THE WOODLANDS — Kathleen Settle was raking her lawn when her husband, Charles, blowing leaves by the street, called to her in alarm. Once again, as people in their neighborhood say, they’d been hit.

Feral hogs had dug all around the fire hydrant overnight, tearing up the grass in search of something to eat. They’d ravaged the yard in which the Settles took pride.

Feral hogs for years have plagued Texans, damaging property and reproducing faster than anyone would like. Then, last month, in a shocking turn, a coroner said hogs had killed 59-year-old Christine Rollins in Chambers County, east of Houston.

The sheriff there is still investigating the incident, trying to use DNA to confirm hogs attacked her. If they did, it was an extraordinarily rare instance of aggression, one that turned a nuisance animal into a public safety threat.

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Sheriff Brian Hawthorne encouraged residents to be aware rather than afraid. Feral hogs, with their tusks, can be scary. Experts say the animals prefer to escape, but they also warn people to be careful when hogs are hurt or with babies.

“All wild animals have the potential of being dangerous, especially when wounded or cornered,” the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department advises in a guide.

News of Rollins’ death, which occurred when she arrived early in the morning for work as a caretaker to an elderly couple in a rural home, scared those in Windsor Hills, an “active adult community” where most residents are 55 or older. It is believed that Rollins may have inadvertently cornered some piglets.

The incident raises new fears about the region’s wild hogs as some residents find they are becoming more troublesome and communities continue to look for ways to insulate themselves from the damage they pose.

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When Settle’s husband discovered their torn-up lawn, many people in Windsor Hills already had stopped walking in the dark, when hogs are active. Some had started driving to the clubhouse to exercise.

Settle’s husband knew he wouldn’t stand a chance against a hog. “If they attack either one of us, we wouldn’t be able to fight them off,” he said. A neighborhood newsletter called them “unwelcome beasts.”

As it happened, The Woodlands board of directors planned to talk about hogs that evening. It was an ongoing issue in the community of 116,000 people, but if anyone could stop the hogs, it was those in Windsor Hills — organized and dedicated with time and resources to spare.

Perhaps now they would find more urgency.

“We need help,” Settle said. “This is beyond us. … We need some action soon before somebody gets hurt or gets killed in here.”

Early Spanish explorers likely brought hogs to Texas, according to the parks and wildlife guide. The feral population grew from those that escaped or were released for hunting and evolved to survive in the wild.

Hog numbers skyrocketed in Texas before the 2011 drought, said Michael Bodenchuk, director of Texas Wildlife Services, which helps hog-afflicted jurisdictions. Now he believes hogs number around 3 million, living just about everywhere possible.

Some swine make homes in rural areas. Bodenchuk calls others “peri-urban pigs” — hogs that live near neighborhoods, including around San Antonio, Austin and, of course, Houston.

Texas allows the animals to be shot from helicopters or hot air balloons or hunted with dogs. Counties and cities divined their own approaches, including in Harris County, where hogs were trapped and their meat was donated to the Houston Food Bank. The Beaumont City Council also wrestled with the topic recently. A state law that took effect Sept. 1 allows people to hunt hogs on private property without a license if they have permission from the landowner.

Last week, Chambers County’s deputies and Texas A&M AgriLife employees took part in a two-day event to shoot and kill hogs in Double Bayou Park, part of an effort to control the population.

The Woodlands, about 30 miles north of Houston, is a master-planned suburb designed to be in sync with nature. Deer and armadillos wander through Windsor Hills in the development’s northeast corner. Hogs nosed around before, too, said Rob Miller, president of the homeowners association.

“When you live in a forested area, you’ve got to accept certain things,” Miller said — but he did not consider hogs one of them.

Miller, 69, had never known the hog problem to be like this. Beginning in June, they seemed to enter the community nightly. Everyone had a theory about why (too much rainfall, too many acorns, too much development).

The homeowners association faced the same problem that so many others have faced, with no clear way out. They put wire fencing across gaps between homes left open for drainage. When hogs dug under that, the association zip-tied barbed wire to the bottom.

It was too dangerous to trap hogs in the neighborhood. The Texas A&M Forest Service did hire Alan Biggerstaff, a retired game warden, to trap hogs in W. Goodrich Jones State Forest to the west. Lone Star College traps them on their campus to the east.

Biggerstaff set up a feeder and built the trap — and when his phone alerts him to hogs in the pen, he catches them. It’s been increasingly difficult to trap them with lots of acorns on the ground.

The hog onslaught continues, leaving Nora Dool, 70, with a yard dotted with divots. She sometimes walks later in the morning to ensure the sun is up. “Right now,” she said, “I’m waiting for them to come back.”

All of Windsor Hills is fenced off except the entrance, where a grassy easement for electric wires runs along either side. That’s where residents believe hogs enter for their nightly snack. Residents want permission to fence it too.

Roughly two dozen Windsor Hills residents attended the Dec. 4 Woodlands township meeting. A handful spoke at the Montgomery County Commissioners Court meeting two weeks earlier.

Currently, there is no countywide hog abatement program, but County Commissioner Charlie Riley said he has been meeting with trappers to try to figure out how to find relief from the hogs.

“It’s not getting pushed down the road,” he said. “There’s just not a whole lot we can do, and they’re hard to deal with. It’s a tough situation to be in.”

Patricia Sanders, 58, offered perhaps the most moving plea in Windsor Hills. She used to walk at night with her 10-pound dog Baby, a Maltese Shih Tzu — until she learned about the hogs, which can weigh hundreds of pounds.

The close-knit community — where neighbors sometimes walk with canes — now felt to her like a ghost town at night. “We’re afraid to even go out at night,” she told board members. “That’s not right.”

Earlier that morning, Belton Byrd, 73, saw the Settles’ lawn. He sent a video of it to Ann Snyder, a board member who had put the topic on the agenda.

Snyder conceded that she looked twice before getting out of her car in Windsor Hills. But a solution, here and in the other neighborhoods, was difficult: Could they trap more hogs? Kill them another way? Would fencing just move them elsewhere?

The Woodlands board members decided to form a sort of hog task force so stakeholders could talk more about it.

The decision in The Woodlands discouraged some from Windsor Hills, who didn’t want to wait for action.

“It’s a problem that will not stop at Windsor Hills,” Byrd said before the discussion concluded, and the residents drove home in the dark.

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