To some of the participants at the ungulate control workshop at the 2006 Hawai`i Conservation Conference, the discussion was déjà vu all over again.

“We’re always doing Groundhog Day on ungulates,” Earl Campbell of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service complained, invoking the film whose premise is the nightmare of reliving the same experiences day after day. “We’ve got to get out of doing this thing over and over again every year at the Hawai`i Conversation Conference,” Campbell told the workshop, part of the annual conference held at the Honolulu Convention Center in late July.

Campbell’s frustration was shared by many others at the table, including public land managers, researchers, and environmentalists. For years, the state Department of Land and Natural Resources has been attempting to come up with methods to satisfy both hunters, who claim to have a cultural right to hunt pigs, and conservationists, who argue that the pigs damage and destroy native plants and, with their wallows, allow mosquitoes to invade the forest and spread life-threatening disease to Hawaiian forest birds.