Hi Annker
Yes, the pooing at food stations could possibly be nervousness. Very difficult to prove that one way or the other!
Re. the slugs. The hogs don’t eat those big ones, which actually perform an important role in the garden, breaking down fallen vegetation, etc. It’s the smaller ones that the hogs eat. But if you create a salt box you might kill all types of them and there isn’t any guarantee that a hog might not try to eat one, which wouldn’t do it a lot of good, I wouldn’t have thought. You would also be depriving the hogs of some of their potential wild food.
Hogs have been around for millions of years. I don’t know how long slugs have been around, but probably a long time, too, when hedgehogs would have been co-existing with them and also any parasites. Whilst it may be serious if a hog gets a bad dose of lungworm, there are probably many which have some lungworm and are symptomless, other than a few microscopic eggs in their droppings.
If you really don’t like the slugs near the hog food, I would take steps to make it unpleasant for them to reach it. i.e. build a frame which the hogs can easily step over (surrounding the feeding area) with copper tape around it, or an area with gravel/eggshells which they are less likely to want to travel over, etc. Sheeps wool seems to work as well. I haven’t tried any of these myself in relation to hog food, even though I also get plenty of slugs visiting, but they are all things which gardeners use to keep slugs off plants, so might work. Worth a try, anyway.
