Wild boars have come to Vermont.

No, this has nothing to do with the campaign for governor. These are the O-A-R boars – the four-footed, perhaps 500-pound rooters — not the O-R-E bores – the two-footed, 100-250-pound preeners.

In the interests of scientific precision, let’s acknowledge that these latest Vermont boars are possibly not even full-fledged boars (Sus scrofa in the official nomenclature) but some combination of boar and the regular old pig (sus domestica).

Boars are not native to Vermont. Neither, probably, are cattle (bos), of which there are many more, but there are at least two major differences between the two species: (1) Cows do less damage (although they do their share); (2) cows were brought to Vermont on purpose.

Wild pigs do a lot of damage to gardens, lawns, streams, fish, other wildlife and some tame life, primarily livestock and pets, though possibly also their human owners. As to the wild pigs now (apparently) resident in the state, they were not brought here on purpose.

They emigrated from New Hampshire, where they are not native, either, but where they (sort of, and no insult intended toward the fine citizens on the far side of the Connecticut) belong.

Details shortly, but first let’s make sure this post does not cause panic. Vermont is not being over-run by wild swine. According to the generally recognized authority on the subject, John J. (Jack) Mayer, Jr., there are not even enough wild hogs in Vermont to constitute a breeding population.

Yet.

And there may never be, said Mayer, who is a research scientist and manager at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., and co-author (with I. Lehr Brisban, Jr.) of Wild Pigs in the United States: Their History, Comparative Morphology, and Current Status (University of Georgia Press, 1991).

“The advantage Vermont will have is the weather,” Mayer said. “Piglets may not be able to survive a cold winter.”

The adult wild hogs, he said, rarely live for long, either, because they are so eagerly hunted.

“Word gets out (that there’s a wild pig in the area) and typically it doesn’t last very long. So far, Vermont really hasn’t had a sustaining population,” he said.

But Michigan, where it’s comparably cold,  does, Mayer said. So do four western Canadian provinces which are colder than Vermont and where the wild pigs, Mayer has been told, burrow into hay bales or make snow tunnels to survive a winter night.

But the animals are rapidly expanding their range, so much that the whole country faces what Mayer calls “a pig bomb.” As recently as mid-2008, wild pigs lived in 37 states. Now Mayer estimates 44, all but Connecticut, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Utah, and Wyoming.

Vermont’s boar population is low, fewer than 100, Mayer estimates, all of them in Windsor County, having swum across the river from their New Hampshire home.

No, wild hogs are not native to the Granite State, either. They were brought there, the first of them more than 100 years ago, to live and be hunted in the immense fenced “park” created in 1886 by Austin Corbin, the founder of the Long Island Rail Road.

After enclosing some 9,500 hectares (about 23,000 acres) with 58 kilometers (almost 35 miles) of fence, buried to make it “wild boar-proof,” Corbin bought 1,000 Black Forest wild boars from Germany.

The problem was that the fence was not people-proof, and then and now, according to Mayer, some of the locals, angry that all this land and all that game was available only to Corbin’s fellow-millionaires, kept tearing holes in the fence. Lately, he said, “vandals have been cutting holes you could drive a truck through.”

It is from those gaps in the fence, Mayer said, that according to his sources (whom he will not name; some of them may be among the fence-cutters) several wild hogs have swum across the Connecticut, probably making landfall somewhere between Windsor and Hartland.

Those travels illustrate how relentless and resilient these animals can be. The eastern edge of Corbin Park is about eight miles from the river, and while the area is not densely populated, it isn’t wilderness, either. Those hogs made their way to and across the Connecticut through human habitat.

Should they establish a breeding population here, the consequences would be consequential, and possibly catastrophic. It isn’t that boars are human-eating killers. There would be no need, Mayer said, “to keep the kids home from school.”

But they are voracious eaters who root into the ground everywhere—gardens and farm fields. They will eat, Mayer said, anything “ if they can get their mouth around it — fawns, goats, lambs.”

And pets. Mayer said wild hogs don’t like dogs, and some of the rare confrontations between the animals and humans have arisen when a hog attacked a dog being walked by its owner.

Boars are as ravenous about water as about food, Mayer said, and will root up a lawn’s underground sprinkling system.

They also damage trout fisheries. By rooting, eating, and excreting along riverbanks, they pollute the water and, by removing vegetation, cause erosion that covers trout redds (spawning areas) with silt.

Bears, bobcats, and coyotes eat wild hogs, but not enough “to have any impact on the population,” Mayer said. That’s why, once they establish a breeding population, they are almost impossible to eradicate.

“Hunters will take a certain numbers,” he said. “But hunting will only take 10-to-50 percent of a wild pig population. To control it, you need to take 70 percent out of the population ever year. Lethal removal just isn’t going to do it.”

Besides, not everyone wants to get rid of wild hogs. Hunters don’t, and hunters are a potent lobby in every state capital, including Vermont’s. The boars are “fun to hunt, good to eat and make a really impressive trophy on the wall,” Mayer said.

A wild pig population, then, creates a political problem as environmentalists, farmers, gardeners, and hikers favor extirpating them while hunters fight to keep enough of them around to hunt.

Well, that’s when happens when folks mess around with nature.

As everyone does and must. Agriculture is messing around with nature, and imposes some negative impacts on the natural world. But it’s necessary. Shipping wild animals far from their native habitat so that a few folks can pay big bucks to hunt them is not. There being no such thing as an indestructible fence, such shipments should perhaps be discouraged, or at least controlled.

Raising, of course, the matter of Pete the Moose (see the August 28 post, “The Moose is Not Loose”), about which a progress report. There has been no progress. Maj. Dennis Reinhardt of Fish and Wildlife’s enforcement division, said Fish and Wildlife officials are “continuing to meet Mr. (Doug) Nelson (on whose farm Pete is being illegally confined) and the Department of Agriculture “trying to resolve it amicably.” But Reinhardt made clear that the department is convinced that keeping the moose “absolutely is not legal.”

Correction: Terry Macaig represents Williston as a Democratic member of the House, not Burlington.

Forenote: There will be an extra News Guy posting tomorrow, Thursday (as well as the usual Friday posting), along with an announcement about some new developments at the web site which we trust will be received favorably.

Actually, it might be more accurate to consider today’s post the “extra” one. Tomorrow’s will have more news; what follows is a bit of musing on Vermont and consistency.

Back in the day, Sen. Russell Long, the Louisiana Democrat who chaired the Senate Finance Committee for a century or so, used to sum up the average person’s attitude toward taxation as follows: “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree.”

Bad poetry, but good political analysis.

As Vermonters are now learning (and proving), the same phenomenon applies to spending. From Gov. Jim Douglas on down, the attitude of the body politic is: “Cut the other guy to the bone, but leave my favorite program alone.”

Poetry no better. Perspicacity identical.

Exhibit A comes right from the top. For years, Vermont farmers and woodland owners have gotten a tax break thanks to the “current use” tax assessment. Nobody opposes this policy in principle; it’s kept thousands of acres open and green by removing an incentive for landowners to sell to developers.

But it’s also expensive.

According to whom?

According to the Douglas Administration, whose tax commissioner, Richard Westman, just a few weeks ago identified the Current Use policy as one reason everybody else’s property taxes keep rising.

As it happens, over the last year or so, the various “stakeholders” of Current Use – farmers, foresters, environmentalists, local officials – have been meeting to try to figure out a way to get a little more money for the state treasury without seriously diminishing the advantage to landowners.

And they succeeded. Or at least most of them thought they did, and they presented the Legislature with a plan that would bring in another $1.6 million in revenue.

Oh, no, said the Douglas Administration, represented in this case by Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Jonathan Wood. Yeah, we need money. We’re $150 million in the hole. But we don’t want money from these landowners because…well, because it’s a good program, Wood said.

Yeah, but they’re all good programs. Maybe what he really meant was—These are our friends.

Then there was the Governor’s major power play to get a special Legislative Board to approve spending several more million dollars for one of his pet programs even as he insists on cutting almost everything else. This was the cap-raising of the Vermont Economic Growth Incentive . (See VEGI Burgher,” the January 13 post)

Assume for the sake of discussion that this, too, is a valuable program. But it never seemed to have occurred to Douglas to apply the same standards to it that he wants imposed on other agencies—spend less than you have in your budget this year because we all have to tighten our belts.

Do not suppose, though, that this “cut everybody but me” attitude is limited to Douglas and his fellow Republicans. At a Democratic fund-raiser a couple of weeks ago, former Gov. Howard Dean scolded lawmakers who might be willing to consider reducing the budget of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.

“We need that program,” Dean said. “It is the perfect public-private partnership.”

It may be, and like Current Use, it has been useful as a conservation mechanism. But it couldn’t survive a year or two with a little less money?

The liberals are somewhat less inconsistent than the conservatives here, because some of them openly call for some targeted and temporary tax increases to help the state over its $150 million budget shortfall. But everybody agrees that programs will have to be cut.

Just not their favorites.

OK, some folks are willing to take less. State workers took a three percent pay cut. Yes, they did it under pressure and to avoid more layoffs, so it wasn’t just an act of noble sacrifice. But it was a sacrifice, as was the five percent pay cut taken by their bosses, the “exempt” state workers who earn more than $60,000 a year. The Stowe teachers agreed to give up the 5.5 percent pay hike they had negotiated for this year.

But these seem to be the exceptions. The default position for Vermont advocates left and right remains a firm and forthright conviction to cut spending. On everybody else’s programs.

Aftnote: Because the News Guy rarely misses an opportunity to ridicule or insult the Burlington Free Press when it deserves ridicule or insult, it’s only fair that the paper’s triumphs be recognized. Last Sunday alone it had three pieces of first-rate journalism: Sam Hemingway’s lead story about tritium contamination at nuclear plants nationwide, Nancy Remsen’s story about the potential impacts of state budget cuts, Candace Page’s fascinating account of niche marketing agriculture in Vermont.

OK, for the last time for a year if not forever, let’s get this fund-raising stuff out of the way.

The response to last month’s plea for donations has been encouraging. The News Guy will live for another year.

The clever ploy, of course, would be to state the opposite, that only you, by your contribution, can stave off the death of this site. But while effective marketing may call for…well, shall we say a touch of artfulness, good journalism – the goal here — requires transparency.

Which you have. Whether or not you contribute, the News Guy will live.

But he still needs a little more revenue. Hence this admittedly annoying reminder. The experience of the last few weeks is that reminders work; each new appeal for funds inspires more donations. Perhaps this explains why public radio station fund drives are so obnoxious. It works. Alas, the News Guy finds it impossible to be nearly as obnoxious as a public radio station. But he’s trying.

So once more: If you think this site brings Vermonters news and analysis they otherwise would not get, and contributes to the state’s public discussion, click on “donate” (Under “pages” in the upper right quarter of the page) and send as little (or, even better, as much) as you choose.

All right. Enough of that.

Now let’s peek into two items of the week’s news, starting with State Sen. Hinda Miller’s proposal to reverse this year’s repeal of the state’s capital gains tax preference.

In this case, a peek is all that’s required because, with the eternal caveat that one can never conclusively predict where proposed legislation will go, one can with some confidence predict that this one ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Still, there was something interesting about the evidence Sen. Miller, a Burlington Democrat, provided as she announced her proposal: there wasn’t much, if any.

Do not misunderstand. This is an observation, not a condemnation. There is nothing unusual in proposing legislation without providing much evidence for it. Better (or worse?) yet, one need not have evidence to be correct.

Miller said that doing away with the preference may have been “fair” because it mostly effected the wealthy, but it was not “smart” because it would discourage investments, which the state needs.

“If we don’t repeal these capital-gains tax increases then we are going to dissipate any consideration people might have to risk their own money in the future of Vermont businesses,” Miller told the Burlington Free Press.

Could be. Then again, the news has been full of late of people who have decided to risk somebody’s money, probably including their own, in Vermont businesses (a new Yogurt plant in Brattleboro; a new company planning to produce hydro power from old flood control dams; three stores moving to Shelburne Road Plaza). Obviously, the tax structure isn’t discouraging everybody.

Not to mention that Gov. Jim Douglas, that advocate of low taxes and investment incentives, once proposed ending that capital gains preference himself. True, Douglas would have, sort of, given the money back to the same people who “lost” it by reducing income tax rates on the wealthiest taxpayers. But the impact on investment would presumably have been identical to the impact from this year’s repeal.

In fairness to Sen. Miller, she might have some facts to back up her contention, but she was out of town yesterday and did not respond to phone and email messages.

But now comes word of an actual economic study arguing that under the present circumstances (high unemployment; effective zero short-term interest rates), cutting capital gains taxes would be exactly the wrong thing to do.

In a paper written for the New York Federal Reserve Bank, economist Gauti Eggertsson concluded that reducing capital gains taxes “deepens a recession” because it “gives people the incentive to save instead of spend, when precisely the opposite is needed.”

The other item worth a peek is yesterday’s unanimous decision by the Legislative Committee on Administrative Review (LCAR) to reject a proposed rule allowing all-terrain vehicles on state land.

Again, only a peek is needed because there’s no reason to think many Vermonters care much. This is a niche issue. Oh, there’s measurable public opinion on it; a rather substantial majority of the public seems to oppose allowing the ATVs on state land. But only the hardcore environmentalists are passionate opponents, just as only the ATV riders are passionate advocates.

This political perspective is appropriate because the Agency of Natural Resource’s case for changing the rule was entirely political. The scientific evidence – every iota of it – supports keeping the ATVs off public land (and perhaps imposing more restrictions elsewhere). That’s why the actual scientists in the agency opposed changing the rule.

Again, this is observation, not condemnation. In a democracy, political decisions are entirely proper. Top ANR officials might have reasonably concluded that the degradation of the natural resource caused by ATVs, while certain, would be minor, outweighed by the enhanced convenience bestowed on the ATV riders.

(And perhaps enhanced economic activity, though whether allowing ATVs on state land would attract more out-of-state riders to Vermont is conjecture, and would have to be considered against the possibility that the policy would deter some out-of-state visitors who prefer quiet hikes on state land).

Then there’s the management consideration. ANR Secretary Jonathan Wood, neither an ATV rider nor, by reliable report, a great fan of the ATV lobby, has pointed out that some ATVers are riding on state land anyway, legal or no, and that providing some legal access might reduce the trespassing.

Besides, the ATV riders are one of the constituencies to which Gov. Jim Douglas…well, after some reflection, let’s say, one which he likes to please.

Before the reflection, the impulse was to say a constituency to which Douglas panders. But that has an unnecessarily derogatory connotation. Pandering is unavoidable in a democracy, and all office-holders engage in it (See under: Vermont Yankee, Democratic candidates for governor, and). The favored constituency does not think of itself as being pandered to, only as having its needs recognized and its sensibilities honored.

That’s why the Douglas Administration might try to push ahead with the rule change anyway. Honoring the sensibilities of a loyal constituency, even a small one, can be politically appealing.