Speaker A
In late March of 2021, traffic stops on US Highway 321 at the edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Pittman Center, Tennessee.
A bear attacks a feral hog on a Smoky Mountains road, sparking a look at how wild hogs invaded the Southern Appalachians and their ecological impact on the park.
Key Takeaways
- Black bears in the Smokies do occasionally prey on feral hogs, though the behavior is rarely witnessed.
- Feral hogs descend from a 1912 release on Hooper Bald and have become a major invasive species in the park.
- Hog removal has been ongoing for decades, yet the population remains large and damaging.
- Bears cannot by themselves solve the hog problem, but predation is a small, emerging natural check.
What the video covers
- In March 2021, a viral video captured a black bear fighting a full-grown feral hog for about 10 minutes on US Highway 321 near Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
- The filmer, Philip Talbot, and park biologist Bill Stiver interpreted the bear's behavior as opportunistic predation, possibly on a hog weakened by a car strike.
- Stiver said such encounters happen regularly in the park, raising the question of why they are so rarely seen by the millions of visitors.
- Feral hogs trace back to George Gordon Moore's 1912 introduction of European wild boars on Hooper Bald in North Carolina, whose escape from an enclosure seeded the population.
- Hogs spread across the Southern Appalachians and reached the park by the late 1940s; the park has removed an average of 271 hogs yearly since 1977.
- Current estimates put 1,200 to 1,500 hogs inside the park, where they damage forest soil, wetlands, and native species.
- Hogs and black bears compete for acorns, and the park's roughly 1,900 bears are described as pressured by this competition.
- The transcript suggests bears may benefit from preying on hogs, particularly in spring when young hogs are vulnerable and bears are hungry.
- Hunters have sometimes mistaken black bears for hogs, as in a 2017 incident where a research-collared bear was shot.
- The piece concludes that bears alone will not control the hog population, but they may partially offset the invader's impact.
Chapters
- 00:00The Viral Bear-Hog Fight on Highway 321
- 01:12Expert Reactions and Why Such Encounters Go Unseen
- 03:12Origins of Feral Hogs at Hooper Bald
- 05:30Spread and Removal Efforts in the Smokies
- 08:00Hog Ecological Damage and Bear Competition
- 11:00Bear Population and Hunting Mistakes
- 16:00Conclusion: Can Bears Check the Hog Invasion?
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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On the embankment, a black bear has its jaws on the neck of a feral hog nearly its own size. For 10 minutes, while people film from their cars, the bear bites, drags, and fails to finish it.
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But that hog was never supposed to be prey. The park's biologist watched the footage and said this happens all the time. So, why has almost nobody seen it? And why can't the bears win?
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The man holding the camera was Philip Talbot, an outdoorsman from Satsuma, Alabama. He and a friend had spent the day in Cades Cove with their families looking for wildlife, and they were driving back toward their cabin when they saw something dark moving on the slope above the road. At first, they took it for a mother bear with a cub.
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Then they got closer, and the cub started screaming. It was a hog, a full-grown feral hog, bristle-backed and heavy through the shoulders, and the bear had it by the neck.
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In the footage, you can watch the bear try to haul it uphill, away from the asphalt, and you can watch the hog refuse to go. Both animals look spent.
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The bear lets go, bites again, pins it, loses it, and pins it again. Somebody off camera says it's unbelievable. Somebody else says it looks like something out of National Geographic.
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The video runs a little over 10 minutes, and in all that time, the bear never makes a clean kill.
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It wrecks the hog. By the end, the pig can barely drag its back half.
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But it's still alive when the car horns start up further back in the line of traffic, and the bear, rattled by the noise in the crowd, turns and climbs the hill into the trees.
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The hog is left in the grass at the edge of the road, still trying to stand.
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Talbot is an avid hunter, and he said he'd never seen anything like it. He guessed the bear would come back for the hog once everyone drove off.
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Nobody stayed to find out. Even the location turned into an argument. One Knoxville television station put the fight in Cades Cove, another placed it just off Highway 321 near Pittman Center on the north edge of the park east of Gatlinburg. The park's biologist said they had no real way to confirm where it was filmed.
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What nobody argued about was what the bear was doing. Within a day or two, people were forwarding the clip to Bill Stiver, the supervisory wildlife biologist for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. A man who'd spent three decades in those mountains. He watched it and didn't flinch. He told a regional environmental journal that what he saw was classic opportunistic predatory behavior.
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He had a theory about the hog. It was right beside a busy road and he suspected a car had clipped it, hurt it badly enough that a bear could take a chance on it.
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He admitted it was a little unusual to see a black bear go after an adult hog.
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That part surprised him, but the rest didn't because it was spring. The bears had just come out of their dens running on whatever fat they'd carried through the winter.
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And he said they were hungry and determined to find every calorie they could. Then he said the thing that turns a viral clip into a real question.
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"People rarely see this side of black bears," he told a Knoxville station, "but in his words, it happens all the time here." Sit with that for a second. This is the most visited national park in the United States. In 2025 alone, it logged more than 11 and a half million visits, more than double the next park on the list.
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People drive its roads at every hour of daylight with cameras in their pockets, and there are roughly 1,900 black bears living inside its boundary.
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If bears are killing hogs all the time and almost nobody has ever seen it, then something in these mountains is happening in plain sight and still staying hidden.
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And as we'll see, even if every one of those bears joined in, it still wouldn't be enough to stop what's coming out of the woods.
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The story of how a bear ends up with a hog by the throat starts on a bald mountain top in North Carolina more than a century ago with a rich man and a fence.
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In April of 1912, George Gordon Moore, a wealthy sportsman, brought the first European wild boars to Hooper Bald, a grassy summit in the Snowbird Mountains of Graham County, North Carolina, about 30 miles southwest of the land that would later become the national park. The boars came out of Germany, bought through an agent in Berlin who advertised them as wild stock from Russia's Ural Mountains.
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They rode the rail line to the town of Murphy, and then they went up the mountain by oxcart. The most common count puts that original herd at 13 animals. Some records say 14.
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Either way, it was a handful of pigs in crates. Moore built them a 500-acre enclosure out of split rails stacked nine rails high, and stocked the place like a European hunting estate. These weren't barnyard pigs. A grown boar stood around three feet at the shoulder, could weigh more than 400 pounds, carried sharp tusks, and wore a thick layer of cartilage across its front that worked like armor. They could root their way out of that fence whenever they felt like it. For years they mostly didn't, because life inside was easy. By the early 1920s, those 13 animals had become somewhere between 60 and 100.
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Then Moore's money ran out. The preserve passed to its caretaker, a Graham County man named Cotton McGuire, who couldn't afford to keep it running. McGuire sold whatever animals he could, and then he invited his friends up the mountain with their dogs for one big boar hunt to clear out the rest. It went badly. Perry Jones, writing in a 1959 booklet for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, recorded what happened that day. Only two boars were killed.
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At least a dozen dogs were killed or badly torn up. Some of the hunters had to climb trees to get away from charging animals.
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And the boars, worked into a frenzy by the banging and the shouting, simply broke through the fence and disappeared into the mountains.
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Nobody planned what came next. A fence gave way on a bad afternoon, and the Southern Appalachians had a new animal.
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The boar spread slowly and in every direction at once. They crossed ridges, followed creek bottoms, and bred with domestic pigs along the way.
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By the late 1940s, according to the Park Service's own records, they had pushed into the southwestern corner of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
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By the 1970s, they were throughout it. The park removed its first hog in 1959, and it has been killing them ever since.
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The first staff hired specifically to deal with hogs came on in 1977. Between 1977 and 2022, the park removed an average of 271 hogs every single year, trapping them in the coves and shooting them on the ridges year after year after year. The hogs living in the Smokies now aren't quite the monsters that broke out of Hooper Bald.
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Generations of mixing with domestic pigs made them smaller and shyer, most of them somewhere between 100 and 200 pounds.
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Most visitors never see one. Current modeling puts the population inside the park at 1,200 to 1,500 animals, and every one of them eats three to five percent of its own body weight every day.
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What they eat is the problem. A family of hogs moving through the woods turns the forest floor over like a plow.
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They tear into wetlands in the high spruce-fir forest, and they'll eat almost anything they turn up: snakes, salamanders, berries, beetles.
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Lisa McInnis, the park's chief of resource management and science, has said that when crews come across rooting damage, it can look like the work of a whole herd and turn out to be one or two pigs.
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Out of all the invasive species in the Smokies, she ranks hogs at the top. But their favorite food, the one they go after harder than anything else, is the acorn.
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And in these mountains, that puts them in direct competition with the biggest animal in the woods. Great Smoky Mountains National Park holds roughly 1,900 black bears.
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That works out to about two bears for every square mile, and the P
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year after year. The hogs living in the Smokies now aren't quite the monsters that broke out of Hooper Bald.
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Generations of mixing with domestic pigs made them smaller and shyer, most of them somewhere between 100 and 200 lbs.
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Most visitors never see one. Current modeling puts the population inside the park at 12 to 1500 animals and every one of them eats 3 to 5% of its own body weight every day.
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What they eat is the problem. A family of hogs moving through the woods turns the forest floor over like a plow.
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They tear into wetlands in the high spruce-fir forest and they'll eat almost anything they turn up, snakes, salamanders berries beetles.
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Lisa McInnis, the park's chief of resource management and science, has said that when crews come across rooting damage, it can look like the work of a whole herd and turn out to be one or two pigs.
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Out of all the invasive species in the Smokies, she ranks hogs at the top. But their favorite food, the one they go after harder than anything else, is the acorn.
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And in these mountains, that puts them in direct competition with the biggest animal in the woods. Great Smoky Mountains National Park holds roughly 1,900 black bears.
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That works out to about two bears for every square mile, and the Park Service calls it the densest black bear population in the country.
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It wasn't always obvious they were there at all. In the late 1960s, park managers guessed there might be as few as 50 bears in the entire park.
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They had no idea that for every bear raiding a campground, dozens more were living quiet lives back in the hollows, never coming near a person.
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Researchers from the University of Tennessee went in to count them, and that work grew into the longest-running black bear research program in North America.
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Most Smokies bears weigh between 100 and 250 lb, though the park has documented bears over 600.
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They can run 30 mph, climb almost anything, and swim. And for all that, they live mostly on plants.
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By the Park Service's count, roughly 85% of a Smokies bear's diet is plant material.
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Greens and grasses in the spring, berries and cherries in the summer, and in the fall, [music] above everything else acorns.
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Fall is when a bear's year gets decided. Between late October and mid-December, Smokies bears settle into their dens, [music] and the thing that carries them through is the fat they built from acorns and other nuts.
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Unlike bears farther north, the ones here may only sleep for a month or two at a time before waking.
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A good acorn crop means fat bears and healthy cubs. A bad one means hungry bears wandering far outside the park into neighborhoods and downtown streets looking for anything. That's why the park service has described European wild hogs as one
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of the most direct threats to the park's black bears. The threat comes from what hogs eat.
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They go after the same food bears need to get through the winter, and every acorn a family of pigs vacuums off the forest floor is one a bear won't get.
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Kim DeLozier, a retired park biologist who started his 32-year career in 1978 as a boar hunter, has said that when you take that much food out of these mountains, you end up with fewer bears, fewer deer, and fewer
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turkeys. So, for most of the time anyone has paid attention, the relationship between these two animals had a clean explanation.
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The hog was the bear's competitor, and that was all. There were good reasons to believe it. An adult boar is a terrible thing to try to kill.
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It's low, dense, fast, and armed with that cartilage armor across its front. The old records are full of fights that went the other way. In the 1920s, in the Okefenokee Swamp on the Georgia-Florida line, a feral boar was reported to have
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killed a black bear outright. There were similar accounts out of the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas back in the 1880s of boars killing bears in fights.
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When wildlife researchers wrote up what was known about the natural predators of feral hogs in this country, the entry on the black bear was careful.
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Bears were known to eat hogs of every age, but nobody knew whether that made any difference to hog numbers, and some researchers suspected bears killed very few hogs, if any at all.
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An adult hog, they pointed out, would be a formidable opponent for a black bear.
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That was the picture. Bears ate hog, sure. They ate it the way vultures eat it. Because hogs can carry disease and state laws restrict moving the carcasses, the park leaves the hogs it kills out in the woods and bears and
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vultures clean them up. A bear finding a dead pig was ordinary. A bear deciding to kill a live one, a grown one, was the kind of thing people filed under rare or under hunting camp stories.
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And that picture held mostly because there was so little to contradict it. The Smokies are steep and thick with laurel and rhododendron and almost everything that happens in them happens out of sight.
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If you're into stories like this one, the things that happen just off the road where nobody's looking, consider subscribing.
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It's the easiest way to catch the next one when it drops. Then that clip from Highway 321 hit the internet and the clean explanation started to come apart.
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Because when the man who'd watched over the park's wildlife for 30 years looked at it, he didn't see a freak event.
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He saw a normal one, a bear seeing an opening and taking it. And once you start looking, the evidence was already sitting there.
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In that same reference that called bear predation on hogs an open question, there's a detail that's easy to skip past.
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Up in the high country of the Great Smoky Mountains, bears had been reported tearing into the nylon net traps the park used to catch hogs to get at the hogs inside.
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Think about what that means. Those bears knew what was in the traps. They knew a hog was food. They'd figured out where the park's crews were catching pigs and they were coming to collect.
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Stiver said something else, too. Smokies bears routinely take down elk calves and sick elk, injured deer, and fawns.
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Every spring, many of the bears that tourists line up to photograph in the open fields of Cades Cove aren't grazing at all.
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They're walking the grass looking for newborn deer. The gentle berry-eating bear on the postcard turns into a hunter for a few weeks every year.
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Right when it's hungriest. And right when the woods are full of young animals that can't outrun it yet.
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And a feral sow can give birth at any time of year. So, the real question isn't whether a black bear can kill a hog.
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It obviously can. The question is how often it's doing it back in the coves and laurel hells where nobody is filming. And what's pushing it to.
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That's where this gets uncomfortable because nobody knows. No one has measured how many hogs the park's bears kill in a year.
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The research literature itself says the effect of bear predation on hog populations isn't known.
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What exists instead is a handful of explanations, and none of them is comfortable. The first is that the bears learned it from us.
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The park has been killing hogs since 1959, and today it typically leaves the bodies where they fall.
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Every one of those carcasses is a free meal of pork left out on the same ridges the bears walk.
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A young bear that follows its mother to a dead pig in a laurel thicket learns what a pig smells like and what it tastes like.
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A bear that has ripped open a hog trap has learned that hogs can be caught.
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If that's what's going on, then the park's long war on hogs may have been training generations of bears to see hogs as food.
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That sounds like a win. It also means a wild animal's hunting behavior is something people built by accident and still don't understand.
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The second explanation is hunger, and it's darker. Hogs eat the acorns bears depend on. In a year when the oaks fail, the bears are already short, and the hogs are still out there rooting up whatever's left.
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In October of 2015, Stiver reported that there were no cherries at all and the hard mast was marginal at best.
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Bears scattered. One mother wearing a GPS collar led her three cubs more than 20 miles from the Elkmont area of the park all the way into downtown Sevierville.
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Park staff counted as many as eight different bears feeding in a single hickory tree.
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Picture one of those bears thinner going into winter or thinner coming out of it crossing paths with the animal that ate its acorns.
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In this version, the bear turns to hogs because the hogs left it so little else.
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The third explanation is the simplest and in some ways the most unsettling. Maybe nothing has changed at all.
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Maybe bears have been killing hogs in these mountains every spring since the first boars came over the ridge from Hooper Bald.
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And the only new thing is that somebody finally happened to be parked on the right stretch of road with a phone.
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Stiver said it happens all the time. If he's right, then this has been playing out for the better part of a century inside the most visited national park in the country and the millions of people driving through it never had any
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idea. But whichever of those is true, the ending doesn't change. The bears aren't going to win this. Start with the math of a sow.
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According to the US Department of Agriculture, feral swine breed year-round, can start breeding at six to eight months old and can have up to two litters a year of four to 12 piglets each.
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Left alone, a feral hog population can double in about four months. In the Smokies, where food is harder to come by, a litter usually runs three to eight piglets.
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That's still far more than any bear is going to keep up with. The park's own estimate is that if it stopped controlling hogs entirely, the population would nearly quadruple in 6 years.
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They don't have to guess how fast it happens either. In 2024, hog control in the park paused while a new management plan was worked out.
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In 2025, the same crews, with no extra staff and no extra money, killed 503 hogs. Almost double the long-term average, simply because there were that many more pigs to find.
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Joe Yarkovich, a wildlife biologist who has spent more than two decades on hog control in the Smokies, said the change in damage from 1 year to the next was obvious on the ground.
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Now, put the bears back in. There are roughly 1,900 bears in the park and somewhere around 1,200 to 1,500 hogs. The bears actually outnumber the pigs, and they still aren't close to holding them back.
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The reason is in how a bear kills. A bear takes what's easy. A piglet that strays from the family, a hog limping away from a car strike, a pig already stuck in a trap.
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Those are exactly the animals that matter least to a hog population. The park learned that the hard way. Hogs are smart. Trap one, and the rest of the family won't fall for the same trick.
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And picking them off one by one barely dents their growth. That's why crews now use big corral traps wired with cameras, built to catch an entire family group, called a sounder, all at once. The only way to make a real impact, Yarkovich has
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said, is to take out the whole sounder. A bear does the opposite. It takes one animal, usually the weakest, [music] and leaves the breeding sows behind to replace it within months. The bears are hunting hogs the exact way the park's
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crew spent decades learning not to. There's one more piece missing. When researchers in this country have found a predator leaning hard on wild pigs, it's been a big cat.
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In South Florida, wild hogs turned out to be a major part of the Florida panther's diet. And mountain lions have been documented killing them, [music] too.
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But the cougar that once lived in these mountains is gone. In 2018, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Eastern cougar extinct.
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The bear is what's left, an animal that gets most of its calories from plants.
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This isn't only a Smokey story, either. Head down into the river bottoms and swamps of Louisiana, and the same two animals are colliding on a scale that makes Tennessee look small.
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In 1992, when the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Louisiana black bear as a threatened species, there may have been as few as 150 of them in their breeding habitat, scattered across three small populations in the bottomland
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forests [music] of the Tensas and Atchafalaya River Basins. This is the bear that inspired the teddy bear, and it had nearly disappeared.
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Then came more than two decades of work. More than 750,000 acres of habitat were protected or restored.
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The bear came off the threatened list in 2016. By 2023, state biologists counted 1,212 bears in the four main populations alone, a number that didn't include cubs. John Hanks, who leads the state's bear program, has estimated the real
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statewide total is likely above 1,500. And in 2024, Louisiana held its first regulated black bear hunt in more than 35 years. But those bears came back into a different swamp than the one they nearly vanished from.
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Louisiana now has feral hogs in all 64 of its parishes. The state wildlife department puts the population around 700,000, and its state wildlife veterinarian has said the real number could be anywhere from 600,000 to 1.2 million.
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Just to hold a hog population steady, state biologists figure you'd need to kill 70% of it every year. In the 2019 to 2020 season, Louisiana deer hunters alone reported killing more than 213,000 hogs, and the herd kept growing.
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Do the division. Roughly 1,500 bears, roughly 700,000 hogs. That's somewhere around 4 to 500 hogs for every bear in the state. And the state's own large carnivore program has said it's unusual for Louisiana black bears to act as
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predators at all. Mostly they live on fruit, nuts, grain, and carrion. The two animals now share the same oak bottoms and the same sugarcane edges.
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They eat the same acorns. In the dark, in heavy cover, they can even look the same.
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In November of 2017, a hunter on the Richard K. Yancey Wildlife Management Area shot and killed a 4-year-old female bear wearing a research collar, and he told agents he thought she was a wild hog.
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He wasn't the only one. Louisiana officials have warned hunters again and again that a black shape in the brush could be either animal, and bears have turned up caught in snares that were set for hogs.
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That's how closely the two animals overlap in Louisiana now. Bears in Louisiana often don't truly hibernate. They can stay active right through the winter, moving through the same woods as the hogs.
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Whether they're pulling hogs down the way that bear did on the roadside in Tennessee, nobody has measured.
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It's the same open question as in the Smokies. And in Louisiana, the odds are far worse.
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If you live anywhere bears and hogs overlap, from the Smokies down to the Atchafalaya, I'd really like to hear what you've seen. Tell me in the comments where you're watching from. So, here's what's actually known.
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Black bears kill feral hogs. The man who managed the Smokies wildlife for three decades said it happens all the time.
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Bears raid hog traps for the pigs inside. They eat the carcasses the park leaves behind.
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[music] And in spring, coming out of their dens hungry, they'll take on an animal that once killed bears in fights.
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And here's what isn't known. Nobody knows how many hogs a bear kills in a year.
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Nobody knows whether that number is rising. Nobody knows whether a bad acorn year sends more bears after hogs.
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Or whether the bears that grew up on carcasses from the park's control program are better at it than their grandparents were.
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The park is moving forward under its new hog plan. Stiver has since retired after 32 years. He used to compare hog control to mowing the grass, a job you never finish. Only keep after.
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Yarkovich puts it even more simply. Once you have wild hogs, you're stuck with them.
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So, the bears won't save these mountains from the pigs. What's left is something stranger. A native animal squeezed by an invader that eats its food has started eating the invader. A little, when it can. Without anyone teaching it on
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purpose and almost without anyone seeing. Go back to that roadside on highway 321. Eventually, the cars start moving again.
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The horns stop. The people drive on toward Gatlinburg with 10 minutes of footage that will travel farther than either of those animals ever will.
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And up on the slope, in the grass at the edge of the trees, the hog is still lying where the bear left it. The bears were in these mountains long before the roads had numbers, long before anyone stacked split rails on Hooper Bald, or
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drew a park boundary around the Smokies. They never agreed to do any of this where we could watch. Right now, somewhere above Pittman Center, a bear is working its way along a laurel slope, nose down, reading the ground for
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anything that moved there in the night. On a high ridge near the state line, a sow is leading a string of striped piglets through a muddy wallow.
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More of them than any bear will ever catch. And down in the Tensas bottomlands of Louisiana, a bear is moving through the oaks at dusk.
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A dark shape in the cover. The kind of shape hunters keep mistaking for a hog.
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Looking closely would mean admitting how much of this goes on without us. So, most of us keep driving.
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And above the road, just inside the tree line, something heavy and patient settles into the leaves and waits.
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If this one stayed with you, YouTube thinks you're going to like the video on your screen right now, too.
Topics:black bearferal hogsGreat Smoky Mountains National Parkinvasive specieswildlife predationAppalachiawild boarHooper BaldTennessee wildlifeecology
