> If poisoning pigs were known to be more effective than shooting, would that change the calculus?
Depends on a lot of things. Relative cruelty of poisoning vs. shooting the pigs; utility of hunters enjoying pig meat; costs
& effectiveness of both strategies; etc.
I suspect you'd probably end up doing both.
On the other hand, it's a bit moot, because I don't think we know how to effectively poison pigs without greater harms. Texas was using specialty-warfarin in addition to the hunting efforts. It's arguably crueler than shooting them.
We definitely do trap wild pigs in many jurisdictions, but this is much less effective than shooting them, IMO.
I'd be fine with it, if it wasn't going to impact other species, wasn't absurdly more cruel, and they could still be used for meat (and I could probably give up on the meat; it's not that much of a factor).
From what I can recall, it's been tried, but had problems. The USDA has cyanide traps that are meant to kill boars (along with wolves and coyotes). In 2017, one of them killed a dog and injured a boy when the dog went after the trap. They're meant to shoot the cyanide into the animals mouth, but there's an area of effect apparently.
Laying out poisoned food tends to kill near everything in the forest.
The problem with most methods that don't involve humans is the inability to discriminate between problem species and normal species. It's hard to build a device that will kill boars but not deer or squirrels or whatever. Boars are big and hard to kill; most things in the forest are far more fragile.
Sausage is yummy, and pigs do ecological damage.