Hog Wild

Louisiana, one of just two states that still allow cockfighting, in 2004 became the first to ban hog-catch trials. Leading up to the vote, legislators engaged in "a boisterous hourlong House debate in which one lawmaker wore a hog nose and scores of others squealed and clucked animal noises," according to the Times-Picayune.

"I'm sure they still go on," says Republican state Representative Warren Triche Jr., who wrote the legislation. "Once we made it illegal, they started going underground with it."

The Louisiana law exempts the popular Uncle Earl's Hog Dog Trials, which draws hundreds of Texans every year. The event was started in 1995 to celebrate former governor and well-known hog hunter Earl K. (brother of Huey) Long's 100th birthday.

Also in 2004, law enforcement in Alabama, Arizona and South Carolina joined forces in what was the first major interstate crackdown on hog-dogging. The raids led to at least a dozen arrests and the confiscation of several dozen catch dogs and feral hogs. Many cases are still pending, including the forthcoming trial of Vicky Stultz Land, the top animal-control official for Chester County in North Carolina, who is charged with animal fighting and baiting by the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division.

Mary Luther, president of the South Carolina-based International Catchdog Association, was arrested in the raids and charged with animal fighting, though a jury later found her not guilty. Cases are pending against her longtime boyfriend and her son, who is autistic. "They have taken this to phenomenally ridiculous heights," Luther says, adding that her family owes $80,000 in legal fees.

Unrepentant, Luther says she continues to organize hog-dog rodeos across the South. Luther can't understand why hogs are being singled out for sympathy. She also organizes fights that pit dogs against raccoons and foxes in pens. "The dogs shred the foxes to pieces, but nobody cares about that," she says. "It's silly to care about hogs but not foxes and coons."

After Luther was acquitted, the South Carolina legislature responded by passing a bill that amends its animal fighting laws to include pitting dogs against wild hogs with the intent of causing them to fight. It also raised penalties for blood sports, which includes hog-dogging. It is now a felony-level offense to attend a hog-catch trial as a spectator, to supply the animals or to own the pit where it is staged. The bill was signed into law this summer.

Alabama, Mississippi and North Carolina also passed laws this summer banning the contests. Similar bills failed in Georgia and Tennessee. Goodwin says the issue will be raised again in each of these states during the next legislative session.

The Texas legislature has not broached the issue of hog-dog rodeos since Wilson's bill was quashed in committee seven years ago. There is no record of any prosecution or conviction in Texas against people who stage such events, despite the attorney general's 1994 opinion that they violate animal cruelty laws.

At the time of the raids two years ago, Goodwin says, the Humane Society was also investigating several Texans known for promoting hog-catch trials over the Internet. "We just didn't get to these guys," he says. "But we shook that world up and forced them into the catacombs."

One of the organization's prime suspects was 45-year-old Steve Johnson, a carpenter and East Texas native who lives in Spring. For Johnson, hunting with dogs is a family tradition that began with his grandfather, an avid bird hunter.

Since being diagnosed with epilepsy four years ago, Johnson no longer hunts hogs on a weekly basis. Instead of hunting on horseback, he now goes out with friends every couple of months on an all-terrain vehicle. An American bulldog, used as a catch dog, rides along, perched on the hood of the four-wheeler.

Johnson admits he helped organize several hog-catch competitions in the Huntsville area but claims he's no longer involved. He says he knows many of the people who were arrested, as well as other organizers in states across the South.

Johnson isn't surprised that the Humane Society targeted him for prosecution.

"Apparently they take me as some cruel animal treater," he says. Pointing to the bulldog lying on his kitchen floor with a litter of two-week-old pups, he says: "It's bullshit; I'm an animal lover."