SAN JOSE — It looks like pig-killing season will continue for good in San Jose, though don’t expect to see locals going on any shooting sprees throughout suburbia.

With one of the newest and seemingly most-out-of-place laws in the capital of high-tech country set to expire, the San Jose City Council is expected to vote Tuesday to keep a temporary ordinance allowing home and business owners to have wild pigs that are tearing up their property trapped and shot.

The council fired the starting pistol on a limited pig-hunting period in November 2013 after home and business owners complained that an invasion of wild boars was chewing up lawns and fairways in search of food, causing thousands of dollars in damage. City law at the time prohibited shooting the caged animals, which trappers said were too big and dangerous to transport to a place where they could be euthanized with drugs. The temporary ordinance requires a state permit and a mandate to trap the boars before they can be shot.

Since then, San Jose hasn’t exactly turned into the Wild West.

A total of 14 pigs have been nabbed and executed in south San Jose, where the hogs have been digging up well-manicured lawns for years. The haul includes six adult females and two piglets caught at the Almaden Country Club, five at a business in Coyote Creek and one at a home in the upscale Almaden neighborhood.

Supporters say the new law has been a success because complaints about boars ripping up lawns are down, perhaps because the animals are intelligent enough to sniff out the traps and avoid those areas in the future. At the country club, after the swine were killed in June, they haven’t been back in significant numbers since.

“They get the word out somehow, and they don’t go there, and that’s one of the reasons I think it’s working,” said Councilman Johnny Khamis, who’s led the charge for the pig ordinance since the hogs have mostly invaded his district at the southern tip of the city.

Hopes for a huge hog haul were never high — Khamis originally said not to expect a “pig genocide.” At first, no one was able to catch any pigs, although one person did report nabbing a skunk in a pig cage. Then-Mayor Chuck Reed, citing the media coverage of the law, joked that “the pigs read the newspaper.”

There was also a sharp decline in interest in catching the pigs after it was detailed that residents could not simply venture into their backyards with shotguns in search of swine. When news of the temporary law surfaced in late 2013, everyone from father-and-son teams to enthusiastic pork lovers flooded City Hall with phone calls asking how they could go fire away at the hogs.

It turns out that in order to kill a pig under the law, property owners must obtain a “depredation” permit from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Only after trying nonlethal methods, such as installing fencing, can they set traps. And if they can outsmart the pigs and catch one, they must notify the police department, move the trap far from homes and shoot the animal while it’s still caged.

Like the rest of the Bay Area, San Jose isn’t exactly Pig Capital U.S.A., but it has been dealing for years with sporadic cases of pigs coming down from remote areas to dig up lawns to reach grub and water — and attracting predators such as mountain lions.

“When the hills turn brown, they have to come to where the moisture is,” said Tim Gall, a licensed trapper who caught the pigs at the San Jose country club and has responded to complaints in Palo Alto, Los Gatos and Morgan Hill. “Because of the drought, it’s going to bring pigs out.”

In virtually every successful case since the law went into effect, locals have spent hundreds of dollars to hire professional trappers as opposed to catching the hogs themselves, said Jon Cicirelli, the city’s animal care director. Gall said it costs even more to buy a huge trapping cage, which then has to be stored when the pigs retreat to the hills.

The new law is set to expire on Feb. 2, but the vote by the council on Tuesday afternoon — after council members 14 months ago approved the temporary ordinance 8 to 3 — would make it permanent.

“We’ve had some minor success,” Khamis said. “But I think that it’s making a difference.”

Contact Mike Rosenberg at 408-920-5705. Follow him at Twitter.com/RosenbergMerc.