his hip. He looked to be around twenty years old, thin, lean, and serious. After hellos, he handed me an AR-15 with a night-vision scope. This guy was all business! We walked out back to his fifty-yard range so I could try out the rifle and he could see how I shot.
    This is an important ritual among people who are hunting together for the first time. I’ve worked as a hunting guide and I know the feeling Daniel probably had. When some unknown person shows up to hunt with you, you’ve got to worry about what he can do with a rifle. You ask yourself, “Does this person know what he’s doing? What are his limitations? Will he do foolish, unsafe things with the gun?” A good host or guide needs to find out these things before the hunting starts. Because of this, some type of seemingly informal shooting usually precedes a hunt among strangers. We act as though this ritual is casual and fun, but the reality is that this is an essential test of a newcomer.
    As we approached the targets, Daniel stopped short and motioned for Bob and me to stop. I saw something white and round in the grass in front of us. Daniel drew his pistol and fired with lightning speed. The white thing jumped straight up in the air about three feet and then disappeared into the brush.“What the hell was that?” I asked.
    “Armadillo. That’s definitely a varmint around here. They go digging holes all over the place. If you see one, you kill it.”
    We set up our targets and sighted in the night-vision scope on the AR-15. The AR platform