SPOONER, Wis. — Two recent and credible reports of feral hogs running wild in the woods of Washburn County spurred the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources on Friday to remind hunters and landowners to shoot the animals on sight.

“Go ahead and poke them. We want them dead as soon as possible,” said Mike Zeckmeister, DNR wildlife supervisor in Spooner.

Zeckmeister said the wild hogs can cause severe damage to the forest. The pigs also can carry disease, damage wildlife habitat, compete with native wildlife for food, cause crop damage and even threaten human safety, the DNR notes.

The animals, which can grow to several hundred pounds, can either be wild boars that escape from game farms or, in some cases, domestic pigs that escape and turn wild.

“They physically change; they get hairy and grow tusks and everything. And they definitely can survive a Wisconsin winter,” Zeckmeister said.

The feral hogs’ most notable features include coarse hair with long bristles, elongated snouts and moderately long, uncurled tails. They are usually black, but also can be gray, brown, blond, white or even reddish to spotted.

The DNR gets occasional reports of wild pigs on the loose in northern Wisconsin. The Washburn County reports from August are the only recent ones, Zeckmeister said. But reports have come from Douglas, Polk, Burnett, Taylor and Oneida counties in the past decade, he said. Several hunters worked together to track and kill a giant wild hog in Polk County two years ago, he said.

No license or permit is required to shoot the pigs on your own property, but a small game or deer hunting license is needed on public land. Whoever shoots them can keep the meat, “and it’s pretty good, I’m told,” Zeckmeister said.

“The goal is, with hunting seasons coming up, that if someone is in their bow stand they won’t hesitate, wondering if they can shoot them. Go ahead and do it,” he said. “An ounce of prevention here can help a lot.”

If you cannot kill the wild pig, the DNR asks that you contact a local DNR wildlife biologist or file a report online.

In July 2001, several wild pigs escaped from a game farm in northern Douglas County by rooting under a fence. At least one was shot by a local landowner, but several were never accounted for.

It is illegal to operate a captive feral pig hunting facility in Wisconsin. It also is illegal to stock feral pigs for hunting purposes, to release hogs into the wild or to possess live feral hogs without a permit.