WILD HOGS TAKE ATLANTA!

Wild hogs are roaming loose in Atlanta… and residents are running for their lives!

Wild hogs are scaring residents of Atlanta.

Some parents fear sending their children to a school bus stop, where up to four hundred of the hogs are roaming the streets and eating trash, attacking people.

Authorities hope the hogs can be trapped in cages by next week, but they may need to have help from the National Guard.

“They’re causing mayhem and terror,” said one Atlanta resident as she headed out to work in downtown Atlanta.

The Atlanta Police Department’s  animal control officers are working on a plan to capture the animals, but two of the officers were already hospitalized after trying to capture just one.

“My children are petrified,” said another Atlanta resident “I have little ones that get on the bus at 6:40 in the morning,” she added. “So, I’m sorry. I’m not built to fight off wildlife.”

The hogs are extremely dangerous if they are cornered, said Harry Forston, a deer and feral hog biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

“If they feel threatened, they can bite and kill,” he said.

A sow protecting piglets can also be dangerous, much like a bear protecting her cubs.

Feral hogs live in just about every county in Georgia. The animals in Georgia are “a hodge-podge” of domestic pigs that escaped from their pens and hogs that have been living in the wild for years.

In the early 1900s, several animals escaped from their enclosures at a hunting preserve at a mountain known as Hooper Bald in North Carolina, and they mated with feral hogs in the surrounding area. That population then spread into other areas of the Southeast, including Georgia, according to research done by Dr. Jack Mayer of the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C.s.