GILROY — Max Zhang grew up in the overcrowded city of Beijing, playing video games for fun and getting little experience in the great outdoors. He’s a 37-year-old Silicon Valley software engineer now — and he’s setting out to change all that.
He’s learning how to hunt wild pigs.
Zhang is part of a new generation of would-be hunters who crowded into a barn in the rolling hills east of Gilroy on Saturday to learn how to shoot, kill, track and butcher the animals — which have become destructive pests in almost every county in the state.
Unlike past generations, many of the three dozen participants who joined the clinic sponsored by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife didn’t grow up with fathers teaching them the fundamentals of hunting.
Zhang certainly didn’t — and his job at a Mountain View startup wasn’t getting him much closer to the land.
“Sitting in a cubicle all day is not healthy,” Zhang said. “This is a good way to communicate with nature.”
Lt. Alan Gregory, who led the clinic for his department, estimated that 75 percent of the participants in the class were new hunters who hadn’t grown up with the sport.
“There is a generation gap,” Gregory said, “and this program bridges that gap.”
Driving into the hills east of Gilroy to the state’s Cañada de los Osos Ecological Reserve is a lesson in environmental appreciation alone. Along the 20-minute drive to what was the old Stevenson Ranch before it was purchased by the state in 2001 for $7.2 million, it was easy to spot a pair of wild turkeys, a family of deer, a hawk, a peacock and a rancher waving from a tractor.
From the state’s point of view, however, the hunting clinic was an opportunity to bring in new, well-trained and respectful hunters to help keep the population of wild pigs under control.
The number of licensed hunters in California once reached more than 800,000. Now, there are only about 350,000. The number of wild pigs in the state, on the other hand, has soared to anywhere from 200,000 to more than a million.
The beasts are not native to California. They were brought in from Europe as livestock to the California missions in the 1700s and 1800s. While grizzly bears nearly eradicated them by the turn of the 20th century, their populations starting resurging in the 1920s after Monterey County ranchers raised them to hunt on their ranches. They often escaped, however, and found perfect conditions to propagate in the region’s oak-studded hills and grasslands.
But the pigs, also called wild boar, proved to be a menace. Not only do they threaten native wildlife and habitat, they also often churn up farmers’ fields, backyards and soccer fields with their incessant rooting.
They’ve become such a nuisance in the Almaden Valley and Coyote Creek areas of South San Jose that the city is now allowing the animals to be shot by licensed trappers within the city limits.
Zhang says he’s happy to be a part of the solution when it comes to culling the pig population. He plans to invite his other engineer friends to join him. But for Zhang and others at the workshop, their motivation is more powerful.
Breanna Duplisea, 26, grew up in Orange County and works for the state as a field biologist. As much as she appreciated wildlife before, she is gaining an even deeper understanding by hunting.
“As a hunter, you get to know the prey even more than as a scientist because you understand that connection” between the predator and prey and the animal and its habitat, she said.
Killing an animal is both an awesome and humbling experience, said Duplisea, who only recently shot her first wild turkey.
“Having that adrenaline rush is insane,” she said.
Some of her old friends don’t understand why she would want to kill a living thing.
“I ask them: ‘Do you eat meat?'” she said. “Where do you think that wrapped piece of chicken comes from?”
For his part, the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Gregory made sure the hunters understood the responsibility of hunting. Not only must they avoid trespassing on private property without permission, he said, but when they bag an animal they must take all the edible meat with them.
“One of the worst things you can do as a hunter is not respect the animal,” Gregory said. “Morally, ethically, legally, it’s your responsibility to take all the meat out of the field.”
For a pig hunter, with a $46 hunting license and $22 to tag each killed animal, that could mean returning home with 70 pounds worth of meat.
The Barragan brothers, Benjamin and Genaro, are looking forward to the whole experience.
Both grew up in East Palo Alto the children of Mexican immigrants. Their parents didn’t hunt, but they knew how to slaughter a goat in their backyard for Christmas.
That sent the younger Genaro hiding under his bed as a child. But now, at 27, he is beginning to appreciate the value of killing his own food.
“I’ve never killed an animal,” said Genaro Barragan, an engineering consultant who still lives in East Palo Alto with his brother, but he’s getting ready to try. “A lot of guys just want to get the big boar, but I just want the experience.”
For Benjamin, a drywall contractor, “sometimes a big part of it is just getting out of the city.”
Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at twitter.com/juliasulek
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