Thirty feral hogs escaped from their pens at a Fort Worth meatpacking plant Sunday night and led animal control officers on a frantic chase through a residential neighborhood, the Fort-Worth Star Telegram‘s Bill Hanna reported.
City official Scott Hanlan warned residents to avoid cornerning the hogs, which were “armed with tusks.” Around fourteen of the hogs were recaptured on slaughterhouse property and animal control officers tracked down another thirteen of the swine roaming through the neighborhood near Meacham International Airport. Eight of those pigs were found under a house, according to Omar Villafranca of NBC DFW, and one boar with especially poor judgment was said to have been found outside Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que. The three remaining hogs were thought to have rejoined the 2.6 million feral hogs that move freely about the state of Texas.
The hogs were awaiting slaughter at BelTex/Frontier Meats, one of the two Texas slaughterhouses that formerly processed horse meat. The Belgian company now handles mainly exotic meats, including wild boar, ostrich, and deer, as well as kosher beef, Bill Hanna wrote in the Star-Telegram. The company processes some 5,300 pounds of meat each month, according to the company website.
Fox 4 aired grainy cell phone videos of the hogs’ wild dash through the neighborhood:
