Texas House approves shooting feral aoudad sheep from helicopters

Texan cultural insecurity strikes again

AUSTIN,  Texas––The Texas House of Representatives on May 7,  2025 overwhelmingly approved a bill to allow hunters to shoot feral aoudad sheep from helicopters.

“If the bill becomes law,”  explained Austin American Statesman chief political reporter John C. Moritz,  “aoudad sheep would join feral hogs among game animals who can be hunted from the air in Texas.  Lawmakers in 2011 enacted legislation dubbed the ‘porkchopper law,’”  Moritz mentioned,  “as a means to try to control the proliferating wild swine who were causing expensive damage to farm and ranch land.”

Feral hogs,  from the earliest European settlement in Texas until relatively recent times,  were generally seen as a huntable and edible plus on Texas ranches.  But the original feral hog population,  descended from runaways imported by the settlers themselves,  has in recent decades been augmented and markedly boosted by escapees from trucks hauling factory farmed pigs to slaughter.

(See Ohio truck crash shows why feral pigs are everywhere.)

Imported to be hunted,  but seldom seen

Aoudad sheep are relatively recent arrivals to Texas.  Native to the Barbary Coast of Africa,  aoudads were introduced to Kerr County hunting ranches in 1963.

Feral aoudads appear to have first been reported in 1973.  Like feral hogs,  historically and still at that time,  feral aoudads were initially welcomed as a huntable species.

Possibly because Texas aoudads have always been hunted,  they have always been seldom seen,  as they still are,  despite the zeal of the Texas House of Representatives to legalize strafing them as alleged invading enemies.

Feral hogs today,  however,  appear to become the most hated aliens in Texas other than Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico,  both the estimated 1.7 million who arrived illegally and the three million or more whose presence is both fully legal and economically essential,  yet are resented nonetheless.

Braggadocio

Texas has historically been the most xenophobic and among the most blatantly racist of states,  for fairly obvious historical and geographic reasons.  Deep cultural insecurity is barely masked,  if at all,  by stereotypical Texan braggadoccio,  a trait long recognized in western films in which Texan braggarts are gunned down by the dozens,  from The Alamo to Zorro.

Cultural insecurity literally comes with the territory.   Most of Texas is surrounded to the south and southwest by the Mexican states of Chihuahua,  Coahuila,  Nuevo León,  and Tamaulipas.  Most Texans are closer to the Mexican border and the Gulf of Mexico than to other U.S. states––and renaming the Gulf of Mexico,  as Donald Trump and Texan supporters hope to do,  does nothing to relieve the underlying anxiety.

The 40% of the Texas human population who are of European ancestry,  historically an even smaller percentage,  wrested political control of Texas from Native Americans and Mexican Spanish-speakers in 1845,  imported African-American slaves mostly from Louisiana,  and have ruled the state ever since from an uneasy minority position,  maintained mostly because the Spanish-speaking and African-American minorities have never forged a strong political alliance.

(See also The animal issue that made Donald Trump a presidential candidate;   How an ant doctor came to be driving public policy;  How the Twin Towers fell on animals too; and Questioning the claims of “crisis.”)

Xenophobia breeds bio-xenophobia

Currently the English-speaking Texas population of European descent is narrowly outnumbered by Spanish-speakers,  while the Spanish-speakers have a 14% higher birth rate.

With perhaps the most xenophobic president in U.S. history in the White House,  put there in large part by sweeping the 40 Texas electoral votes,  it should be no surprise that bio-xenophobia is resurging in Texas as an external correlative to xenophobia focused on people.

The zeal to strafe aoudads,  Moritz of the Austin American Statesman explained,  is motivated by concern that “they’ve crowded out native animals”;  that “According to the hunting guide company Outdoors International,  the aoudad population in Texas is estimated to have ballooned by 1,800% since 1963”;  and that “in recent years aoudad sheep have been known to carry a pneumonia-causing bacteria called Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae that can be spread to commercial sheep and goat herds.”

Aoudads vs. white-tailed deer

Bear in mind that the aoudad rate of population increase over more than 60 years is a fraction of the rate of increase of any suddenly popular exotic pet or dog breed.

If only two aoudads in 1963 had an 1800% rate of population increase for 62 consecutive years,  they would still have only 2,232 descendants today.

That is a lot of aoudads,  but white-tailed deer are their major native competitor species.  Texas hunters kill 430,000 to 500,000 white-tailed deer per year,  the most of any state,  leaving a relatively stable population of about 5.6 million,  according to Texas Parks & Wildlife.

Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae,  meanwhile,  is bad news,  but occurs in nature throughout the Rocky Mountain states,  and is spread primarily by domestic sheep,  who have for decades repeatedly infected wild bighorn sheep herds.

USDA Wildlife Services budget

While some Texans exulted over the prospect of shooting aoudads from helicopters,  others fretted lest Donald Trump administration budget cuts might slow the pace of the USDA Wildlife Services’ Feral Swine Eradication Control Pilot Program,  begun in 2018.

This consists of USDA Wildlife Services agents shooting feral hogs from helicopters,  wherever sport hunters are deemed to be not killing enough.

Counter to that,  “A bipartisan group of senators,”  led by John Cornyn,  a Texas Republican,  “are pushing to take the program nationwide,”   Houston Chronicle Washington D.C. correspondent James Osborne reported on May 3,  2025.

“At a time President Donald Trump and Republicans are looking to reduce federal spending, getting agreement on $75 million in new funding [for pig-shooting] could prove a tough sell in Congress,”  Osborne wrote.  “But Cornyn said he was confident the support was there.”

Feral pigs eat sheep?!

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture,  led by Secretary Brooke Rollins — another Texan — declined to comment on whether it supported extending the program,”  Osborne mentioned.

And added,  “In the Hill Country west of San Antonio,  for instance,”  exactly where the aoudads are supposedly most concentrated,   “wild pigs have taken to eating baby goats and sheep, said Edwards County Judge Shouli Shanklin,  a rancher.

“They’ll come in there after the ewes have lambed and eat the offspring,”  Shanklin alleged. “The bigger ones,  the boars,  will eat the adults.  And they’ll eat the turkey eggs and the quail and anything that’s ground nesting.  They’re just detrimental to everything.”

But Texas hunters are still killing an estimated 100,000 wild turkeys per year,  with a bag limit for quail of 15 a day,  the highest in the U.S.

And the voracious feral hogs do not seem to be hurting the aoudad population at all.

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