Feral Hogs in Texas: How Thermal Drone Data Helps Landowners Fight Back

Texas has an estimated 4 million feral hogs, and they cause roughly $500 million in agricultural damage every year. Torn-up pastures, trashed fences, destroyed food plots, and competition with the native wildlife that landowners actively manage lead to immense frustration across Texas and the United States. If you own or lease Texas land, you've probably already dealt with this problem, and you've probably already learned that hogs are frustratingly sometimes illusive. They move at night, stick to thick cover, and can wipe out ten acres in a single evening without a single sighting during daylight hours.

This is exactly the kind of challenge thermal imaging was built to address. Here’s how thermal drone data can support a feral hog management plan, along with tools for Texas landowners to navigate the complex legal world surrounding these swine. 

Why Feral Hogs Are So Hard to Manage 

Feral hogs are intelligent, mostly nocturnal, and highly fecund. A single sow can produce two litters a year, with four to eight piglets in each litter. Trail cameras spotlighting can tell you hogs are present, but they rarely tell you how many, where they're concentrated, or how they're moving across your property. Without that picture, landowners end up guessing at trap placement, wasting time on the wrong areas, and underestimating just how big the problem actually is.

A thermal drone survey solves the visibility problem directly. Hogs show up clearly in thermal imagery, allowing a single flight to provide a reliable population estimate and map where hogs are concentrated across your property. It’s the same core technology Sky Senderos has used for years to conduct deer population surveys, now applied to a different species.

What Texas Law Actually Allows

The legal code in Texas regarding outdoor activities, particularly hunting, can be complex, so it’s worth being precise. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) treats drones as aircraft, and under the federal Airborne Hunting Act, shooting or attempting to shoot any animal from an aircraft is illegal in Texas. The act does provide exceptions for depredation management, and TPWD issues the necessary permits to conduct this activity. Drone-mounted weapons systems are not permitted under any circumstances.

However, TPWD carved out a specific exception for feral hogs in 2022, recognizing the scale of the damage they cause. Under this rule:

• Drones can legally be used at night to locate feral hogs, so that gunners on the ground can act on that information.
• The take itself must happen from the ground — a licensed shooter, not the drone, does the work.
• General wildlife surveying by drone: locating, capturing, or photographing wildlife otherwise requires an Aerial Management Permit (AMP) and Landowner Authorization (LOA) issued by TPWD. Feral hogs are the specific caveat that doesn't require the same restrictions for locating purposes, but operators still need to comply with FAA Part 107 rules for commercial drone flights.

In short: The use of thermal drones to locate feral hogs and aid in eradication efforts is legal in the state of Texas. Whoever is conducting the survey must possess an Aerial Wildlife Management Permit (AMP) from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department and drones may only be used strictly as a scouting tool to guide ground gunners or pinpoint location coordinates for removal.

What a Thermal Hog Survey Tells You

When we fly a property, feral hogs can be a primary target of the thermal survey. Because hogs show up clearly in thermal imagery, we can locate and document them across the property, providing valuable insight into their numbers, distribution, and areas of concentrated activity. A dedicated hog-focused flight, or a hog survey incorporated into a broader wildlife census, can give you:

• An accurate population estimate, instead of a guess based on rooting damage or occasional sightings
• Hot spot mapping showing where hogs are concentrated, which tells you exactly where to place traps or focus control efforts
• Movement patterns across the property, useful for understanding travel corridors between bedding and feeding areas
• A damage-to-population correlation, so you can see whether the destruction you're seeing on the ground matches the size of the group actually causing it

Annual wildlife surveys offer a natural opportunity to assess feral hog activity alongside deer and exotic species. Collecting all of the wildlife management data you need with a single drone flight is an invaluable tool in a landowners management plan. 

Turning Data Into a Control Plan

Aerial data is only useful if it informs what you do on the ground. Once you know where hogs are concentrated and roughly how many you're dealing with, the most common next steps are:

• Coordinating with a licensed aerial gunning operation or ground hunters, using the drone data to prioritize which pastures to hit first
• Trap placement based on documented hot spots rather than trial and error
• Fencing or exclusion decisions around high-value areas like food plots, water sources, or sensitive habitat
• Tracking control efforts over time by comparing survey data year over year to see whether your management plan is actually reducing the population

Feral hogs won’t be eliminated from a property in a single effort, they’re simply too mobile and reproduce too quickly. But accurate data can turn hog control from a constant, reactive scramble into a management strategy you can plan, target, and measure over time.

Get a Clear Picture of What's on Your Property

If you're managing deer, dealing with a wildlife exemption, or just tired of guessing how bad your hog problem really is, a thermal drone survey gives you the full picture in a single flight. Request a free quote from Sky Senderos to see what's actually out there on your land.

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