Shortly after the sun’s last rays sink beneath Central Louisiana’s pines, the Rougarou slips into the darkness that follows. He prowls farmland from Pineville to Natchitoches, every step sharpened by a gnawing hunger.

Some still claim the nocturnal beast is a fiction of Cajun folklore, but at 6-feet-6, retired Pineville firefighter Shane Kessler is proof of the contrary. It’s nearly 2 a.m., and he’s steadying an AR-15 through the window of his pickup truck. On its tailgate, yellow block letters spell out “Rougarou Hog Control.”

Three to four nights a week, from dusk until 2 a.m., Kessler peers with a military grade thermal scanner through fields of corn, soybeans and milo, searching for the white glow of body heat — his next target.

“11 o’clock,” he mumbles, one cheek full of sunflower seeds, a white beard falling from his face. “It’s lookin’ real piggy.”

Two other hunters, Darren Spano, an Air Force veteran who recently moved to Louisiana from Alaska, and Malcolm Rachal, another retired firefighter, direct their scanners out of the left windows.

“Get your rifles out,” Kessler says. “I see him.”

Bullets crack from the truck, muffled by silencers, aimed at movement invisible to the naked eye.

“He’s hauling ass,” Malcom says. “Somebody stop that pig!”

A dozen more hot brass casings hit the floor, but the hog vanishes into the brush. For Kessler, who estimates he kills about 1,000 feral hogs each year through partnerships with fed-up farmers, it’s a rare miss.

Pigs cause over $90 million annually in agricultural damage statewide, according to the latest estimates from the LSU AgCenter. That’s despite hunting being legal year-round on privately owned land.

In the grand scheme, Kessler knows he’s losing the war. Hunters would have to kill 70% of Louisiana’s nearly 1 million hogs each year just to keep the numbers flat, assuming more from neighboring states don’t take their place.

But two researchers at LSU might have an answer. They’ve spent the last decade trying to expand the hog-killing arsenal, and were issued a patent last year for a lethal bait they claim is humane, effective and environmentally friendly. Farmers across the southeast are calling about it, but a complicated web of bureaucracy has prevented them from getting it. 

“I’m at the point of complete and total frustration,” said Glen Gentry, interim research director at the AgCenter. “It’s not moving.”

War pigs

Earlier in the night, Kessler, Spano and Rachal tracked a litter of about 15 pigs rooting in a cornfield. Though the animal will eat almost anything (including themselves), hogs prefer calorie-dense seeds — a destructive appetite satisfied by plowing their snouts like shovels beneath the soil.

“Those pigs will go down the row and eat every piece of corn, jump over three or four rows and start again,” said Kessler. “They’ll be massive areas of nothing … at a certain point, it cannot be replanted.”

The hunters creep from downwind, no closer than 50 yards, then rest their rifles on tripods. Cunning is required: hogs can smell from 5 miles out, and one step on some dry foliage can send them scattering. Once settled, they line their shots between the hog’s shoulder and neck, to avoid an armored hide that Kessler refers to as a “self-sealing gas tank.”

An eruption of squeals and gunfire. Seven hogs drop. Back at his truck, Kessler operates a thermal drone, searching for stragglers in the dense thicket. The strategy began a few years ago, after eight local farmers pooled nearly $9,000 to enhance defenses.

“The drone saves us so much time. We can cover so much ground so much faster, more thoroughly,” he said.

Kessler, whose Facebook page has over 75,000 followers, says fewer hate comments come from the PETA-types than from purists who claim what he does isn’t real hunting. He doesn’t argue.

“I know it’s not hunting, it’s eradication,” he said. To him, the hogs are oversized cockroaches that, beyond tearing up crops, cause erosion, wreck levee systems, pollute water and spread diseases. 

At the LSU AgCenter, Gentry gives a quick origin story. Feral hogs began as ordinary domestic pigs — think Wilbur from “Charlotte’s Web” — brought over from Europe with Columbus and De Soto, after which many wandered free-range or slipped loose from pens. By the early 1900s, Eurasian wild boars (same species, different subspecies) were imported for sport hunting. The two bloodlines mixed, creating tougher, wilder hybrids, turning Wilbur into Napoleon from “Animal Farm.”

In Louisiana, feral hogs that were originally confined to the central and southeast regions spread in the 1980s after being transported to other areas for hunting. Similar practices nationwide have exploded their population to around 6 million, mostly in the southeast and West Coast, but also in Canada, as hogs thrive in both swamps and snow, Gentry said. Like most invasive species, rapid reproduction fuels the fire.

“They breed like rabbits, but they’re smart,” Gentry said. On average, sows produce one and a half litters a year, with about 6 to each litter, he said. Female hogs can reach sexual maturity shortly after their first birthday.

Within 48 months, one sow can add hundreds of hogs to the landscape. “Within 72 months, she’s added thousands,” said Gentry. “I’m not saying hunting or trapping doesn’t have an impact, what I’m saying is you’re not going to control the population with just those two things.”

A bloodless alternative?

For the past century, sodium nitrite has been a mainstay in the food industry, mostly used to cure meats.

The compound kills harmful bacteria, but at doses far past what’s used on an average charcuterie board, it can bind to and alter hemoglobin, preventing the protein from carrying oxygen throughout the body. In some cases, that results in fatal asphyxiation. The USDA limits sodium nitrite in human food to 200 parts per million.

Over a decade ago, Gentry began testing sodium nitrite’s effects on pigs at the AgCenter’s Idlewild Experiment Station. He found that a dose of 189 ppm killed 90% of the pigs he tested, since animals lack the enzymes humans have to process the compound. At the same time, Gentry also discovered the scent of dehydrated fish attracted pigs over most other organic baits.

Gentry combined the two into a bait that looked to be a relatively painless treatment. Pigs who ate sublethal doses simply fell asleep, he observed, and after waking unharmed, often came back for seconds.

“They don’t suffer if they die,” he said. “They literally just fall asleep.”

The bait also appeared environmentally friendly. Unlike many conventional pesticides, sodium nitrite easily breaks down and won’t accumulate up the food chain, said John Pojman, chair of the LSU Chemistry Department.

“If you have a dead hog and somebody comes and eats it, it doesn’t get contaminated and kill off native species,” he said. 

However, that same virtue meant the bait quickly broke down outside laboratory conditions, turning into foul-smelling oxides that deterred the pigs. Gentry tried developing a capsule delivery system, but couldn’t find a casing durable enough to hold in wet environments but also dissolve in the stomach. After months of frustration, he reached out to LSU’s chemistry department, and Pojman eagerly volunteered.

Pojman said the solution lay in keeping it “basic.” He created a more stable version of sodium nitrite by adding calcium carbonate — widely used in antacids such as Tums — to raise its pH. To prevent the possibility of leftover crumbs that could harm smaller animals, Pojman’s lab also harnessed food chemistry to turn the bait into a gelatinous, green, fish-scented, bouncy-ball-sized hog killer.

“I’m really proud of that because it was just using some general chemistry,” said Pojman. “Food-grade materials that you can easily buy, not expensive, safe to work with.”

They envision farmers ringing their fields with bait, buried 6 inches deep — a hog-specific force field only pigs could snuff out. They’ve also successfully tested cellphone-operated wildlife feeders that allow users to remotely dispense the bait if a pig shows up on camera.

But their patent, issued in May 2024, has yet to be put to use.

“We got a lot of interest, people calling us asking to use it on their land,” said Pojman. “I say I’m sorry we can’t do anything with it.”

Obtaining pesticide approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can take a decade, and navigating the bureaucracy has been particularly challenging for academics who lack industry backing. Even obtaining a permit necessary to begin testing has proven Kafkaesque. Gentry has spent six years trying to figure out how to obtain one, only to face hundreds of pages of documents filled with unrelated chemical information and acronyms. Both scientists say all they want are clear instructions.

Meanwhile, warfarin, a known environmental toxin, has been approved as hog bait, largely because the chemical has been used as rat poison.

“We are in a unique position because it’s not a traditional pesticide,” said Pojman. “I’m not opposed to the EPA doing its job. I just think we’re in a really weird situation.”

For now, the two are forced to hope for an EPA official or a member of Congress to recognize what they see as a novel, common-sense approach and help them cut through the red tape.

“If it’s safe for human consumption, why are these extra hoops here?” said Gentry. “Nobody can tell me what I need to do to give it to pigs.”

A threat beyond the fields

Even if a bait were on the market that was 100% effective, Gentry says it wouldn’t come close to a panacea.

“We’ve been poisoning rats since the ’40s and ‘50s,” he said. “We still have a lot of rats.”

Like rats, Gentry says it’s likely that as feral hogs push deeper into urban areas, they’ll pose problems beyond economic ones. In 2016, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries researchers collected 40 water samples near Kessler’s hunting area and found harmful pathogens linked to hog fecal contamination in all of them, including E. coli and salmonella. In one incident in California, groundwater contamination from feral hogs is suspected of killing three people and sickening hundreds more.

“Right now it’s an economic problem,” said Gentry. “As more of them show up in towns and cities, I think you’re going to see more of a human health crisis.”