(1) FANAC.ORG SCANNING STATION AT DUBLIN 2019. Joe Siclari looks forward to digitizing more zines and photos at the Worldcon —
FANAC.org has scanned and archived over 92,000 pages of fanzines. Next week, our Scanning Station is coming to Dublin. If you are attending the Dublin Worldcon and can brings fanzines appropriate for scanning, we would love to have them. We’ll scan right there on site – we’ll be set-up at a fan table in the Convention Center. Look for our banner.
We have run similar Scanning Stations this year at Boskone and Corflu with great success. To see what we already have scanned and have online, look at our main fanzine page: http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/Classic_Fanzines.html.
If you have old fannish photos that you can bring, we’d love to scan them as well. If you have photos in digital format, please bring those too.
Even if you don’t bring material to scan, stop by our table anyway and say hello.
(2) PRE-’64 IN PUBLIC DOMAIN. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says “Data-mining reveals that 80% of books published 1924-63 never had their copyrights renewed and are now in the public domain”.
…But there’s another source of public domain works: until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed….
…Now, Leonard Richardson (previously) has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books; what’s more, many of these books have already been scanned by the Hathi Trust (which uses a limitation in copyright to scan university library holdings for use by educational institutions, regardless of copyright status).
“Fun facts” are, sadly, often less than fun. But here’s a genuinely fun fact: most books published in the US before 1964 are in the public domain! Back then, you had to send in a form to get a second 28-year copyright term, and most people didn’t bother.
(3) WHEATON W00TSTOUT. The 2019 pouring of Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout is here. Comic artist Alan Davis designed the label. Will you collect it or drink it?
Each year, when July rolls through, Stone Brewing serves up a superhero of an imperial stout. Its sheer existence, a POW! BAM! WHAM! square to the face. Its contents – an art; its bottle – a collectible. Stone Brewing announces the release of Drew Curtis / Wil Wheaton / Greg Koch Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout.
Over the years, Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout has become one of Stone’s most anticipated annual releases, and not just because it’s an astoundingly flavorful beer concocted as a collaboration between FARK’s Drew Curtis, nerd royalty Wil Wheaton and Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch. It’s the incredible label art adorning this beer over the years that has elevated it to the pinnacle of beer, geekery and beer geekery. “W00tstout is more than a great beer,” said actor, writer and Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout collaborator Wil Wheaton. “It’s a work of art, carefully designed to be as drinkable right now as it will be in a decade. I am so honored and proud to be one of its parents.”
(4) CLARION WEST 2020. Next year’s Clarion West instructors have been announced:
(5) STRANGERS LIKE ME. Brian Doherty, in “San Diego Comic-Con and the Tensions of Market-Induced Growth” on Reason.com, reports from the convention and finds that despite its huge size lovers of comics and the small press can find a great deal to satisfy them at the convention. He also interviews Maryelizabeth Yturvalde of the Mysterious Galaxy sf shop, who says she sold a great many YA novels to Comic-Con attendees.
…But who are “people like yourself” in the tent of fannish tents? That’s the sticking point. Things can get complicated when you are thrust in a tight space with people whose nerdy obsessions don’t match yours. Smith joked about seeing a bunch of people dressed as Klingons sneering at the lame geeks striding by dressed as stormtroopers.
On one of this year’s historical panels, Barry Short, a longtime SDCC worker and a former comic shop owner, described the vast crowds attracted to the con as a clear victory, the promised land all the lonely geeks of decades gone by had been fighting for. Their culture was no longer mocked and hated! Their tribe had grown beyond imagining! But one detail that he chose to highlight was telling—that it was no longer hard to find T-shirts featuring Marvel superheroes.
That sort of thing would not be any kind of victory to, say, indie cartoonist Mary Fleener, who on a historical panel remembered fondly the days in the 1990s when she and a few fellow independent artists could pool money together for a table that cost less than $400 and profit selling their homemade mini-comix. Her tribe was different than Short’s; they just awkwardly co-existed in the same grounds.
Comics are not just the root of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters; they’re a newly respected part of American literary culture. The artists and writers responsible for that aren’t necessarily obsessed with superhero T-shirts. But even that conclusion was complicated at a SDCC panel starring Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, one of the linchpins of modern literary comics. He admitted, in his self-lacerating sad-sack way, that as a nerdy, scared, hated kid in school, if he found anyone else who shared in any way his tortured love and fascination with crummy Mego toy figures of comics characters, he’d want to hold them close—too close for their comfort.
Comic-Con is filled with people who both seek validation in their manias and mistrust the manias next door, whether those neighboring fandoms seem to bring down the cultural property values or try to make them annoyingly highbrow.
No matter how pollyannaish you want to be about change and growth, more people in an experience makes for a different experience. Such changes may come to the benefit of the newcomers but the detriment of old-timers….
(6) GATHERING DATA. ScienceFiction.com, in “Brent Spiner Teases Data’s Role On ‘Star Trek: Picard’”, quoted the actor from his recent appearance at the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention.
I am delighted to be part of the show and all I am, is a part of the show…I want to make it semi-clear, because I don’t want to make it too clear, that I am not a regular on the show. Data did die at the end of Nemesis. But I am on the show. I do make appearances. Data’s story is a part of the thread of show.”
Apparently the Data-like android is a predecessor called B-4.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s also asked Spiner about Facebook’s Area 51 craze:
Given Spiner’s connections to Area 51 — his Dr. Brakish Okun was in charge of research there in both “Independence Day” and “Independence Day: Resurgence,” its 20-years-later sequel — you can’t let the actor off the phone without asking if he has advice for anyone looking to follow the Facebook phenomenon and storm the secretive military installation to “see them aliens.”
“Well, let me just say, I know this is going to be a huge disappointment to everyone, but if they do this, and they actually get there, I will not be there,” Spiner says, dryly.
“I mean, unless I’m well paid. Then I’ll show up.”
(7) TRADE WARRIORS. The Hollywood Reporter explains how “A boycott of Japanese products has been growing as a political spat with historical roots impacts sectors from beer to cars to movies” — “Anime ‘Doraemon’ Latest Victim of Japan-South Korea Trade War”.
The Korean release of the latest installment of Doraemon, Japan’s biggest anime franchise, has been postponed indefinitely as a trade war between the Asian neighbors continues to escalate.
Doraemon: Nobita’s Chronicle of the Moon Exploration, the 39th feature in the tales of the blue, “cat-type robot” and his human sidekick, schoolboy Nobita, is the latest victim in the Tokyo-Seoul spat.
Last month Butt Detective: The Movie was also caught up in the growing boycott of Japanese goods, services and companies. The film, a spinoff from a children’s book and anime TV series about a detective with a head shaped like a backside, had received maximum scores on South Korean review websites on its release, but got a bum deal after the sites were hit with posts calling for cinemagoers to boycott Japanese films.
…The current row was triggered when Japan announced July 1 that it was placing export restrictions to South Korea on materials used in manufacturing semiconductors, a major Korean industry. Tokyo accused Seoul of breaking sanctions on North Korea, but the move was widely seen as retaliation for a Korean court ruling that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has to pay compensation to Koreans forced to work for the company during World War II….
(8) ROSEN OBIT. Fraggle Rock voice actor Stuart M. Rosen has died reports SYFY Wire.
Stuart M. Rosen, a prolific voice actor and creator who helped develop the iconic children’s puppet program Dusty’s Treehouse in the late 1960s and voiced The Storyteller in HBO’s Fraggle Rock, reportedly has passed away from cancer. He was 80 years old.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- Born August 5, 1891 — Donald Kerr. Happy Hapgood in 1938’s Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars which might be one of the earliest such films. His only other genre appearances were in the Abbott and Costello films such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man in uncredited roles. (Died 1977.)
- Born August 5, 1935 — Wanda Ventham, 84. Mother of Benedict Cumberbatch. She’s showed up on during Doctor Who over a number of years playing three different roles (Jean Rock, Thea Ransome/Fendahl Core and Faroon) in three different stories, “The Faceless Ones” over six episodes, Serial: “Image of the Fendahl” over four episodes and “Time and the Rani” over three episodes. That’d mean she appeared with the Fourth and Seventh Doctors. She was also Col. Virginia Lake, a series regular on UFO, during the Seventies.
- Born August 5, 1940 — Natalie Trundy,79. First, she was one of the Underdwellers named Albina in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Next, she played Dr. Stephanie Branton, a specialist studying apes from the future who came into our present day in Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Then in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, she played the chimp Lisa.
- Born August 5, 1947 — Élisabeth Vonarburg, 72. Parisian born, she’s Quebec resident. She was the literary director of the French-Canadian SF magazine Solaris. Her first novel, Le Silence de la Cité, was published in 1981. Since then she’s been a prolific witter of novels and short fiction. In 1993, her website notes sgphecreceived a Prix spécial du Jury Philip K. Dick Award for In the Mothers’ Land. H’h. I’m pleased to say that iBooks is deeply stock in her works but Kindle has nothing at all by her. Her website, in French of course, is here.
- Born August 5, 1956 — Robert Frezza, 63. Wrote five SF novels of a space opera-ish nature in five years covering two series, McLendon’s Syndrome and The VMR Theory, and The Small Colonial War series which is A Small Colonial War, Fire in a Faraway Place and Cain’s Land) before disappearing from writing SF twenty years ago.
- Born August 5, 1956 — Maureen McCormick, 63. Though better for being Marcia Brady on The Brady Bunch, she has done some genre performances. She was Eve in Snow White: A Deadly Summer and Officer Tyler in Return to Horror High, both decidedly pulpish horror film. A step up in class was her portrayal of the young Endora in two episodes of Bewitched, “And Something Makes Three” and “Trick or Treat”. She shows up in another magical show, I Dream of Jeannie, as Susan in “My Master, the Doctor”. And she was used in six different roles on Fantasy Island.
- Born August 5, 1968 — Matt Jones, 51. Started as columnist for Doctor Who Magazine. A decade later, he wrote two of the Tenth Doctor scripts, a two-parter, “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit”, and one for Torchwood, “Dead Man Walking”. He co-authored with Joan Ormond, Time Travel in Popular Media.
- Born August 5, 1980 — JoSelle Vanderhooft, 39. Former Green Man reviewer with a single novel so far, Ebenezer, and several collections, Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. She also co-edited with Steve Berman, Heiresses of Russ 2011: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction.
- Born August 5, 1961 — Janet McTeer, 58. Last genre role was as Jessica’s mother, Alisa Jones. in Jessica Jones. She was also Edith Prior in The Divergent Series: Insurgent, and the elderly Princess Aurora who was the narrator in Maleficent.
(10) CHECK THAT OFF. J. Scott Coatsworth got into SFWA – not everybody does: “POINT OF VIEW: Setting Goals (And Making Them)”.
I set myself two missions at the start of this year – one, to get into the Science Fiction Writers’ Association (SFWA, pronounced Siffwuh) by writing and selling a qualifying short story. And two, to take steps to snag an agent for what I hope will be the next step in my writing career.
Well, missions one accomplished….
(11) A HOIST OF BOOKS. Atlas Obscura reads from the log of the “Bokbåten”, a circulating library afloat.
Sweden and its Nordic neighbors are among the world’s most literate countries. These nations boast a range of newspapers and public libraries, as well as provide convenient access to computers and strong educational resources to its residents.
Access to books and resources might be harder to come by for some, though, especially those living on the remote islands of Stockholm’s archipelago—the largest group of islands in Sweden and the second-largest in the Baltic Sea.
To combat this obstacle while continuing its prioritization of literacy, twice a year the Stockholm Library Service rents a boat for a week and brings books to 23 inhabited islands. Each spring and fall, the boat is packed with approximately 3,000 books and sets sail along Stockholm’s eastern seaboard as an aquatic library….
(12) IT’S EERIE. He looks just like a pinker version of my father when he was young.
My father is in the lower left corner of this holiday card, sent out in the early days of television.
(13) IN GLORIOUS BLACK AND WHITE. Jessica Holmes updates Galactic Journey readers about the current Doctor Who arc: “[August 5th 1964] A Bit Of A Flub (Doctor Who: The Sensorites [Part 2])”.
Meanwhile, John’s having his brain fixed, and the city Administrator comes in to whine about it. He was the one who wanted to disintegrate everybody last episode, if you recall. He doesn’t seem to like anything about the humans. Not their names, which he reckons are absurd (cheek!), not their culture of egalitarianism (though I could dispute that), and not their stupid, ugly faces (pot, kettle!)
(14) I DARN YOU TO HECK. TheWrap’s article is paved with good intentions – and spoilers (beware!): “‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ Creator Says ‘We’re Going to Hell’ in Season 3 – ‘and It’s Very Fun’”.
If the closing moments of the second season finale of “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” hadn’t already made it clear that the show was going to take an even darker turn next season, then creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did so Sunday by confirming the fiery setting Sabrina (Kiernan Shipka) and co. will be entering when the show returns….
(15) SECOND TIME’S THE CHARM. BBC is on the beach — “Franky Zapata: Flyboarding Frenchman crosses English Channel”.
French inventor Franky Zapata has made the first-ever successful Channel crossing on a jet-powered flyboard.
Mr Zapata, 40, took off from Sangatte, near Calais, at 06:17 GMT on Sunday and landed in St Margaret’s Bay in Dover.
The invention, powered by a kerosene-filled backpack, made the 22-mile (35.4-km) journey in 22 minutes.
Mr Zapata, a former jet-ski champion, had failed in his first attempt to cross the Channel on 25 July after complications with refuelling.
Here’s the Voice of America video:
(16) ROMANCING THE STONE? “‘Snow White’ gravestone on show in German museum”.
Once upon a time a museum in a charming old German town was given a very important, long-lost gravestone.
It was that of Maria Sophia von Erthal, a baroness who is believed to have inspired the Brothers Grimm to write Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Her restored gravestone has just gone on display at the Diocesan Museum in Bamberg, southern Germany. It was donated by a family who had rescued it.
The museum director says Sophia’s life “became the nucleus of Snow White”.
(17) LOTERIA UPDATE. BBC finds the game is evolving — “Loteria: A centuries-old game remade for millennials”. Beyond Picacio’s version: “La Mano” becomes “El Nail Art”, “El Mundo” becomes “La Student Debt”…
Lotería, a game that’s been played across Latin America for centuries, has been given a humorous and perceptive update by designer Mike Alfaro. The new version is now being sold online.
(18) BIRD IS THE WORD. You knew this, right? CBS News tells “How the Peanuts character Woodstock got his name”.
Charles Schulz, the creator of the comic strip “Peanuts,” was many things: a father, a veteran, an artist. But one thing he was NOT, by any stretch, was a hippie.
When asked if he thought Schulz would have enjoyed attending the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Benjamin Clark, curator of the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, Calif., laughed, “No!
“He was famous for not really enjoying travel, or crowds.”…
(19) SLASHER FICTION. Slate: “Jimmy Kimmel Debuted a Considerably Less Heartwarming Trailer for That Tom Hanks Mister Rogers Movie”. Is A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood genre? Well, if Jimmy Kimmel is to be believed it’s actually a horror film. (Hint: Don’t believe him.)
[Thanks to Chip Hitchcock, Cat Eldridge, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Mike Kennedy, Jon Del Arroz, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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(2) Interesting. Wonder how that will play out.
Your dad’s a good lookin’ guy Mike!
This summer, enjoy the SF cons you attend!
Book Reviews Wanted!
The National Fantasy Fan Federation, the world’s longest-lived non-regional SF&F hobby club, is launching a new magazine. The Review will be free by email to all N3F members, as well as SF&F archives. Public Membership in the N3F is itself free.
The N3F Review of Books, Incorporating Prose Bono, will publish longer reviews of SF&F novels of all genres (e/g., MilSF, SF Romance, swords and sorcery). Our objective is to review every published SF&F novel. We also welcome articles on writing, editing, illustrating, and marketing stfnal tales.
Send submissions as text or MSword-readable files to George Phillies, [email protected]. If you publish a review blog, we would be delighted to discuss reprint arrangements.
Ground rules that we have thought of so far:
0 A good review is 500-2000 words; it goes beyond a plot summary,
1) Reviews by book authors of other people’s books are welcome. Mutual congratulations societies at some point become inappropriate.
2) Discussions of political events found within a book are highly appropriate. Discussions of an author’s politics, let alone shading a review based on the author’s political leanings, are not welcome.
.
Janet McTeer apparently has access to a reverse Fountain of Youth (and a time machine), if she’s 22 and looks old enough to be 38-year-old Krysten Ritter’s mother.
Wikipedia says she was born in 1961. She did win a Tony Award in 1997, so maybe that’s where that date came from.
(Jessica Jones Season 2 was uneven, but McTeer was fantastic in it.)
That Captain Kangaroo video was funny, funny stuff.
I didn’t realize Captain Kangaroo was a veteran of the Australian Coast Guard. BUT did he serve with Captain Crunch?
Martin,
According to Wikipedia, Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) enlisted in the Marines in 1945, but the war ended before he could be sent overseas.
The “Australian Coast Guard” thing may have been made up for the parody trailer, but several othr false stories about Keeshan’s military service have gone around on occasion. One was that Lee Marvin reportedly said he met Keeshan during the battle of Iwo Jima, but Lee Marvin wasn’t at Iwo Jima either, since he was recovering from wounds incurred at the Battle of Saipan.
The other false story I’ve heard was that Keeshan was a beachmaster on D-Day, exposed to enemy fire while directing the unloading of men and supplies. But again, he never actually saw combat.
11) The book boat stops at the island my family has its summercottage at. It used to have its own school and library, but has too few students now. Last year, they started to test remote education for some islands and it seems to be working out.
(12) the side effects of the file 770 time machine may be getting out of hand.
@Dublin2019 for some high-level whining.
I miss an iCal or ics option for my personal programme. Currently it’s a list which gives me no time relation at all and doing it by hand seems a waste of effort and time.
Wikipedia featured article of the day is Analog Science Fiction and Fact
[click]
Lena Mar, are you referring to the PDF, or to the Grenadine schedule?
30-50 pixels stream into the yard after 3-5 minutes. This is why I support the right to scroll.s
Bruce: i was making a joke about Captain Kangaroo the character not Bob Keeshan the actor, but I had heard that Keeshan was a Marine. But thanks for the details of his service.
Ok, I’m not on much social media; can anyone explain the 30-50 feral hogs reference, or is it just one of those things that happen? Suddenly I’m seeing references in the few social media places I frequent, which implies to me it’s widespread…
Where did it start? What does it mean? All I’m seeing are parodies so I don’t have any sort of context.
17) I’ve always thought the Loteria cards would make a good divination deck, and was surprised when I first found out it wasn’t that.
@ Cassy B
There was a tweet which plainitively asked how to deal with 30-50 feral hogs, which would flood his yard when his kids went out to play. And off Twitter went.
@Cassy —
It started with people advocating banning assault rifles, and some idiot declared that if assault rifles were banned, then how would he deal with the 30-50 feral hogs that flood into his yard within 3-5 minutes of his children going outside?
Obvious problems with this idea: 1. if he now has an assault rifle, and he still has 30-50 hogs flooding into his yard, obviously the gun hasn’t done him any good; and 2. multiple studies have shown that in areas that encourage the hunting of feral hogs, the hog population has actually INCREASED — so, again, the guns aren’t helping.
The UnFeral Profession of Mr. Jonathan Hogg
The 30-50 feral hogs was something of a justification of why one might own an assault rifle. The hogs would turn up over 3-5 minutes while the children were in the yard and then what would you do? The original tweeter said that they themselves didn’t own one, but some of their neighbors had found owning one to be useful.
The best thing I got out of all of it was a video of a trap for catching feral hogs. It was a round cage that was held over a center where you would leave some hog bait. Once the hogs were in the center snacking, the cage would drop down. (No hogs were hurt in the demonstration on the video.)
The Files of Master Scroll and Number Ten Pixel.
Wow. Just… wow.
That’s a hell of a hypothetical. I don’t think any ecosystem other than a hog farm can support 30-50 hogs in one small area.
And an assault rifle seems to be the wrong remedy for the situation. People pay good money to hunt feral hogs, as I understand it. So this person is missing a heck of a money-making opportunity…
@Cassy —
Feral hogs are actually a big problem over large swaths of the US — so that part of the plea could be true, depending on where the guy lives. But indiscriminately blasting away at them in your yard ain’t the way to deal with it. 😉
P.S. — Ha! CNN, WaPo, and The Guardian now ALL have stories about the 30-50 feral hog thing.
I enjoyed this cartoon on the feral hog phenomenon that the New Yorker tweeted today.
August 5th was also John Huston’s birthday. I don’t think any of the movies he directed were really genre, but he gets mentioned on this site for his interaction with Ray Bradbury on the production of Moby Dick. He also provided the voice of Gandalf for the Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit and The Return of the King. He was also The Lawgiver in The Battle for the Planet of the Apes.
Feral pigs, Mr. Rico! 30 to 50 of ’em!
Feral hogs are inevitably a worse problem where hunting them is a money-making field. People will import hogs for the hunters when there aren’t enough local hogs for a good hunt. Like Patrician Veternari said, “Tax the rat farms.”
What are hogs to 30-40 feral filers with assault scrolls? They’ll need plenty of pixels in Dublin to handle that.
“What are Feral Hogs to Hecuba or Hecuba to Feral Hogs?”
P.S. Have we done “Scrollmas won’t be Scrollmas without any Pixels”?
I have spent the entire day,starting at 8am, at my sister’s, doing both my laundry, and my niece’s. My niece theoretically does her own laundry. However, she is now at McLean Hospital, and my sister went into her bedroom to get a few things for her.
So after some consultation, I agreed to spend the day running every article of clothing, towels, blankets in my niece’s room through the washer and dryer.
I am home, exhausted, achy, and my brain wants to be turned off for a while.
@Lis Carey: Best wishes for you, your sister and your niece.
@ Lis Carey
Hope your niece comes out of hospital soon. And you & your sister take care.
@JJ
I think the last time Grenadine had a subscribable calendar option which meant I could import it into my calendar and see when there’s overlap and when there’s some free time.
Lis Carey, you are a good aunt. I hope your rest is excellent and that your niece will recover fully. Best wishes to your sister as well.
If you have an invasion of feral hogs, in your front yard, with your children playing in said front yard, you’re probably better off dressing the children in good, solid steel armour and training them to use boar spears. If you have a fully-automatic rifle and try to put the hogs down with it, you’re probably also going to put (some of) your children down, with some of the bullets you were hoping to put hogs down with. Sad, but well more likely than leaving the children unscathed. 🙁
@Contrarius: “multiple studies have shown that in areas that encourage the hunting of feral hogs, the hog population has actually INCREASED”
I’d be curious to see those studies. Could you point me to a couple of the best ones? I’m really curious how that works, because it sounds counterintuitive.
For the curious, there’s a specific starting point for this meme: Jason Isbell made a very sensible tweet about assault rifles and a guy from Texarkana replied. This article from CNN isn’t bad.
Jason is right, of course. I’m just not sure the other guy isn’t, too.
In any event, our society licenses fully automatic weapons to people such as my ex-boss. Those Thompson machine guns don’t get used for murder any more because they are strictly regulated. There’s no reason people who can make a legit claim of need can’t go through a similar vetting and licensing process. It’d be a good example to set.
@ John A Arkansawyer
I don’t have links to the studies, but as far as I recall the following was the suggested mechanism for the observed population increase.
50-60 seems to be the optimum stable size for a herd, and sows in larger herds tend to come into oestrus less often than those in smaller groups.
When hunted, the herd tends to flee and split into several smaller units. Sows in the new smaller groups then produce more litters until the herd reaches the optimum size.
So in a relatively space of of time where there was one herd of 60, there will be several – and the increased competition for resources drives the hogs closer to areas inhabited by humans armed with with assault rifles….
@JRLawrence: That’s quite plausible. Thanks! That does support not hunting them other than to local extinction.
Every scroll is sacred, every scroll is great…
@John —
It’s actually a fairly well-known phenomenon for prey species. IIRC, the same has happened with deer and turkeys, for instance.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time right now searching out the specific studies, but here’s a couple of snippets:
“Hogs are present in all 67 counties in Alabama, according to the game department. A study conducted by Mississippi State University shows pig populations can double each year. ….When it comes to population control, the study shows that a 50 percent depredation of wild hogs is needed to stop population increases and a 70 percent removal of wild hogs yearly is needed if there is a chance to eventually exterminate the population.”
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/local/solutions-
“Mark McLain, MDC’s feral hog elimination team leader, said MDC is partnering with many agricultural and conservation groups, as well as hundreds of private landowners, that are all committed to eliminating feral hogs from Missouri.[….] He hopes the message that hunting is not an effective method for eliminating feral hog populations is starting to be better understood across Missouri. ‘For over 20 years, unregulated hunting of feral hogs was allowed in Missouri, during which time our feral hog population expanded from a few counties to over 30 counties,’ he said. In 2017, MDC, the Corps of Engineers and the LAD Foundation established regulations against feral hog hunting on lands owned and managed by these three organizations. Other agencies have passed regulations similar to MDC’s to eliminate hog hunting on land they own.”
https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/local/ozarks/2019/01/29/missouri-feral-hogs-problem-hunting/2705988002/
It’s also relevant to note that a large part of the reason why we have problems with feral hogs in the first place is that hunters trap them and then release them in new areas to establish new populations they can hunt. So it’s pretty darned hypocritical for gun owners to create the problem themselves and then turn around to complain that guns are the only way to solve it!
@Contrarius: All this is very sensible. It still doesn’t solve the problem of what you do when you have them on your land. As the article points out, using dogs to drive them off just moves the problem over to your neighbor. They aren’t like bears; you can live with bears, if you aren’t stupid.
There’s no reason people with a credible need for powerful weapons can’t be issued permits, other than the things blocking every other reasonable gun control measure. Agricultural poisons are managed like that. Why not weapons, too? It’s better than what we have now.
@John —
As one of those articles points out, the wildlife guys who have to deal with hogs on a daily basis are trapping and killing whole herds at a time — not just pot-shotting individual pigs.
And again — it’s pretty darned hypocritical to complain about needing guns because they’re on your land, when guns are the REASON they’re on your land in the first place.
So does using guns.
There’s another article that I read the other day — no, I’m not going to go look it up right now — which points out that run-of-the-mill AR-style rifles aren’t the best way to shoot hogs in the first place, because hogs have very tough skin. If you’re going to shoot and kill feral hogs, you need a more powerful weapon — single-shot rifles with large caliber bullets. So even if a person “needs” a gun to shoot hogs with, this STILL isn’t an argument for keeping assault-style rifles.
@Contrarius:
That’s a poor argument. In its original form, you claimed that feral hogs were moved into areas in order for people to hunt them. I would agree that if those who moved the hogs made such a claim, it would be hypocritical. For the person living near that hunting ground who had nothing to do with importing the hogs? No hypocrisy at all.
As for your reply in:
Not the one you kill. The claim earlier that scattering herds drives up reproduction is plausible. I accept it on its face. The claim that a dead hog would trouble your neighbor is not. Dogs are much likelier to be killed by hogs than vice versa. You use them to run the hogs, not to kill them.
File770: the place for your feral hog informational needs.
@John —
Yup. And what do most people hunt with? Oh yeah, that’s right — GUNS.
It’s still hypocritical, because they are making an argument that guns are beneficial — while ignoring the costs that the guns have already imposed.
As has already been pointed out both by me and another poster, “the one you kill” is meaningless in the scheme of the overall population. The practical effect of shooting one or two hogs in a herd is simply to motivate the herd to move over to your neighbor’s property.
I have no idea why you’re trying to derail the discussion with kvetches about dogs. I’ve never even mentioned dogs in this context.
Thanks for the kind words, everyone!
Time for some game math:
30-50 feral hogs (1D5*5 +25) going through a gate at 3-5 minutes, comes down to 10 hogs/minute, or 1 hog every 6 seconds. A bolt or lever action gun should be able to maintain that rate of fire.
Note that modern Dungeons & Dragons uses 6 second combat rounds, or one boar per combat turn, which is highly convenient if one fighter decides to hold the gate….
I would like you all to know that every time I go to search Twitter for “file770.com” now, as soon as I fill in the “f” it offers me “feral hogs”…
What Soon Lee said. 😉
Archaeologists in the future will probably conclude that America was overrun by feral hogs in the summer of 2019, based on the perfectly reasonable premise that the contemporaries wouldn’t all be talking about feral hogs if they weren’t a real problem. No doubt there will be papers comparing the statistical rate of mentions in news organizations that plagues of grasshoppers and other such pests got to the American feral hog plague of 2019.
As a counterpoint: How many hogs are killed by assault rifle each year, when they try to invade someone’s yard? It doesn’t seem like a very common thing.