Swine Smuggling:
The New American Art

by Mason Dougherty

I am currently driving a semi truck full of feral hogs from El Paso Texas to a tract of land thirty miles outside of Greensboro, North Carolina. This is not the first time I have done this. I have been hired by a wealthy landowner to provide a truckload of fifty to seventy-five hogs every three months as breeding stock to supplement the preexisting population. This very same wealthy landowner will take tourists on rides in his helicopter where they will legally shoot the invasive pigs with a machine gun. He has told me this every time I have made the trip, and I still do not care.

I will accept cash payment upon delivery and use all of it to buy bath salts. I will then spend the next two days in a state of extreme delirium, and wake up under an overpass the day after entirely penniless. I have spent twelve thousand dollars on more bath salts, booze, and a magic potion a homeless man sold to me that turned out to be three separate brands of toilet cleaner in a vodka bottle. It is at this point where I will return to my eighteen-wheeler and drive it around the city looking for grocery stores with full dumpsters. I will spend the next three days loading rotting garbage into the back of the truck to use as hog bait before going to the very same tract of land and poaching fifty to seventy-five feral hogs from the helicopter man before leaving for Frankfort, Kentucky. I will proceed to deliver the hogs to another rich man on the outskirts of town who will use them as breeding stock to supplement the local population. He will take tourists on rides in ATVs where they will legally shoot the invasive pigs with a machine gun. I still do not care.

I will take the payment he gives me before stowing half of it in a ditch. I will then meet up with an acquaintance from my past, who I refer to as ‘Gizzard,’ in a strip club located underneath an overpass. We will exchange anecdotes about our lines of work, where he will tell me about how he has been smuggling trucks of two thousand Burmese pythons into a private swathe of the Florida Everglades for a rich landowner who lets redneck tourists obliterate them with explosives. I will punch him in the nose without warning and get thrown out of the club by the bouncer, who will snap my left thumb like a pretzel. I will be inconsolable due to my jealousy. In my frustration, I will go on another bath salt-induced bender and take my eighteen-wheeler for a joyride before getting pulled over by a state trooper. I will be noticeably intoxicated and unable to coherently answer questions about why my trailer is full of garbage and rotting hog carcasses. The trooper will then have me thrown in jail before letting me out with a DUI and a warning.

After this, I will use the rest of the ditch money to get my truck out of the impound lot. I will be out of contracts and self-respect, so I use a payphone to call my boss. I have never seen his face and do not know his true ulterior motives, but this does not bother me. I will manage to convince him to wire me a fifteen hundred dollar company loan before he gives me my next job. I am to source fifty to seventy-five feral hogs in the back of my truck and deliver them to a location where a rich landowner has erected a train track around his property to take tourists around in a miniature locomotive to legally shoot feral swine with a machine gun. I will instead use the money to buy more bath salts. I do not care.

I have no intention of paying the money back because I do not understand why it could be detrimental to my physical health in the long run. I am unable to comprehend consequences because my synapses are dead from years of crippling drug dependency, and because I dropped out of the fourth grade. I single-handedly have caused over two-point-four billion dollars worth of property damage over the four years since I started swine trafficking. I am partly responsible for the extinction of two subspecies of endangered salamanders and one rare newt. The feral hog populations in the greater southern United States have nearly tripled, and I am indirectly responsible for the bankruptcy of thirty-two different farms in eighteen different counties. I do not have the mental capacity to understand these facts, nor would I care if I did. I spend the night huffing gasoline in my truck cab.

I spend the next two days driving around the city, filling up my truck bed with garbage to use as bait to poach more feral pigs. The next night, while I am illegally parking my truck on the train man’s land and trying to lure pigs to my trailer, the landowner sees me while riding the children’s locomotive and shoots at my truck cab with a machine gun. This frightens me, and I close the doors to my trailer, entrapping only thirty-six feral hogs inside. This is enough to establish a growing population of swine even in an area in which they are not adapted to, but I do not know this and am angry at myself for not entrapping more. I manage to drive away in time, but not before the trailer is riddled with bullet holes. I do not care. I spend the rest of the night smoking methamphetamine in my truck cab. The next morning I start driving to my next destination. I am unsure of where it is exactly, but don’t worry: it will probably be a place near you.

Mason Dougherty is a pre-medical student currently living in Southern California. In his free time he enjoys hiking, appreciating citrus fruit, and writing about things that have nothing to do with calculus.