BATON ROUGE - Across Louisiana, the feral pig population continues to grow. They can be found in all 64 parishes, and the total number of feral pigs is around 900,000 in the state.

"When I first started this, I thought Texas had a pig problem, not Louisiana. However, when you look at the population estimates for the states and compare it by the land area, we have about the same density of feral pigs as Texas," LSU AgCenter's Interim Southeast Regional Director Glen Gentry said.

According to a recent study by the AgCenter, it found that feral pigs have done about $94 million worth of damage to the state's agricultural operations each year. He expects that number to rise.

A big reason for the hogs' expansion is their high birth rate.

"I'm a reproductive physiologist by training. One day, I sat down and looked at a pig and her offspring, which is about six piglets. They have about a litter and a half every year on average," Gentry said.

In that litter, there could be several females that have liters of their own. Gentry says in 48 months, there could be hundreds of pigs all leading back to just one sow.

"In Louisiana, we are hunting and trapping them. The problem with those techniques is you can't make a large enough impact on the pig population," Gentry said.

Pointe Coupee Sheriff Rene' Thibodeaux says he's lived in the parish his whole life. Growing up, he says he never saw feral pigs. Now, they have become common in woods, pastures, and even neighborhoods. He told WBRZ he's seen an increase in the amount of calls they've received about feral hogs recently.

The AgCenter says it has developed a way to mitigate the population by lacing dehydrated fish with sodium nitrite, which can kill the hogs.

"We ran preference trials, and we found out that dehydrated pogey fish is what they would leave whole shell corn for, so we made a bunch of comparisons. The whole shell corn was always our control, and we compared all kinds of things to it and the dehydrated fish. They ate the fish before they would go eat the corn," Gentry said.

According to Gentry, sodium nitrate works by changing hemoglobin to methemoglobin, which cannot carry oxygen. The pig suffocates from the inside out.

"We ran some studies to determine what the lethal dose would need to be to kill 90 percent of the population, which is our LD 90 number, and we came up with 188 parts per million," Gentry said.

Some of the work they did showed that it would take about three hours from the time the pig gets a lethal dose to the time they die.

However, the sodium nitrite can degrade in wet conditions -- and Gentry says in those cases, the pigs just fall asleep.

Additionally, sodium nitrite is still not approved as a feral pig toxicant in Louisiana.

"Right now, we're working with a consulting group to try to figure out what we need to get through the EPA to get what we call an experimental use permit. Up until this point, all the experiments that we've run with sodium nitrite baits have been in pens. So we catch wild pigs and put them in a pen, run our trials and record the results. We think that when we put it out on the landscape, we're gonna get similar results, but you don't know until we're actually going to do it."

Gentry said that the efforts won't deplete the population. 

"It's gonna help control pigs. It's not going to eradicate pigs from the landscape and I explained it like rats. We've had rats and we've been poisoning rats since the '40s and '50s and we still have rats. It's going to be the same thing with the pigs," He added.